Current home design trends are breaking away from a household full of wall to wall carpets in every room. Now a mixture is in play with many consisting of laminate or hard wood floor surfaces, lightweight area rugs, and oriental rugs, a few rooms with wall to wall carpet and steps wooded or carpet. With all these types of floor surfaces to clean along with upholstered furniture and curtains, the question of the best vacuum for a household arises.
Carpets and Rugs
A vacuum with an electric motor powered revolving agitator brush roll is the best choice. This could be any upright vacuum, a canister vacuum with a power nozzle or central vacuum with electric power nozzle. Agitation on a carpet not only removes dog hair easily and leaves a gorgeous groomed appearance but it also separates the carpet fibers allowing the suction stream and bristles to sweep and suck out damaging gritty objects such as sand, small stones, dust mites and other foreign objects all the way down to the base of the carpet pile. The electric powered brush roll is much better than air powered for allowing higher more consistent RPMs of the brushroll. Generally a faster spinning brush roll provides the best cleaning performance.
Hard Floor Surfaces
Suction only cleaning is the only recommended method. A bare floor brush with soft, stationary bristles or felt padding type material that dusts the floor and sweeps any fine matter into the suction stream. These tools are generally extremely low profile, very gentle, lightweight and highly maneuverable allowing the user to easily clean floors behind toilets, around chair legs, under refrigerator doors and of course large open areas to immediately suck in dirt along baseboards or wherever it hides. They also are great for dusting walls and removing cobwebs from ceilings.
Gentle is the key word for cleaning hard floors. Cleaning is just that as the purpose is to help restore and preserve a surface to look its best without damaging it. A spinning agitator brush is terrific for carpets but for hard floor surfaces the marks of the spinning brush roll are quite unappealing, and ruins any waxed or polished finished including scratching the surface of the floor and chipping grout. On linoleum flooring, rubber mats and some other delicate floors a vacuums spinning brushes can actually burn through the surface all the way to the bottom leaving permanent damage. A spinning brush also causes many fine particles to just be kicked out the back of the machine instead of sucked away. This is counterproductive for cleaning a house and causes more dust on furniture and elsewhere.
Best Choice
The all around best of both worlds is a canister vacuum with electric power nozzle. Many canister vacuums have electric power heads that provide excellent carpet cleaning results. The power nozzles are lightweight and low profile for easy cleaning under beds, low furniture or even automotive interior. The power nozzles detach very easily with a step on quick release button to attach a most likely included separate bare floor tool. Otherwise for about $15 it’s a very easy to get accessory from your preferred vacuum repair shop, which they can help you find the best one to fit your needs and machine.
If you’re a Die Hard Upright fan you can do one of two things. 1) Pick out an excellent deep cleaning upright vacuum for your carpets. Buy a separate canister vacuum for your bare floor needs and any attachment work that you have. There are many sizes of suction only or included power nozzle canisters on the market to fit your needs and desires. 2) Find an upright vacuum with a brush roll shut off switch. You can try doing your hard floors this way with the brush roll shut off or better yet, ask your vacuum shop for an extension hose, bare floor tool and some extension wands to fit with your upright vacuum that has included on board tool storage. Evacuumstore.com can help you outfit your vacuum with adapters, wands, bare floor brushes, etc. to turn your upright vac into an easy to use attachment ready machine at a very reasonable price.
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