Sunday, January 18, 2015

Right On The Verge Of Perfection: Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet Vacuum (Model 7636) Works Wonders!


The Good: Reasonable price for the quality, Incredible sucking power for an upright, Easy to assemble, Easy to clean, Surprisingly quiet
The Bad: Still very right-biased on the suction
The Basics: The best vacuum cleaner I have yet found, the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is quiet and powerful enough to keep my pet-filled home hair-free!


Last summer, when I had the chance to revamp some things around the house thanks to a sudden largess and some great sales, I asked my wife what she actually wanted new for our apartment. I was somewhat surprised when she said she wanted a new vacuum cleaner. After all, our Eureka 4700 vacuum (reviewed here!) had not died and that (usually) was our standard for replacing appliances. My wife, though, had apparently been researching the topic for some time (our Eureka 4700 had been making more noise of late . . .) and she started to talk with me, at length, about Bissell. Bissell is a Michigan-based company that is, apparently, committed to offering quality products at under $100. So, as part of a larger stock-up on housing supplies, I “splurged” the $89.99 (it was on sale that day, rather conveniently) for the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum.

The Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet is a very simple canister-style vacuum and the 7636 is only the second canister-style vacuum cleaner I’ve owned and I’m pleasantly surprised by some of the technological advances between my first and my new canister vacuum. The Cleanview Rewind Pet came in a pretty big box and it is a little heavier than some of the other canister-style vacuums I’ve tried. Fortunately, that seems to be because the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is most sturdy, durable and stable than lighter models. The Cleanview Rewind Pet came unassembled, so our first task was to get it out of the box and put it all together. Anyone with a Phillips head screwdriver can put this together, probably without even looking at the directions; the assembly is pretty intuitive for both attaching the handle and affixing the tube. One simply needs to attach the base to the handle assembly and connect the hose and they all come together in one way. The handle has two pieces which snap into the base and screw together to form the solid drive shaft of the vacuum. The Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is predominantly purple-gray for all of the front pieces (at least the ones that are not made out of clear plastic) and black for all of the components along the drive shaft of the vacuum.

Properly assembled, the Cleanview Rewind Pet is 45" tall by 13 1/4” wide by 12 1/4" deep at the base. This is a sleek-looking canister vacuum cleaner with a handle with a guard that actually makes it very easy to maneuver the vacuum. The drive shaft holds the tube, so the handle is not encumbered by the tube which is transporting the sucked up matter from the ground to the canister. The 7636 has the belt and motor assembly in the base of the vacuum, which rotates the brushes. There seems to be suction from the canister area, though, even without the brushes rotating and sucking (which makes sense because the hose on the back of the vacuum detaches in order to get into tough areas). The canister is attached to the front of the handle assembly and snaps in easily. The tube winds around the back of the handle assembly.

Once the Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum was assembled, we plugged it in – the cord is attached to the base, but winds up into the unit at the press of a lever on the side. After five months of use, the recoil function for the power cord still works amazingly well and I’ve not had any problems.

The moment the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum impressed me with how little noise it made. I’m not a fan of loud noises and the Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum impressed me because it was so quiet my vacuum-skittish dog and two cats were amazingly unperturbed. The fact that Myah, our Siberian Husky, remains in the room when the unit is on is amazing!

What is more amazing is that the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum works. We bought ours at a time when Myah was shedding daily and our old vacuum labored to pick up the hair. While the volume of Myah’s hair did not change, the results did. Our rug is tan; with our old vacuum, when Myah was shedding, we would vacuum and get up what we thought was all her hair, but the rug still looked fairly gray. With the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum, the instant reaction my wife and I had after using it from the very first times was “oh yeah, our rug is tan!” The difference in the amount of hair and dirt vacuumed up was that different. For sure, there were still areas that would be so concentrated with dog hair and dust that we would fill the canister within four passes of the vacuum (about four square feet of carpet!) because of how much Myah sheds, but once the canister was emptied, we could move onto the next high-soil area. The Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is so efficient that one need not continue to go over the same spots so many times!

The Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is not a flawless appliance, though. Because the transport tube comes in the right side of the base, the right side has stronger suction than the left side on this vacuum cleaner. Suction on the Bissell Cleanview Rewind Pet is the best I’ve ever seen out of an upright vacuum, but there is a noticeable difference between the quality of the suction on the right and on the left.

The vacuum easily removes dirt and hair and every other form of solid matter I’ve been able to find so far from carpets and walls. Because the hose may be detached from the base, this vacuum has quite a bit more versatility than most uprights and it may be used to get cobwebs as well . . . assuming the cobwebs are within five feet of the base of the vacuum, as that is about the length of the vacuum’s hose. In addition to all of the dog hair we never realized had built up this vacuum was powerful enough to suck up was the dust that was caked onto the fan in my tower computer! The Cleanview Rewind Pet is easy to move over any level of carpet or hardwood, which makes it a pleasure to clean with.

Use of the assembled Cleanview Rewind Pet is exceptionally easy. There is the standard release lever on the base of the unit which allows the handle to be unlocked. This allows one to push or pull the vacuum at an angle, as opposed to perpendicular with the floor. Near the top of the handle for the vacuum is a simple button which activates the vacuum. From there, the vacuum does almost all the work. It sucks up anything on the floor and it is powerful with great cleaning power. The Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum may be used on low carpets (or bare floors), medium pile carpets or even longer carpets, with the height of the base being adjusted by a simple knob on the front of the base.

As the canister gets filled up – easily visible as it is at the front and transparent – the vacuum continues to vacuum with astonishing force, making this an impressive vacuum option, while still being affordable. When the canister is filled, simply unlatch the canister from the handle assembly and empty the canister. The press of a button allows all the crap in the canister to drop out, like the canister has a trap door! The top of the filter twists off and the filter itself may then be dumped into a garbage bag. You can even wash the filter and canister out, but that just puts dirt and dust down the sink. Either way, it is exceptionally easy to get the hair, dirt and dust one vacuums up out of the canister without putting it back in the air, simply by operating the release right in the container one is disposing of the stuff into!

Even so, the cleaning power of the Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum should not be underestimated and my wife, who has allergic reactions to dust, animal hair and about a dozen other things, has shown a noticeable improvement in health since we started using the vacuum. It gets up so much deep-down crap in rugs and from the air that her allergies are acting up less than they were before, which is pretty extraordinary results that have been maintained for six months of use (so far!). Perhaps most impressive about the suction is that my wife can be in the room when I am vacuuming and not suffer from all of the side effects and hair and dust getting vacuumed up; the filters on the Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum are THAT good!

The Cleanview Rewind Pet comes with a pair of attachments: a solid tube which extends the hose an additional two feet and a little brush which attaches to that or to the hose itself. I’m not wild about attachments, but both my wife and I used the attachments and found them easy to use, though the sucking power was diminished some using the extension. Far more often, we found the vacuum worked great on the floors and for sucking up matter through the hose directly when we detached it from the base.

As a result, the Cleanview Rewind Pet vacuum is ideal for cleaning a home for those with pets and/or allergies. The original cost might be a little more than some (who aren’t able to splurge at the time) might think is reasonable to spend, but the results make this vacuum a real value and a powerful home appliance worth picking up!

For other vacuum reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Cheetah Ash Vac II vacuum cleaner
Kenmore 31079 vacuum
Dirt Devil KWIK vacuum

9/10

For other home and garden product reviews, please visit my Home And Garden Products Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2015 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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