You’ve probably seen infomercials for Shark steamer products — they have steam mops for floor care and hand-held devices that you can use on anything you can point it at.

The advantage to using steam to clean is that it sanitizes without the use of chemicals, which is a great thing especially if you have kids or pets. Steam also dries a lot faster than using a lot of water. These steam products can be used even on wood flooring (assuming it’s in pretty good condition to begin with). Cleaning tile grout is a lot easier with steam. If you have a lot of tile flooring, you’ll probably wonder how you ever lived without one of these. It makes them look so much better without the endless scrubbing. You’ll also save money not having to buy multiple cleaning solutions. That means free space under your kitchen sink, too.

For regular floor cleaning, both the mops and the hand-helds have a washable fabric mop head. You can buy replacements but you’ll get a lot of mileage out of the original just by tossing it in the wash.

The hand-held models have a nozzle that can get into places that are tight or hard to see. You might finally clean all the cracks and crevices in your bathroom. And your kitchen. Coffeemakers are notoriously hard to clean, but you can shoot steam through it and get out stuff you probably don’t want to think about. You can clean things like your appliances, kids toys, pet toys, and one of these days I’m going to try cleaning my fake indoor plants. Those things catch dust like crazy, and I bet the steamer would clean it up in no time.

If you just need to do a better job of floor cleaning, you might want to try the mop models. The hand-helds offer more versatility if you want to clean bathtubs, shower stalls, your car, outside furniture, etc. No idea if you could “iron” out wrinkles in your clothes, but really, I don’t see why you couldn’t. You could probably even freshen upholstery, or at least things like pillows and pet beds.

Anyway, the combination of ease of use, low cost and no chemicals makes a Shark steamer a good choice.