As is the case with millions of other households at present, in recent months my house has been getting more use than ever. Given the ongoing coronavirus and semi-self-imposed quarantine, we’ve been cooking and eating all three meals a day at home, our son finished his kindergarten school year from his bedroom, our daughter’s toddler classes have been cancelled and replaced with in-home activities, and we’ve all generally just been home all the time.
The result? A bit of stir-craziness, a lot more inventive dinners, a few moments of peak stress, a few others of hilarity, and a pretty goddamn messy house at the end of each week. When Saturday morning rolls around and weekly cleaning time is upon us, we have our work cut out for us. But as the bathrooms, kitchen, and hard floor guy of the house, my work got a bit earlier when I got a Karcher FC 3 Cordless Hard Floor Cleaner.
If you have a powered wet mop, be it the kind that spins or the kind that steams, the intention is the same: clean hard floors like tiles, hardwood, laminate, or linoleum (if… like do you still have linoleum? That’s cool, just asking). What most every electric wet mop has in common regardless of how it cleans is that cord you need to plug into the wall. You know, the cord that seems preternaturally attracted to glasses of water perched on counters or islands, to chair legs around which to snag, and to being just too short to let you clean the entire kitchen, goddammit.
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The Karcher FC 3 Cordless is, as its name may have tipped you off, cordless; it’s powered by a rechargeable battery. The fact that it’s cordless makes maneuvering about the house easy. The fact that it weighs less than 5.5 pound and that its head can flex and twist in myriad directions means you can reach under tables and sinks, hit that nook behind the toilet, and get up close and personal with moldings.
The actual cleaning function comes thanks to a pair of rollers that are kept moist by a clean water tank (topped off with a few drops of concentrated soap). Dirty water is collected in a separate reservoir that’s easily emptied after the mopping is done. The rollers pop off to be cleaned and dried themselves, and the whole mop has just one button (on/off FYI) so using it requires rather little time spent reading the manual.
One thing to note is that there is always a little strip of uncleaned floor left between the two rollers, so you need to complete two passes of most swaths of floor or else work out some back-and-forth thatch pattern as you move. But given how light and nimble the FC 3 is, your work will still be done faster than with a bulkier plug-in floor cleaner. And the floor will be good and clean, too.
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