Best and Worst Carpet Cleaners From Consumer Reports' Tests

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As spring gives way to summer, prepare for outdoor parties, soccer matches—and more muddy shoes or paw prints all over your carpets.

If you find yourself needing to deep clean your carpet, you can rent a carpet cleaner at your local home improvement store for around $30 a day, plus whatever cleaning detergent you might need. But if you have a busy household with lots of carpet, you might want to buy 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.

Below, CR members can find reviews of the four top picks from our tests, as well as three carpet cleaners to skip. Or go straight to our carpet cleaner ratings for details on even more options.

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.

Before you choose a model, take stock of the area you’ll be cleaning. If you live in a one-story house, for instance, you might not need a model with a long hose.

“On the other hand, if you have carpeted stairs, you want a carpet cleaner with a long hose so you can reach up the steps,” says Larry Ciufo, who oversees Consumer Reports’ carpet cleaner tests. “You don’t want to put the cleaner on the top step and tug on the hose; the machine could barrel down on top of you.”

Keep in mind that carpet cleaners are noisy; some are so loud that we recommend wearing hearing protection. And don’t buy by brand name alone. In our tests, we found big differences among models from the same brand. Bissell, for example, holds the top spot in our rankings as well as the next-to-last spot.

Keep your upright or canister vacuum cleaner at hand before you tackle a messy rug or carpeting. Carpet cleaner manufacturers typically suggest that you vacuum up loose debris before using a carpet cleaner. This ensures that you’re not wetting carpet with excess dust or dirt, creating a bigger mess.

4 Top Carpet Cleaners

Read on for ratings and reviews of four of the best carpet cleaner models based on CR’s latest tests. And below those you’ll find details on a few worse-than-average performers.

3 Models Not Worth the Storage Space

Although their names might look similar to the models that sit near the top of our ratings chart, these three machines—the bottom three 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, a carrying handle, and brush attachments. But features 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 Delux 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 more than our two top Bissell picks, proving that the price-quality relationship doesn’t always bear out.

Another model 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.