Choose the Right Carpet Cleaner for Your Home

The best carpet cleaners—the ones that excel at lifting embedded dirt—have powerful motors and spinning bristles that help agitate the carpet for more efficient removal of dirt and stains. They also dry carpet effectively by sucking the dirt out along with the cleaning solution. The most convenient carpet cleaners come with a range of helpful hose attachments, including pet tools and crevice tools. And while all carpet cleaners are pretty noisy, some are a little quieter than others.

Our extensive testing reveals that almost all full-sized models remove dirt more effectively than smaller portable models. This is partly because the portable models we’ve tested rely on a hose attachment for cleaning, lacking the mechanical bristles and powerful motors of full-sized models.

You can rent a carpet cleaner from a home improvement store like Home Depot for about $40 per day. But that comes with the hassle of hauling a heavy cleaner home as well as a time limit for returning it.

While the initial cost of buying a carpet cleaner is higher than renting one—models in our ratings range from about $100 to about $600—if you have pets, large carpets, or multiple carpets to clean, it may make sense to buy your own cleaner. After a number of uses, it’ll pay for itself.

Before you buy one, though, check your carpet’s warranty or the carpet manufacturer’s website for recommendations on how often they should be cleaned to avoid damaging the carpet or voiding its warranty. When you’re ready to clean, try the carpet cleaner on a small, inconspicuous area first to make sure it doesn’t damage the fabric before using it on the entire carpet, says Meghan Johnston, a senior brand manager at Bissell.

Full-Sized or Portable?
If you want to give your large area rugs a thorough, deep-clean on a regular basis, you should buy a full-sized model. Its wide, motorized brushes are best for cleaning a large surface area and tackling deeply embedded dirt. It will also usually come with hoses to help you handle smaller spaces, stairs, upholstery, and the occasional targeted mess, like a coffee stain or a pet’s accident.

But if you mainly intend to clean spills and stains as they arise—or if you specifically want a carpet cleaner for upholstery or the interior of your car—a portable model may be best for you. They’re compact, so you can carry them easily wherever you need them. While they don’t match the cleaning abilities of full-sized models, they’re designed for a different purpose, and they’re more than up to the task of spot-cleaning.

Focus on Features
Carpet cleaners typically have two tanks: one for water and a cleaning solution, and the other for dirty water removed from the carpet during cleaning. Certain models now have three tanks: one for clean water, one for the solution, and one for dirty water. One advantage of dedicated compartments for clean water and solution is that you don’t need to measure and mix the correct ratio of water to detergent yourself—the machine will do it for you. It also lets you easily give the carpet a water-only rinse.

Choose models that have hose attachments suited to what you want to clean. Some models have pet-specific attachments with rubber prongs that help collect pet hair and handle other pet messes. Some have crevice tools to help you reach tight spaces or clean upholstery delicately. There are also especially wide attachments to help you cover more ground when you’re using the hose.

Consider the Size of Your Home—and the Carpet Cleaner
While carpet cleaners tend to have long cords and hoses, not every model will be ideal for every space. If you have a very large home, a longer hose will probably be a huge help because you won’t have to move the machine around as much while you’re cleaning. And if you have stairs, check that the cord and hose length will allow you to clean them without perching the carpet cleaner on a narrow step.

You’ll also want to look at the weight of the carpet cleaner, both empty and with a full tank. A full-sized carpet cleaner with a full tank of solution can weigh over 65 pounds, making it difficult to move or carry up and down stairs. This is less of a concern for portable carpet cleaners, but the heaviest portable model in our tests still weighs 19 pounds with a full tank.

If You Hire a Service
If you decide to hire a carpet-cleaning service instead of renting or buying your own carpet cleaner, select a company approved by the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration Certification, a nonprofit organization, to ensure that it carries liability insurance and employs certified technicians. Make sure they vacuum before deep-cleaning, and ask about spot removal. Get a detailed written estimate for the cost, check references, and be sure to get an invoice.

Consider Your Carpet
Carpet cleaners are generally okay to use on water-safe carpets and upholstery. Check whether the manufacturer’s care tag carries a “W” or “WS” label, which indicates that the surface can be cleaned with water-based solutions, according to the carpet experts at SharkNinja. This typically includes synthetic carpets made from nylon, polyester, olefin, and triexta, as well as standard wall-to-wall carpeting and some upholstery.

They also advise against using carpet cleaners on carpets made of delicate or natural materials—such as wool, cotton, silk, antique, or hand-woven rugs—or on items labeled “S” (solvent only) or “Dry-Clean Only.” These fabrics can shrink, bleed dye, or discolor when exposed to moisture. For these types of rugs, professional cleaning services are the best option, Johnston says.

Take Precautions
Working with water and electricity requires care, so if possible, plug the machine into an outlet with a ground-fault circuit interrupter. Wear hearing protection when using any machine for extended periods. The noise produced by carpet cleaners, even portable models, can reach 90 decibels, loud enough to damage your hearing with prolonged exposure.

Vent the Area
Some cleaning solutions and carpet stain removers emit fumes, so be sure to open windows and run fans when cleaning. That’s especially important if someone in your household has a respiratory condition such as asthma.

Maintain Your Cleaner
If you want to keep your carpet machine performing at its peak, it’s important to clean and maintain it regularly. First of all, always vacuum your carpets before any wet cleaning to prevent debris from building up and clogging the machine, Johnston says.

Empty the dirty water tank of the carpet cleaner after every use to prevent odors and mold from forming. After each cleaning session, rinse the tank and tools with warm, soapy water, and remove any hair or debris from the filter. Let all parts fully air-dry before reassembling the cleaner.

It takes three days to put a carpet cleaner through our battery of cleaning performance tests. To assess both full-sized and portable carpet cleaners, our engineers soil large swatches of off-white nylon carpet with red Georgia clay, and then run a cleaner over it for four wet and four dry cycles, simulating how you’d clean a particularly dirty spot on a well-trafficked carpet. Then they repeat the test on two more swatches.

For each set of swatches, our experts take 60 readings with a colorimeter (a device that measures light absorption) to determine how well each device cleaned the carpet. This includes 20 readings of the carpet in its clean state, 20 after it’s been soiled, and 20 after it has been cleaned by the machine. Because we test each cleaner on three swatches, that adds up to 180 readings per model. We base a machine’s cleaning score on the amount of color remaining, which indicates how much soil was removed.

We conduct a similar test to assess drying performance: We apply a set amount of water to carpet swatches and run a dry pass with each carpet cleaner. Our testers measure the weight of the wet carpet and then the weight of the carpet after it’s been “dried” using the cleaner. (Carpet cleaners don’t fully dry a carpet, but the good ones extract a fair amount of liquid.) We assign drying scores based on how much water the cleaner picks up.

We also evaluate how loud each carpet cleaner is by taking readings in both decibels and sones. The scores for convenience are based on factors such as the cleaner’s weight, the capacity of its water tanks, and the number of additional attachments.

In our ratings, you’ll notice that the scores for portable carpet cleaners are lower than those for almost all full-sized models. That’s because we put the portables through the same rigorous tests as full-sized cleaners, tests designed to evaluate how well a carpet cleaner can extract deeply embedded soil from a carpet. But portable carpet cleaners are really designed for a different job: spot-cleaning smaller stains. So while their scores are lower than those of full-sized models, they’ll perform much better on the kinds of messes they’re designed for.