Recoiling over the Recoil

Soil Lint Green wrote: Grunt, what do you use to clean carpet?  Some gas guzzling gross polluter or a rental rug doctor?  Not sure why you try to talk crap about the best unit on the market but your colors are starting to show real fast.

Remarks like that are just ignorant.  

If you use electricity, do you know where that comes from?  I'll give you a hint, it's not free of pollutants either.

It's interesting, and funny, to see being self-righteous about not having a truck mount.  Most people would prefer one, except for the price which they can not afford.  Portables are certainly useful, and advantageous in many situations, so I'm not knocking them.  

Furthermore, emission of carbon dioxide are VERY green, not the reverse.  The uneducated somehow frame these emissions differently, but, as anyone should know, plants LOVE carbon dioxide.  They grow faster, by a lot, and produce more food with more in the environment.  So, there's a negative feedback loop with carbon dioxide.  The more you pump into the air, the faster it is removed, so it won't increase forever unless we kill plants and don't give them a chance to do what they want.

More to the point, there are a bunch of CA groupies who love to say how wonderful this machine is, but, in reality, it's been tested, and found wanting.  It's poorly constructed (so much so that one of the owners had to change his vacs back to stock, because the body was flexing too much when he upgraded the motors, and he was afraid it would break), and has many ergonomic flaws as indicated in the testing done on TruckMountForums.  I didn't agree with all of the criticisms, but, most are irrefutable. 

You'll also notice how this group loves to deal in generalities, instead of producing hard numbers which would back up their claims of how powerful this machine is.  You'll get so and so saying this, bold claims of being in business for so many years, claims of envy from others, but no facts.  They deal in smoke and mirrors, and avoid cold, hard facts that would quantify the performance.  Try getting a number from them, like CFM, or lift, and you'll get fluff, distortion, and obfuscation.  You'll get an anecdote, possibly real, from someone.  You won't get numbers.  

Performance IS quantifiable.  It's not like arguing which girl is prettier, or which peach tastes better.  But, when tested, the Recoil showed poor performance.  So, they say it was a bum machine.  So the forum owner offered to pay for anyone to ship their machine to him for testing, including Mr. Valentine, to show the performance.  Of course, nothing came of it.  They know the performance is bad, and would prefer to say something is wrong with the machine.   If they send another machine, people will realize the machine isn't a good performer, by design.

This is not to say it can't clean a carpet, just there are cheaper choices (M5) that are better.

Now, Ed Valentine and I argue often, but to say he wouldn't properly support his machine sounds pretty foolish.  If he had something I wanted(his booster is certainly an attractive product), I'd have no fear of purchasing something from him.  From these rabid groupies, you can safely say his customer service should not be brought into question.

The Recoil, on the other hand ...