Rowenta, Iron, Stainless Steel Soleplate Professional Steam Station for Clothes, 1.1L Removable Tank, Fast Heat Up, 1800 Watts, Blue Clothes Iron, DG8624

Ironing is one of those lifestyle elements of military life that just stuck with me after I retired. I iron nearly everything - I cannot stand wearing clothes that are wrinkled. Using the typical irons I have owned over the years, my weekly ironing was always a chore and always took much longer than I would prefer. I decided to splurge on this iron about eight months ago, and I couldn't be happier. This iron is a beast. I get my weekly ironing done in a fraction of the time it used to take me, and the continuous steam and high quality of the machine make it something I actually enjoy doing. If you are a person who irons a lot, I highly recommend this iron.

I first purchased a $100 one and it leaked, didn't produce steam and didn't move. Then I got this one: It glides effortlessly. It steams constantly, doesn't spray out the sides, only onto the fabric and irons linen instantly. I enjoy using it so much I ironed my duvet cover for the first time ever. You can put the iron on its rest, or tilt it and leave it standing on the board. No unwanted or unannounced burst of steam. Everything exactly where is is supposed to be when you want it. I returned the less expensive one and a, loving this one.

The media could not be loaded. Why did you pick this product vs others?:Not even a year old and the boiler went out. Took over two weeks to ship and return from repair center. Arrived back with a cracked water chamber! You’ve got to be kidding. Then we discovered that the iron sent back was not the iron we sent. No documentation regarding the repair, just a little sticker on the iron grip says rep boiler. All that being said, the next phone call to customer service to report this issue seems to have resulted in Rowenta promising to send us a new replacement water chamber. We will see…UPDATE: A brand new complete appliance replacement Rowenta steaming iron arrived today. I have to say that they honored their warranty commitment. My wife is exceedingly happy with this outcome and would like to thank Rowenta customer service for their quick assistance. They listened, were understanding and solved our issue. Rowenta is a good product. Many Thanks.

Let me summarize this iron in one word: CRAP.This is the 5th Rowenta Steam Station I've owned since 2015. The previous units were the two models prior to this one (one white/blue, and one white/purple). On average they have lasted about 18 months or so before they began continually spewing brown water all over the clothes and ironing board. That was despite cleaning the sole plates regularly, using tap water as emphatically recommended in Rowenta's user manual, and decalcifying them and cleaning out the tanks regularly.On the last previous model, purchased in November 2019, we decided to try using distilled water only and from the start. We were thinking maybe the issue is the tap water after all, even though Rowenta says to only use tap water... Well by the first week of April it was spewing not brown water, but black water, and a new feature... black fuzz. That fuzz would stain instantly before you could get it off the fabric. It was maintained the same as the previous units, the only difference was the strict use of store-bought distilled water.After about a week of trying to clean it repeatedly, and piles of ruined fabric, I decided to order a new one and this is the new model. This one arrived in early to mid April and we immediately went back to tap water as the manual advises. Right away we noticed there are major design issues with this model.For years people have begged for an auto-shut-off feature and Rowenta added it to this model. Unfortunately they think it needs to shut off within 5 minutes. You can forget about stepping away to change the wash over, by the time you do that the iron has begun to shut down and needs to restart. If you're doing lots of small sewing work that requires iron - sew - iron - sew, you may as well use a different iron because you will wait longer between each step for it to heat up again.The steam trigger used to be a manual button which stopped delivering steam the second you let go of the button. This makes sense and seems like the safer way to make a steam appliance. This model appears to be electronic and has a mind of its own. If you press the steam trigger once, and then press it again one or more times in too rapid a succession, the iron will get caught in a loop of pumping out steam in rapid little bursts and this will continue for a while relative to the number of times you pressed the trigger. Press it 3 times too fast, you might get 5 seconds of burst, press it 8 times and you might get 27 seconds of bursts. There is no way to stop it once it starts, you just have to stand there and hold the iron until it stops and try not to over-steam your clothes, or yourself, or whatever might be in the path of the iron. This seems like a major safety issue, which totally negates the added super fast auto-shut-off feature.And finally, the sludge... Just like previous models, this one spews brown liquid and brown fuzz (yay!) all over the place periodically. I don't mean it "spits"... I mean it POURS out. Curiously, it isn't black water/fuzz like the last one, which only ran on distilled water. Some days it does it, some days it does not. There is no real pattern to it. The only way to guarantee you'll get brown sludge is to run the iron on any temperature below MAX. Anything less than the hottest temp, and there's a 95% chance you will get brown water/fuzz. But even on MAX, it's a 50/50 chance from one day to the next. So today is July 1, 2020, and this iron has lasted from April 15 to June 27 before the brown water/fuzz started, by far the shortest time from new out of the box to sludge of any of the previous models I have had. For the last three days, no matter what is done to clean it, nor only using Max temp setting, it's all brown muck, all the time.I've calculated the amount of ruined garments and fabric I've had over the years, and I'm placing it somewhere around $1500. Coincidentally, that's about what I have spent on all these Rowenta Steam Stations. Well Rowenta... never again. There are very few companies that make tank style steam irons, but it's time to try one of the others. This is the last Rowenta I will own.