Best carpet cleaners – strike out stains with our top picks

Rug Doctor is known for hiring out carpet cleaners to spring clean entire houses, but the Rug Doctor Deep Carpet Cleaner is available to buy. It isn’t overly large but it packs in a 1300W motor, a large rotating brush-bar with cross-action brushes and a separate row that oscillates back and forth. Clever water tank and handle design makes this easy to fill up and heft about – just as well, as with fresh water on board it weighs an epic 17.5kg.

The Deep Carpet Cleaner uses Rug Doctor’s own cleaning chemicals, and for stubborn stains there’s a Super Spray Boost, which fires down between the rear wheels so you can aim it better. Unlike other cleaners, you pull it backwards towards you, which takes a little getting used to, but it’s a quicker system. The results are outstanding, even on red wine spilled into a cream carpet; it was gone after four passes. The cleaner even sucked out old stains left from previous tests!

The Deep Carpet Cleaner combines great build quality, class-leading cleaning and outstanding vacuuming with brilliant tools and detergent. Its only real drawback is its weight. If you want as-new carpets and upholstery throughout the home, this is the carpet cleaner to choose.

Reviewer: Richard & Jackie Stevenson

Full Review: Rug Doctor Deep Carpet Cleaner

The Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain is a rechargeable shampooer with cordless portability. It sprays, scrubs and vacuums up moisture like a full-size cleaner in a convenient hand-held form. It’s never going to be able to cover large areas, but for tackling stains in the car or urgently sucking up spilled party food, it’s a super-handy gadget.

The Stain Eraser works by shooting a spray of warm water and cleaning fluid onto a target area, waiting for you to agitate it with the brush, then vacuuming everything up into its waste tank. It takes about four hours to fully charge, and we timed 20 minutes suction on a full battery – enough to deal with a stain or two.

It may be small, but this cleaner is capable. Using Bissell’s excellent cleaning fluids, it removed a fresh red wine stain in just two attempts. It’s a breeze to fill, use and clean, although we wish it came with a charging dock rather than a flying cable.

If you’ve ever frantically Googled “what to use on a spill of <highly staining food/drink/cosmetic>”, then the Stain Eraser is for you.

Reviewer: Richard & Jackie Stevenson

Full Review: Bissell Stain Eraser Cordless Spot & Stain

The Polti Vaporetto Go is a pint-sized steam cleaner that looks like a cylinder vacuum. It can follow you around on wheels, or you can wear it like a backpack and pretend you’re in Ghostbusters – don’t cross the steams! You’ll need a separate vacuum cleaner to get dirt and dust up first, after which the Vaporetto Go will do a great job of lifting the remaining grime from hard floors, and getting light stains out of rugs, carpets, or anything else.

For heavier stains, you can fit a brush directly to the Vaporetto Go’s steam lance and contribute a bit of scrubbing. There are seven other tools neatly packed away on board, and the modular lance can be adjusted to three different lengths, making this a very flexible appliance. The results were a revelation, with this cleaner really lifting dirt, rather than just giving floors a polish.

There are some drawbacks. It takes around five minutes for the 750ml water tank to start producing steam, and the safety valve won’t let you refill until things have cooled down a little. We also found the handle slightly uncomfortable. However, at this price it is a fantastic way to tackle small stains and lift the grime out of carpets or hard floors.

Reviewer: Caramel Quin

Full Review: Polti Vaporetto Go

The Vax S6S Home Pro Compact Steam Cleaner is a cylinder type steamer that follows you around on wheels. It has some neat details, such as a detergent tank in the handle that helps you lift out stains, and an easily accessed set of tools stored on its back.

Like most steam cleaners it takes a while before it’s ready – we timed 12 minutes – but after that it was 40 minutes before we needed to refill the tank. You’ll need to wait 10 minutes for it to cool down, or you can take a shortcut by releasing the remaining steam pressure. You can turn the steam down for mopping, or refreshing furnishing. Teamed with detergent, the brush attachment and some elbow grease, it was really good for lifting ingrained carpet stains.

