One of life’s general principles is that you can save a lot of money by avoiding convenience. Make your own juice or iced tea at home and take them with you in the car and to work. Make your own oatmeal for breakfast. Use a cast-iron waffle maker.
And so it is with mopping the floor.
Years ago we bought a floor-cleaning machine. It squirted water onto the floor, its brushes spun and scrubbed, and it vacuumed up the dirty water and collected it in a tank. It worked great. It got our floors really clean. The only problem was that it didn’t last. After a couple years, it stopped working. I bought another one. And it soon stopped working. Seemed like a pattern was developing. (It also needed a new part occasionally; a rubber gasket that helped it maintain a vacuum against the floor needed replacing about once a year.) I didn’t want to continue spending a couple hundred dollars every couple years for a machine to clean the floor.
So I bought a mop. A modern mop that comes with a microfiber mop head and a bucket that spins it dry. Much less expensive. Will probably last much longer. The only maintenance cost is the microfiber mop heads, which are re-usable and can be cleaned in the washing machine. All in all, a human-powered mop is much more economical than the mopping machine powered by an electric motor.
