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 $20 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’ 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
CR members can read on for ratings and reviews of the four best carpet cleaners, based on our latest lab tests. Below those, you’ll find details on a few subpar performers to avoid. And you can consult our carpet cleaner buying guide for more tips.
3 Carpet Cleaners Not Worth the Storage Space
Although their names might look similar to the ones that sit near the top of our ratings chart, the following 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’s one of two carpet cleaners that gets the poorest marks for cleaning 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.
One of the higher-performing Bissell models on the list of top carpet cleaners has “pet” in its name. So does the Bissell DeepClean Deluxe Pet 36Z9, but that’s where the similarity ends. Unlike the Bissell ProHeat 2X Lift-Off Pet 15651 mentioned above, the DeepClean Deluxe Pet is only so-so at cleaning and worse at leaving a dry carpet behind, earning a Poor score in that test. But it costs about 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 struggles with both cleaning and drying. The only things going for it are that it has a carrying handle, separate tanks for clean and dirty water, and a long hose.