I have hardwood throughout the first floor, a couple of wool area rugs, and a dog who tracks in whatever the yard has on offer that week. For years I rotated between a stick vacuum, a spray mop, and the occasional rental shampooer for the rugs. The CrossWave HydroSteam replaced all three on my closet shelf, which is what sold me before I ever turned it on.
The thing it gets right is the order of operations. It vacuums and washes in a single pass, so the gritty stuff that usually gets smeared around by a mop ends up in the dirty tank instead. The steam mode is the part I didn't expect to care about and ended up using weekly. After a winter of salt and slush by the back door, one slow pass with steam pulled up a haze I hadn't realized was there. The floor squeaked under my socks for the rest of the night.
On the rugs it surprised me twice. The first time was a glass of red wine on the cream runner in the hallway, which it cleared on a single pass with the pet formula. The second was a patch of dog urine I'd treated and forgotten about a month earlier; the machine pulled enough out of the fibers that I could smell it in the dirty water tank. That is the kind of feedback I don't want and absolutely want.
The self-clean cycle is the catch nobody mentions in the marketing. After you finish, you dock it and run a rinse, then you wait. Mine takes a full day to dry properly before the next use. If you were hoping to do the kitchen on Saturday morning and the rugs on Saturday afternoon, you're doing one of them on Sunday. I've learned to plan around it, but it took me a few cycles to accept that this isn't a tool you grab on impulse.
The other things to know are mostly the things you'd guess. It's corded, which I don't mind on a downstairs-only machine but might bother you. It's bulkier than a stick vacuum and wants its own corner of the laundry room. The pet formula left a faint sweet smell on the rug for an evening, which faded by morning but isn't nothing. And it is, explicitly, not meant for wall-to-wall carpet. If most of your floor is carpet, this is the wrong machine and you want a real carpet shampooer.
At around $280 it sits in the awkward middle where you can talk yourself into a flagship cordless instead. Don't. A V15 Detect won't sanitize and it won't lift a stain. This is a different category of cleaning, not a more expensive version of the same one. The right way to think about the HydroSteam is as a weekly tool, the floor equivalent of running the dishwasher: not glamorous, not constant, but the thing that keeps the house from quietly degrading.
Verdict: Buy this if you live mostly on hard floors with a few rugs and a household that produces real messes. If your house is wall-to-wall carpet, rent a Big Green and skip this entirely.