For less targeted cleaning, the S6S glides over carpets beautifully, although the carpet attachment isn’t clipped on, which caused some frustration. With powerful steam and detergent, this inexpensive steamer does a good job of cleaning anything.

Reviewer: Caramel Quin

Full Review: Vax S6S Home Pro Compact Steam Cleaner

The Bissel Vac & Steam is an unusual combination of steam mop and cyclonic vacuum cleaner. You can use it to vacuum and steam-clean carpets, rugs and hard floors, making it a quick way to get a clean and fresh look throughout the home. Without handheld tools however, it’s no use for curtains, upholstery or really ingrained stains.

Vacuuming is instant, while steam is ready just 24 seconds later. Neither high nor low settings produced huge clouds of steam, but the cleaning results were impressive, with the Vac & Steam making quick work of grubby carpets, and easily lifting muddy footprints from a wooden floor. It’s generally easy to use, but the indicator lights are tricky to see, and while it’s good to have separate switches for vacuum and steam, it’s easy to forget to switch the latter off.

The Vac & Steam isn’t the most versatile cleaner, nor will it give you the deepest clean, but if your priority is cleaning a mix of floors quickly then it’s a great, relatively inexpensive choice.

Reviewer: Caramel Quin

Full Review: Bissel Vac & Steam

If you want to clean whole rooms then you should look elsewhere, but for zapping spills and stains, or cleaning stair carpets, the Bissell SpotClean Pro is ideal. Highly portable, with a powerful motor, the SpotClean Pro has decent-sized water tanks and dedicated tools for carpet stains and general upholstery cleaning.

A fraction of the size and weight of a full-sized cleaner, the SpotClean Pro is easier to store, and quicker to press into action when that glass of red slips onto the Axminster. Cleaning is a spray and vacuum away; there are no motorised brushes, however, so you’ll have to supply the agitation.

This is a very effective carpet and upholstery cleaner, so much so that we struggled with “clean patches” – areas where we’d lifted a stain, only to emphasise the dirt in the rest of the carpet. There are some drawbacks: the hose is very short, and it’s a pain to fill and empty the tanks. However, if you want a small cleaner on hand to fix minor stains or spills then it’s ideal.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full Review: Bissell SpotClean Pro

At more than £300, the Bissell StainPro 10 is a premium carpet cleaner that does plenty to justify its price. It’s a full-size carpet shampooer with an 800W motor and heated cleaning. With dual rotating brushes, an easy-clean floorhead, plenty of suction and huge capacity tanks, this is certainly a cleaner for more sizeable homes. It’s big itself, weighing in at a whopping 16kg loaded with clean water, but most of that mass is low to the ground, making this easier to use than it looks.

There’s a small amount of assembly to do before the StainPro 10 is ready to go. The fluid container is unique, as the clean water goes in a bladder within the waste water tank – it collapses as it empties, making room for waste water. It’s a neat space-saver, but it’s hard to know how much clean fluid remains.

Once you get to know the StainPro 10, though, it delivers on its deep-clean promise with outstanding cleaning results and solid vacuuming, leaving carpets relatively dry. It nearly removed our red wine with a few passes, and we got the remainder out completely with the included hand-held detail tool. It’s a top-notch cleaner.

Reviewer: Richard & Jackie Stevenson

Full Review: Bissell StainPro 10

The Karcher SC 5 EasyFix Premium is the most expensive steam cleaner we’ve tested, but it’s also the most powerful too – plus it packs more tools and features than you can shake a mop at. The huge two-litre tank is split into a 1.5-litre refillable reservoir and a 0.5-litre working tank. You can detach and refill the big one while the machine is still powered up and steaming.

With a heater over 2kW, the SC 5 can produce a whopping 4.2-bar of steam pressure, and it’s ready to go within three minutes. You can dial the steam down for more delicate jobs, or turn the power past maximum for VapoHydro mode, which combines hot water with the steam to give you a kind of jet wash.

This cleaner’s huge steam head promises faster floor cleaning. There are multiple tools for detailing and tougher cleaning, and a concentrated power nozzle. Sadly, there’s no window squeegee, even in a range of optional extras that extends to a clothes ironing station.

