I focused on my shirts, since they are made from a variety of fabrics in different thicknesses, and that is what I iron the most. I steamed one side of each with the Iggi and the other with the URPower. I quickly confirmed that cotton dress shirts aren’t the vapers’ forte. They work to gently remove wrinkles from one that has been recently ironed, but not much more than that. An iron would do this job faster. I also noticed that, at least on this singlet, there was little difference in performance between the two steamers.
In a true pandemic flashback, I stayed home on a Friday night to smooth out my head-to-head wrinkles, then changed into a linen shirt that had been ironed some time ago. This was clearly more steam-friendly territory, the hot steam gently smoothing most of her folds. I could see the appeal of not taking out the ironing board, especially if I just needed to fix that day’s shirt, and envisioned my new routine: wake up, plug in the steamer, make coffee, steam, head out the door.
I switched to a 65% polyester 35% cotton denim shirt and it steamed pretty well as well. But honestly, if you have a decent ironing setup, the added convenience of a handheld steamer isn’t always so great. Speaking of arrangements, if you’re committing to Team Steam, you’ll want to find a way to hang your clothes so that you can work on them comfortably and effectively, which means having them hang from a solid hanger on a hook that won’t budge. To me, that hook would be at head height and that hanger would not have any flex, allowing me to easily apply gentle tension to the bottom of the fabric. One of those hangers that clip onto pants would also come in handy.
Perhaps the best moment in head-to-head competition was using the vapors on my Woolly Brand merino polo shirts and t-shirts, which I found new at a Goodwill store in Seattle. (Side note: I highly recommend these t-shirts. They don’t itch and, pardon my French, they don’t itch as much as cotton t-shirts, which means I can wear them several days without washing them.) One drawback is that their label says “no iron” but you can steam them! The steamships did a good job of improving them, especially the poles. There’s a lot of talk about how steam restores shine or “brings new life” to fabric, and this was the closest I got to it.
Apparently people like to steam their curtains, so I tried that too. “Like” was a strong word in my case, and after doing side-by-side test areas of maybe 30 square feet with each steamer, I gave up. I have no idea what my curtains are made of—some kind of fancy jute?—but my wife, Elisabeth, and I inspected them with a couple of different angles of light and didn’t see any difference.
Then, I took the Iggi to Mexico. The URPower steamer says directly that it’s “not for foreign use” which is a bit of a contradiction for a travel steamer, but I wasn’t in the mood to start an electrical fire in a foreign country so I left it at home. The Iggi is on the heavier side, at over 2 pounds, it’s nearly twice the weight of the URPower, but if you can afford a $300 steamer, you probably aren’t too concerned about excess baggage fees.
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