Use These 5 Vacuuming Hacks to Speed Up Your Cleaning
Vacuum your home more effectively with these strategies
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At CR, we’ve run more than 250 vacuums over floors covered with Cheerios, rice, sand, or Maine Coon hair. From our hundreds of hours vacuuming, we’ve found a few great ways to make the process simpler and quicker.
While a full-sized upright or canister vacuum is good for deep cleaning, you can make your life easier by handling small cleanups as the need arises with a stick or handheld vacuum. Robot vacuums are a fun choice for everyday set-and-forget cleaning. They’ve come down in price over the last few years (one of our top-rated robot vacs sells for as little as $150), and they generally clean well if you don’t have a lot of carpet or pets.
Click on or hover your cursor over the dots on the illustration below (or tap on a mobile device), or read on for our expert advice on the no-hassle way to clean every nook and cranny in your house.
Start at the top. If you’re cleaning an entire room, start from the ceiling and move down: cobwebs in the corner first, dust bunnies under the couch last. That way, your final step will be to vacuum up all the dirt or dust you knocked onto the floor from surfaces such as windowsills and picture frames—and you won’t waste time cleaning the floor twice.
Use your vacuum attachments. Your machine’s dust brush attachment can be used to gently clean books and shelves, and the upholstery attachment is helpful when cleaning furnishings and curtains. Twice a year, strip the bedding off your mattress, then go over the entire surface with the upholstery brush attachment. Use the crevice attachment for seams and corners, where dust, dirt, dead skin, and other icky stuff can collect.
Adjust vacuum settings for deeper dirt. The carpet pile-height adjustment allows you to raise or lower the brush roll. “For normal vacuuming, use the height indicated in the manual for the type of carpet being cleaned,” says John Galeotafiore, who oversees CR’s tests of home products. “For an unusually dirty area, drop the setting lower for deeper cleaning. But don’t do that too often, since a lower setting could make the carpet wear faster.”
Clean your machine, too. Don’t wait until the vacuum’s dirt collection bag or bin is completely full to empty it. “In tests we typically find that when the bag or bin loads up with dirt, the vacuum’s performance drops,” Galeotafiore says. “Change the bag when it’s about three-fourths full, and empty the bin after each use.” Also, check the brush roll and remove any tangles of hair or other debris that could prevent it from turning properly.
Make several passes on the floors. In our tests, we make 16 passes over sand-embedded carpet in different directions, but even one or two extra runs can make a difference. Susan Booth, who leads our vacuum testing, says, “My advice is to vacuum over the same area at least two to three times to give the vacuum a chance to pick up anything in its path.”
5 Top-Rated Vacuum Cleaners From Our Tests
CR members can read on for ratings and reviews of our top-rated upright, canister, stick, handheld, and robotic vacuums. For more options, check out our full vacuum cleaner ratings. For shopping tips, read our vacuum cleaner buying guide.
Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in the October 2021 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.
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