The SC 5 excels at cleaning tiles and laminate floors, but clip on the carpet-glider attachment and it will do an impressive job of freshening up your rugs or carpets. As a detail steamer, the VapoHydro mode is unrivalled for shifting serious grime. The only real caveat is its premium price.

Reviewer: Richard & Jackie Stevenson

Full Review: Karcher SC 5 EasyFix Premium

If you’re in need of a new carpet cleaner to tackle pet stains and odours, the Vax Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design is the pet version of one of the best and most powerful carpet cleaners we’ve reviewed, the Vax Platinum SmartWash. 

Like the standard SmartWash, the Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design is huge at 1070 x 325 x 480mm and 8.95kg. This makes it ideal for big jobs. 

The carpet cleaner has three tanks, including a 3.5-litre water tank and a 1.9-litre dirty water tank that automatically shuts the carpet cleaner off when it’s full. There’s also a third tank for concentrated detergent, with two 250ml bottles of Vax’s Platinum Antibacterial Carpet Cleaning solution included in the box. The detergent and water being mixed as you clean means there’s no waste as any unused detergent can be decanted back into the bottle. 

The biggest difference between the Pet-Design and the standard version of this vacuum is the handle, which lifts out with a smaller tank designed to hold the Vax Pet Stain & Odour remover. The tool is designed to tackle pet stains and neutralise odours directly and runs on two AA batteries. 

The Pet-Design is incredibly simple to use and we particularly enjoyed the auto-dosing machine, which takes the guesswork out of knowing how long to leave the trigger depressed. The only other carpet cleaner we’ve tested with this tech is the Tineco Carpet One Pro which has a sensor that shows how clean the floor is, but the Tineco is significantly more expensive. 

We found that the Vax Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design cleaned brilliantly and easily, though it is quite loud. 

There are two brushes inside the floor head with an antimicrobial coating. For spot cleaning, there’s a 2.5m hose with a manual 2-in-1 antimicrobial wash tool (with a brush and rubber pet tool) and the rotating SpinScrub. 

Finally, there’s a dry-only mode that uses suction to pull water out of carpets so they can naturally dry faster. 

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full Review: Vax Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design

The Vax SpotWash Home Duo is our favourite compact carpet cleaner. The spot cleaner is a great option for dealing with minor day-to-day stains where pulling out a larger, heavier carpet cleaner like the Vax Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design might be too much hassle. 

The SpotWash Home Duo is small, easy to carry and easy to store. The spot washer features two water tanks, including a 1.1-litre tank for holding water and cleaning solution, and a 0.72-litre tank for dirty water. There’s also a float in the tank to seal it when it’s full. 

We found the spot washer very easy to use with a single button that turns the device on and a trigger to release cleaning fluid. The SpotWash has a transparent head so once you see the liquid run clear, you’ll know the dirt has been lifted. Vax also includes a 250ml bottle of cleaning fluid in the box which should cover you for the first few cleans. 

The Home Duo comes with two floor heads – the Extra Wide 2-in-1 Wash Tool to deal with most of the cleaning and the smaller Messy Clean Tool for other jobs like cleaning up pet mess. Both heads come with inserts, including carpet/upholstery brushes for both and a hard floor brush for the wide tool. Both have the same anti-microbial finish found on the Vax Platinum SmartWash Pet-Design to prevent fungal growth. 

There’s also a thin crevice tool in the box to get into the corners and wedges of a room. 

The spot cleaner did an excellent job in our tests, removing ketchup and mud from carpet quickly with some gentle scrubbing. The SpotWash also worked well when cleaning wet messes on hard floors, though a dedicated steam cleaner or hard floor cleaner will do better for most stains. 

All-in-all the Vax SpotWash Home Duo is a great little tool for spot cleaning, with the dual heads making it easy to keep “dirty” and “clean” jobs separate. However, for larger areas, a full-sized carpet cleaner might still make more sense. 

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full Review: Vax SpotWash Home Duo