Carpet Cleaner Review

User reviews are most reliable when it comes to carpet cleaners

We found a serious lack of professional carpet-cleaner testing, leading us to user reviews for the best sources of information. Consumers are both thrilled with and vexed by carpet cleaners and offer up plenty of detailed performance descriptions on retail websites. Amazon.com has by far the largest collection of opinions (some models receive hundreds of reviews) followed by Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com and Epinions.com. Large home-improvement stores, including Lowe's and Home Depot, weren't much help. We found few or no reviews for carpet cleaners on their websites.

Consumer Reports hasn't reviewed carpet cleaners since 2003, although they do offer a helpful buyer's guide on their website that discusses types of cleaners. We found only a couple of sources that seemed to test carpet-cleaning machines, although none of them described their methods, calling into question whether models were actually tested. Rather, on sites like About.com, reviewers seem to base opinions simply on product claims. ConsumerGuide.com is another such source. It reviews 11 machines but doesn't share testing methodology. ConsumerGuide.com does offer more lengthy reviews and quick pro-and-con summaries, as well as top picks. Barbara Whiting, About.com's guide to appliances, takes a similar approach, singling out a handful of machines without disclosing how she came to choose them.

While advertising may lead shoppers to believe that carpet cleaners will leave carpets looking brand new, experts like David Ristenbatt of Ristenbatt Vacuum Service warn otherwise: "Hot water extractors work best when used to periodically clean carpets which are lightly soiled. Performance on a heavily soiled or stained carpet can be disappointing at best." Reviewers say frequent vacuuming and spot pre-treating will increase an extractor's effectiveness, but be aware that none of these machines will completely remove tough stains that have been in your carpet for a while.

We found more negative reviews of portable or spot carpet cleaners than upright cleaners, with the consensus being so clear that a few models emerged as definite lemons to avoid. Each of the big three names in carpet cleaning, Hoover, Bissell and Dirt Devil, make a portable model with problems.

The least expensive of the pack, the Dirt Devil Spot Scrubber (*Est. $30), receives a low average rating on Amazon.com. – 2.5 stars of a possible five with well over 140 reviews. Owners say it doesn't clean well and leaves the carpet very wet, even spraying dirty water through its exhaust vents. Others say it leaks. Several said that manually agitating stains with a brush and spray carpet cleaner yields better results. Still others comment that it's very noisy.

Hoover's portable carpet cleaner is a cordless, upright model. The SteamVac Spot Carpet Cleaner F5505 (*Est. $120), weighing 24 pounds, is fairly heavy, but it does fold down for easy storage. Hoover also boasts that its StairFit design allows the unit to sit on a step while cleaning. Though we found just a dozen reviews of this unit on Amazon.com, four of them reported that their units broke shortly after purchase. Another six owners say the SteamVac Spot doesn't suction very well, leaving the carpet wet.

Bissell's Cordless Spot Lifter 2X Handheld Deep Cleaner 1719-B (*Est. $50) also gets mixed reviews. While some praise its convenience, the majority of users at Target.com pan the Spot Lifter as a leaky machine that doesn't suction well and takes way too long (12 hours) to charge. Some users on Amazon.com like this model, especially for pets, but one says it spits sucked-up fluid through the air vents. Among spot carpet cleaners, we found much more consistent reviews for a more expensive model, the Bissell SpotBot (*Est. $130).