Vileda steam mop review

The Vileda steammop in all its glory.

With two young children, our kitchen and bathroom floors regularly take a hammering. Drinks and food get spilled in the kitchen and just yesterday my eldest daughter was involved in a freak toothpaste incident in the bathroom that involved a large dollop of it landing on the floor.

The floors need a lot of attention and we’ve historically used a traditional mop and bucket to keep things clean. I have, however, often been put off by the fact the heads take ages to dry out and can smell.

A section of our kitchen floor, the children having kindly covered it in mud.

An alternative to this is the steam mop. I’ve spent a little while trying out the Vileda steam mop (this isn’t the first time I’ve come face to face with Vileda products; read my review of its Windowmatic cleaning device here). In addition to keeping the floors clean, it also claims to kill 99.9% of bacteria without the need for household cleaning agents. So what did this stay at home dad think of the steam mop?

Firstly, it has to be assembled. Don’t let this put you off, it’s very simple. I managed it in about two minutes, even with curious children trying to, ahem, help me. You have to place  a microfibre cleaning pad on the end of the mop (two such pads are provided). This is the piece that is in contact with the floor. You need to wash these regularly and, like a standard mop head, you will need to replace them after a while. Once put together it was time for the children to get out of the way.

Rather like a steam iron, you fill the mop with water and switch on. It claims to be ready for use in 15 seconds and I must say I was very surprised at how quickly the mop was operational.

It glided across the floor very easily. There was one particular patch where there was a stubborn, sticky mark. I thought this would be a great test for the mop and so I went over this spot repeatedly until it was cleared up.

The floor, which was lino, came up looking very good. It dried instantly and no puddles were left behind.

The same patch of kitchen floor having been cleaned by the Vileda steam mop.

A few days later it got the ultimate test in the kitchen. Regular readers will be aware that I recently got into home brewing beer. While bottling a batch of ale, I knocked one over, sending half a litre of sticky beer across the floor. The children also trod mud all over the place and the cat decided to do its business in the kitchen.

Steam mop in hand, I cleared this lot up. I didn’t think it would handle it but the floor came up very well indeed and, to my surprise, the house no longer smelled like a brewery.

By adding a carpet glider fitting to the end, you can take the steam mop across your carpet to refresh it. I tried this and at first wasn’t too impressed. I think my mistake was to assume the carpet would look instantly refreshed. This didn’t seem to be the case, but once the moisture had properly dissipated the carpet looked a little better. To be clear, it isn’t designed to clean the carpet, but it did bring the fibres up a little bit.

We only have lino floors in our kitchen and bathroom. This will change when we get our new kitchen installed in February as we’re probably going to get laminate flooring installed. This product claims to useable on all sealed floors but it may be an idea to check with your supplier before use on a laminate or wood floor.

In summary, the Vileda steam mop was very easy to use. It’s lightweight, did a very good job with our lino floors and worked reasonably well at refreshing our hallway carpet.

The Vileda steam mop has an RRP of £89.99. It can be purchased direct from Vileda plus Argo and B&Q.