Deep cleaning your carpets have never been so easy
The Shark CarpetXpert EX200 offers an 8x deeper clean than a regular vacuum, while at the same time blasting your dirty carpets and rugs with a cleaning solution to bring them back to life. More convenient than hiring a dedicated deep carpet cleaner, the EX200 also has a Stain Striking handheld cleaner to concentrate on tougher stains. It's a fantastic way to deep clean your carpets and upholstery with ease, although you need to make sure to clean thoroughly after use.
Pros
- Fantastic deep clean
- Powerful handheld stain cleaner
- Dry clean option
- Pet care tool
Cons
- Heavy and bulky
- After clean care required
- Handheld not too secure
- Rogue warning light
The Shark CarpetXpert EX200 is a 2-in-1 carpet cleaner and handheld stain eliminator, designed to deep clean your carpets while at the same time giving you extra protection against surprise spills and walked in stains.
Designed to eliminate the need to hire a carpet cleaner from a DIY or department store, the EX200 offers you deep cleaning for your carpets, rugs and upholstery, and the additional Stain Striker handheld element means you can concentrate on more stubborn dirt such as pet stains, odours, embedded mud, red wine, coffee, food grease and so on.
The Shark CarpetXpert EX200 is normally £299.99 but there’s currently £100 off if you shop directly with Shark.
I’ve been testing the Shark CarpetXpert EX200 on the dirtiest carpets and the most hideous stains in my house, read on for my full review to see how it performed.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
Design and build
When you first unpack the EX200 from the box you’ve got a bit of assembly to do.
It’s not exactly an IKEA build, all of the tanks are already in place, but you will want to consult the manual to make sure you get the handheld cleaning pipe fitted correctly.
In the box is the main unit, with an affixed electric cable, a handle that simply pops in (white side forward), the hose and grip for the handheld cleaning part, the Stain Striking hand tool and an accessory for cleaning the handheld part, that clips on the handle.
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On the Stain Striking part, the bristle part can actually be flipped – on one side it’s tough bristles, on the other it’s some sharper rubber bristles.
You’ll also find a couple of bottles of cleaning fluid, one is the Deep Clean Pro formula, the other is the Oxy Multiplier, both 335ml bottles.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
You may also find, if you’ve chosen that particular package, Shark’s wider tough stain tool and the pet stain trapping tool as well.
You’ll need to plug the EX200 in, there’s too much going on for this to be a cordless machine, but the good news is the cable it’s 7.6m long, so you shouldn’t need to move the plug around too much when cleaning a room.
The EX200 is pretty heavy and bulky but nowhere near the heft of those hired carpet cleaners.
Measuring in 111 x 30.5 x 35 cm, and weighing 8.3kg (with the tank empty) it’s much heavier than a regular vacuum cleaner and you’ll feel like you’ve done a bit of a workout once you’re done cleaning a room.
In use
Once you’ve unpacked everything and assembled the EX200, you’re ready to start deep cleaning.
Before you start, be aware that the process will leave your carpets wet, so give yourself plenty of time to get everything dry before you start moving things back into place or walking on it. I’ll talk more about drying times and the process in a bit.
Shark recommends vacuuming rooms in advance of a deep clean for maximum performance.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
The first thing to do is to fill up the water tank with warm (not hot – nothing over 60 degrees) water and add some formula.
When filled to the top, at the maximum lines, you use half of the bottle of that Deep Clean Pro formula for the 2.1l water tank.
That full tank allowed a thorough clean of one of my daughter’s bedroom, which is about 25 square metres.
So you’re looking at two rooms of deep carpet cleaning from what you get in the box. However, replacement bottles aren’t too expensive: it’s £9.99 for 1.4l of the Deep Clean Pro and £14.99 for the Oxy Multiplier.
Doing some very crass maths that means it costs around £1.25 to clean a room of around 20-25 square metres. You might get more, you might get less, I probably went around the room at least 3 times to make sure I’d covered every inch.
The cleaning process is straightforward, it’s just like using a vacuum cleaner really. When you turn the machine on you’ll be greeted with two green LEDs on the display.
This means it’s powered on but you need to retract the handle to enter a cleaning mode. Once you’ve done that, simply by pulling the handle back and moving the EX200 like a regular vacuum, you’ll see a blue LED come on. On the left, the blue LED means you’re in deep clean mode, on the right it means a dry clean (there’s a mode switch button to swap between these.)
