Shark Steam Mop Review

The Shark Lift Away has many loyal fans who rave about it. There’s a significant minority dissenting voice, though, of customers who haven’t been impressed with the model. Where does the truth lie? As ever, it depends a bit on your expectations and requirements.

This mop includes a handheld ‘lift-away’ pod for steam cleaning a variety of surfaces. Its reported performance as a mop seems to be mixed. It is generally agreed that it’s pretty efficient at cleaning dirty marks off floors and removing grime and stubborn stains. It’s less good at actually mopping up spills though. It can be used on wooden floors, laminates, tiles and vinyl, but seems to clean tiles more efficiently than the other surfaces. The mop is light, easy to assemble and to use – with good manoeuvrability. It doesn’t have a triangular head, but the head swivels and this allows good access to nooks and crannies. The head is a generous size, so covers quite an area of floor in one swipe. The cloth ‘pocket’ covers seemed to wash well. The model has three settings ‘scrub’, ‘mop’ and ‘dust’.

Click here to see what over 60 confirmed buyers had to say about the Shark Steam Mop…

The mop is sturdy and well made and the main criticism of the design is fairly minor, that it doesn’t stand up on its own – so that it has to lean on something when being stored. It comes with a carpet glider and is advertised as ‘refreshing’ carpets, rather than actually cleaning them. Customers felt it was quite good on carpets – taking out dirty marks and sprucing up pile; removing furniture marks. A definite plus was that the mop has an ‘intelligent steam control’ feature. This means that once you set the level of steam you want, the machine maintains that level, without the need for the user to hold down a trigger – a gripe on some other models. It heats up in 30 seconds and gives 15-20 minutes of steam power. It has a generous 7 metre cord length.

The handheld pod comes with a number of different attachments; window squeegee, extension hose, flat scrubber head, concentrator nozzle, nozzle cleaner, scrubbing brush. The unit performed well at cleaning glass; windows and shower screens came up nicely. It didn’t tackle grout so well, with users finding that they had to use quite a lot of elbow grease to get results. Similarly, on greasy hobs and ovens it was found to take quite a lot of human effort to get the machine to cut through grease. Generally, as a handheld device the unit wasn’t found to be powerful enough to give a really good clean on many surfaces. It was, however, good at getting odours out of fabric and reasonable at de-creasing clothes. The steam trigger does have to be held down when using the model in handheld mode.

So, it is possible to find a better mop for the price (if you just want a basic mop) and the handheld unit is also not the best on the market – but the model does have a lot of happy customers. It’s sturdy and continued to perform well after prolonged use.

To find out more see the manufacturer’s video below.

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And finally, the pros and cons of this model are…