Bissell’s Portable Dog Washer Might Be the Easiest Way to Clean Your Pet

Doggie bath time isn’t always a fun time. It’s messy, everyone gets wet, and it takes forever. A portable dog-bathing machine could be the answer.

Bissell’s BarkBath looks sort of like a weird vacuum designed to work on your dog’s fur. You drag the hose along your dog’s body, and the nozzle simultaneously shoots water and no-rinse shampoo out and sucks it back up into the tank, so your dog ends up being only slightly damp during the process—which the company says takes as little as 10 minutes. (You can see how it works in this YouTube video.) As a result, you don’t need to do it in the bathtub. You could wash your dog in the living room if you really wanted to.

Bissell estimates that it takes about 48 ounces of water to wash a dog with BarkBath, compared to around 19 gallons to wash your dog in a tub, so it saves a good amount of water, whether you bathe your dog once a month or once a year. (Recommendations on bathing dogs vary from once a week to once every three months.)

If your dog hates to get wet, it may be easier to convince them to undergo a rapid clean with BarkBath rather than being soaked for 30 minutes while you rinse, shampoo, and rinse again. If your dog is skittish about noise, though, the machine might add yet another stressor to the bathing experience.

If your dog can handle a weird machine that both squirts water and suctions it off their fur, the BarkBath could be the answer to canine sanitation. Because washing your dog shouldn’t make more of a mess than it cleans up.

It’s $141 on Amazon.