You don’t need to worry about all these LEDs, there’s a handy key up top.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
On a deep clean, the idea is to clean in a familiar forward and backwards motion; the forward motion applies the Deep Clean Pro mix and pulling back sucks up all the dirt. It’s very, very satisfying seeing all that grime being pulled out your carpet fibres.
I had a couple of perfect test rooms for the EX200 as we’ve recently had a lot of building work done in the house and the only two rooms where we kept the original carpet were the kids’ bedrooms; our reasoning being they’d probably want new (probably garish) carpet of their own choosing in the next couple of years anyway.
So I was cleaning rooms that had 5+ years of general dirt, but also a few months worth of builders dust too. Obviously we vacuum these rooms, and they’ve also been steamed a few times, but they’ve never been deep cleaned.
And crikey – the difference between before and after was as shocking as the dirty water tank’s contents at the conclusion.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
Moving the machine around was easy enough despite its size and weight. My only real quibbles are that the handheld cleaner at the side continuously falls out of its holder from even the most minor of knocks and could do with stronger grooves to hold it in place, and that if you bash the machine it will start coughing water (clean water, at least) out of the vents at the side.
The EX200 also had a habit of telling me – via those LEDs – that the dirty water tank was full when it wasn’t. A simple on and off sorted that out, but it was a bit annoying.
Aside from those issues, it’s a super smooth experience and the head is well shaped to get in small corners and under furniture just enough so you won’t have dirty edges along your new clean space.
When dealing with water and carpets there’s obviously people that will, quite rightly, be worried about getting the carpets dried out after a clean.
Shark states that the EX200 boasts “fast drying” and advises to do a run around the room you’ve deep cleaned on the Dry Clean setting to speed up the process.
In my testing I did this and, in a room where I just left the windows open to circulate the air, I found that the carpet was dry after about 3-4 hours (in semi-mild UK autumn weather.)
In the other room, I cheated by whacking up the heating, having a Dyson purifier on full blast and a dehumidifier running.
I don’t want to see my next electricity bill after all that – but the carpets dried in that room in a couple of hours.
If you’re really worried about drying times I’d suggest scheduling your deep cleans for sunny summer days. It’s no use just blasting the heating up – that water needs to go somewhere and you don’t want a condensation problem.
When it comes to Stain Striking – which Shark tells us is 20x more powerful than the regular deep clean – I was able to shift a couple of greasy food marks from our dining room chairs in a matter of minutes.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
The Stain Striking handheld part actually has a diagram on of how to do it – but it’s pretty straightforward, you simply spray the solution as needed and scrub, it’s not rocket science.
The work is all done by the machine itself, which simply adds some of that Oxy Multiplier mix to the main tank’s Deep Clean Pro cocktail.
If you’ve got a hairy pet then you’ll also be able to make use of the pet stain tool that collects hair, debris and dirty liquid into a separate compartment.
After care
As mentioned, the CarpetXpert EX200 is meant to replace that experience of hiring a big carpet cleaner from a department store.
The big difference is that, unlike that rented machine that you don’t really care about, you’ll actually own the EX200 and, presumably, you’ll care about it a bit more.
You can’t just hand it back in and forget about it, you’re going to have to do some after cleaning maintenance to avoid mould and bad smells.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
It’s not that difficult but it is a bit of a faff and it’s actually pretty disgusting. The dirty water tank is the most grim but that’s also the easiest to deal with; just pour it down a drain.
But then you’re going to need to fish out a few compartments and manually clean them, such as the filter, the brush, the solution spraying head and so on.
(Image credit: The Ambient)
It’s all pretty easy, everything just pops out like a Lego set, but just make sure you check every nook and cranny; you’ll find wet fluff everywhere.
And then, once you’re confident you’ve cleaned everything, be sure to let everything dry before putting back together.
Final thoughts
The Shark CarpetXpert EX200 is a great option for houses with multiple rooms where the carpets need a deep clean.
It’s not a cleaner that you’ll be getting out every week or even every month to use; it’s a machine you’d store in the garage and get out annually to keep your carpets fresh.
However, while that method would make the EX200 better value than renting a carpet cleaner, the fact that it has that Stain Striking option means it’s also a great insurance against surprise stains that you can blast instantly.
The Shark CarpetXpert EX200 has an RRP £299.99 but there’s currently £100 off if you shop directly with Shark.
Shark CarpetXpert EX200 – Specifications
Clean Solution Tank – 2.1L
Dirty Water Tank – 850ml
