Best and Worst Carpet Cleaners From Consumer Reports' Tests
Use our ratings to get the right one for your home—and avoid paying extra for features you don't need
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Whether it’s dirt brought in on muddy paws or shoes—or errant spills of coffee or red wine—our carpets take a beating over time. And if it has been a while since you last cleaned a high-traffic area in your home, a quick vacuuming job won’t cut it.
To remove embedded dirt and grime, you can rent a carpet cleaner at your local home improvement store for around $30 a day, plus the cost of cleaning detergent. But if you have a busy household with lots of carpet, you might want to consider buying one instead.
For a little more than $100 you can get one of the top performers in Consumer Reports’ latest carpet cleaner tests. Take note that these machines are powerful—and heavy. The best easily remove embedded dirt and stains without leaving a trail of water and a soggy stretch of carpet behind.
It takes three days to put one carpet cleaner through our battery of cleaning-performance tests. Our engineers soil large swatches of off-white nylon carpet with red Georgia clay. We run a cleaner over the carpet for four wet and four dry cycles, simulating how you’d clean a particularly dirty spot on a well-trafficked carpet. Then we repeat the test on two more swatches.
4 Top Carpet Cleaners
Read on for ratings and reviews of the four best carpet cleaners, based on CR’s latest tests. And below those you’ll find details on a few subpar performers to avoid.
3 Models Not Worth the Storage Space
Although their names might look similar to the ones that sit near the top of our ratings chart, these three machines—the bottom scorers in our ratings—are worse than average at cleaning:
The Hoover Power Scrub Elite Pet FH50251 performs at two extremes. It gets the poorest marks for cleaning of all the carpet cleaners in our tests. But it also gets one of the best scores for leaving behind a dry carpet, earning an Excellent rating in that test. It does have some nice convenience features, such as separate tanks for clean and dirty water, a hose that’s more than 8 feet long, a carrying handle, and brush attachments. But bells and whistles don’t make up for poor performance in our ratings.
Both of the higher-performing Bissell models on this list have “pet” in their names. So does the Bissell DeepClean Deluxe Pet 36Z9, but that’s where the similarity ends. Unlike the two Bissells mentioned above, the DeepClean Deluxe Pet is only so-so at cleaning and worse than that at leaving a dry carpet behind, earning a Poor score. But it costs the same as our top Bissell pick, proving that the price-quality relationship doesn’t always bear out.
Another carpet cleaner with “pet” in its name that can’t compete with other models by the same brand is the Hoover SmartWash Pet Complete FH53000PC. This model has trouble with both cleaning and drying, and it’s extremely loud to boot. The only thing going for it is that it has a carrying handle and a long hose.