Hardwood floors can be attractive, even elegant, but they won’t ever seem as warm and inviting as a richly toned carpet living room. And if you’ve gone with tile, you’ll notice on a cold winter morning exactly how much better a lush, soft carpet would feel on bare feet.
Carpets are wonderful flooring – they are comfortable, they can really accent a room with color and texture, and on top of that they are relatively affordable.
They also accumulate dirt faster and more easily than any other kind of flooring, though. So it pays to have a convenient, effective way to clean them.
A Vacuum Will Be Your Best Friend
This is especially important because the longer carpet goes with debris and dust in its fibers, the more the mess is ground down deep into the pile, which will ruin the carpet’s appearance and even how it feels.
- Luckily, this can be prevented by vacuuming at least once weekly
- Vacuum even more often for areas with lots of traffic and where people put their feet a lot, like at the base of a couch.
An extra benefit of keeping up with your cleaning like this, of course, is keeping down the allergens in your home that get trapped in the carpet along with dust. You’ll definitely notice the difference if you or a loved one have allergies or asthma.
Cordless or Upright Vacuum?
While the upright vacuum might be the first type you think of because you always saw a parent using one when you were little, a cordless stick vacuum is a much better, more modern option.
- Cordless vacuums are more affordable than uprights
- You won’t have to unplug the cord to switch from room to room, or to untangle, trip over, or struggle to put the cord away
- They are lighter and easier to manage than uprights – you’ll notice the difference when going up and down stairs
Cordless stick vacuums are obviously the better option especially when you look at the rule of thumb we’ve already gone over to avoid ruining carpet with built up dirt: vacuum at least once weekly and more in high traffic areas.
If you really do want to care for your carpets the way they really need it, it only makes sense to use the most convenient, easiest-to-use option: a cordless stick vacuum.
How Do I Know a Vacuum Is the Right One for Carpet?
There are three things you should look for when choosing a vacuum for carpet.
- Power – measured in volts, the higher the power of the vacuum, the better it will be able to clean your carpet and avoid the accumulation of dirt amongst the fibers.
- It’s all well and good to clean the dirt that is visible on the surface of the carpet, but you’ll want a vacuum that can clean deeper to what’s already gotten beneath the surface, if you want your carpet to last longer
- Brushroll – a vacuum with a good rotating brushroll or a beater/brush bar is a non-negotiable when it comes to carpet. This part of the vacuum head will work at your carpet to shake free dust and debris in a way that bare floors vacuum simply can’t.
- The one caveat is if you have shag or carpet with loose, loopy pile which might get caught in the brushroll – that is the one type of situation you will want to use a bare-floors vacuum on carpet
- Battery – a long runtime is best for cleaning carpet, which usually comes along with a vacuum that uses a lithium-ion battery.
- Just as carpet collects dirt and dust much more easily than bare floors, in the same token it takes relatively longer to clean than bare floors.
- You’ll want a good battery to keep it going strong throughout your cleaning. Especially if you want to do a good job and get the carpet truly clean, you need to take your time and move slowly enough to let the vacuum do its work.
The Best Cordless Vacuum for Carpet
The cordless vacuum that will give you all of those necessities, do them well, and then offer more is the Hoover Linx Cordless Stick Vacuum. Putting it in more detail it has:
- a lithium-ion battery for fast charging and a long runtime that won’t fade, so you can keep up with the vacuuming schedule that good carpet maintenance requires
- unlike most other vacuums, the Linx also features a battery gauge so you can best estimate how to most efficiently clean all of your carpets
- 18 volts of power to best get at the dirt that gets deep
- a brushroll with special edge-cleaning bristles for the hard-to-get areas near baseboards
- the vacuum head can be angled to be very low-profile for getting under coffee tables and furniture more conveniently
- a translucent dust container that easily and tidily empties from the bottom
If you’re still not sure, it should be mentioned that this is Amazon’s best selling cordless vacuum. Hoover’s Linx is really your best option for cleaning carpet.