I live with two messy toddlers, two cats who are prone to vomiting and one sweet shelter dog who doesn’t always like to go outside to relieve herself. Throw in my undeniable clumsiness and I’m pretty sure we have more spills and messes on carpets than the average family.

After getting my carpet professionally cleaned last spring, I learned a few things about how to treat carpet stains:

• Don’t use sudsy cleansers on carpet. It will take an insane amount of rinses to get all the soapy residue out.
• Don’t soak any stain with carpet cleaner. Repeated light applications are more effective than one heavy one.
• Blot, don’t rub or scrub, any stain.
• If you use a carpet-stain-remover treatment, follow it by saturating the area with boiling hot water and sucking it up with a shop-vac. This mimics the process used by professional carpet cleaners.

Great advice, right? But, let’s face it. I’m a busy mom and “repeated light applications” for cleaning anything isn’t always going to work for me, and some offenders, like pet stains, need to be treated right away.

My friends at Mom Central sent me a few packs of the new Bissell Stomp & Go stain lifting pads to try out. As someone who has more than a few permanant stains on her carpet, I was a bit skeptical of the package’s statement that the pad “permanently removes tough stains.”

I know tough stains, and I had the perfect one in mind to test the stain on:

This is a small, dry spot of cranberry juice that was caused from an abandoned, leaky sippy cup. The stain was about 2 weeks old when I tried to treat it with the stain lifting pad:

The absolute best thing about the Bissell Stomp & Go stain lifting pads is their ease of use and convenience. Most of the time, I spray a stain with a stain remover in a squirt bottle. Then I wait 5 minutes and come back with my damp cloth to blot the stain and see if the process needs to be repeated.

My old stain-removing procedure was made more frequent and more inconvenient by having children. I certainly can’t leave a bottle of poisonous stain remover sitting around while I wait for the first application to work. That means I need to spray the stain, put the bottle somewhere safe, blot the stain then go back and get the bottle to reapply more stain-removing spray.

The Bissell Stomp & Go pads remove the “bottle filled with poison” hazard from the process. I still need to keep my kiddos away from the pad while it’s working, but it’s a lot easier to put the pad down on the carpet and keep all of us away from the spot for a while while the pad does its magic!

Wondering how the pad worked?

Here’s the after shot of the area that had a set-in cranberry juice stain:

Pretty impressive, right?

Since I’m ever the bargain shopper, I can’t help but mention that there are a few ways for you to get a deal on Bissell Stomp & Go stain lifting pads:

• There are a few coupons on Coupons.com to save $1.50 off 1 box or $3 off two boxes of Stomp & Go stain lifting pads.
• There’s also a rebate offer to try the Bissell Stomp & Go pads for FREE!  rebate offer ends 4/15/2012.

I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of BISSELL and received product samples and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

A few years ago, I used the last of a small jar of minced garlic in a dish I was making for dinner. The tiny, 4-oz glass jar was so cute, I thought I would be able to repurpose it for something. Not thinking much of it, I rinsed it out and tossed it in the dishwasher.

When the dishwasher ran that night, I noticed a strong smell of garlic still hanging in the air. Thinking it would dissipate as the cycle completed, I didn’t give it another thought. The next day, I came home from work went to empty the dishwasher. Upon opening the door, I was overwhelmed with the odor of garlic that filled my kitchen. After inspecting several dishes, I realized that the garlic smell had permeated everything in the load.

I took the clean garlic jar out, promptly recycled it, and set to work figuring out how to deodorize my dishwasher. After a few extra-hot loads with added lemon juice, the contents of the dishwasher were finally in a usable condition. My dishwasher, however, was in bad shape. I ran empty load after empty load with supposed odor-fighters like vinegar, baking soda and lemon juice. Each time, the smell was better, but it wasn’t gone.

Finally, after dumping an entire box of baking soda over the bottom of the washer and letting it sit overnight, I started the dishwasher with bleach in the detergent cup. That finally seemed to clear it up, but I cringe when I think about the water, power, and supplies I wasted just because I was dumb enough to wash a container filled with garlic!

I definitely learned my lesson that time; I’ve never, ever put anything odorous in the dishwasher again! If I did, my first order of business would be to use Affresh Dishwasher and Disposal Cleaner to neutralize the smells.

While my dishwasher has never smelled as bad as it did after the garlic incident, it occasionally takes on a stale odor, and there are mineral deposits that should be scrubbed every few months. Running an empty load with an Affresh tablet is all it takes to refresh the appliance and get it looking shiny bright on the inside.

The instructions for Affresh Dishwasher and Disposal Cleaner actually state to use two tablets to clean the dishwasher, but it leaves behind a pretty strong citrus smell (which is FAR better than the previous smells!), so I prefer to just use one. If I ever run into a garlic incident again, I’d definitely throw two in there to try to solve the problem as quickly as possible!

Since I’ve been using Affresh for several weeks, I’ve noticed that I don’t need to worry about mineral deposits. Affresh keeps me from having to scrub the inside nooks and crannies of my dishwasher. I love that!

I’ve mentioned before that I also use Affresh to make my garbage disposal not smell. I’ve found that Affresh by Whirlpool is a great product to keep both dishwashers and disposals smelling clean and running properly!

Where Can I Buy Affresh Dishwasher & Disposal Cleaner Tablets?

Affresh is avaialble at retailers nationwide, including Sears, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Kroger and Food Lion, and at www.affresh.com. A pack of 6 tablets has a suggested retail price of $6.99.

I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Affresh and received product samples and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.