I got a nice hand-me-down from my mother a couple months ago. She had a Shark steam mop and just didn’t quite like it well enough. She figured I might like to give it a try.

Let’s see… cleaning my floors with steam rather than chemicals or even plain vinegar. Reusing something she doesn’t want. Yes, I’ll try!

The Shark steam mop is really easy to use. You have to push down to get steam, but that happens quite naturally when pushing the mop. I haven’t found that to be a problem. That’s a good thing because I long since gave the chore of cleaning the kitchen floors mostly to my kids. It’s easy enough they can use it, with appropriate supervision, of course. It’s hot steam but so far they show no inclination to test the heat out on themselves or each other.

They love that it picks up the many sticky spills they make on the floor so easily. And believe me, they do leave some messes about, and they had to really scrub in the past with the old mop. It may take several passes with the steam mop, but that’s still easier than the scrubbing they had to do with the other one.

They use washable cloth pads, which is another great feature. They also let me know just how much yeeech was on the floor. They don’t generally come back perfectly white for me after a wash, but hey, they’re just for cleaning the floor.

The water container is kind of small, but so is our kitchen, so that works for us. Just about everything else in our house is carpeted so we don’t have a lot of tile or other hard floor surfaces to worry about.

Reading some of the steam mop reviews on Amazon, it’s clear that many steam mops get hotter than the Shark, and that can be important. If you have a lot of hard surface floors, you’re probably going to want one with a bigger tank. But for our situation the Shark is quite good.