Vacuum smarter, not harder: This is the best home cleaning technique

Vacuuming is rarely fun, but it can make a big difference in your home. Using a vacuum cleaner to suck up debris, dust, and pet hair from your floors not only makes your home look better, it also improves indoor air quality, removing microbes and dirt particles from your living space that would otherwise be lifted by pedestrian traffic. If you have a pest problem, it is incredibly important to keep your floors clean so that the offending critters have nothing to graze on.

But if you’re like me, maybe you didn’t know that there is a right and wrong way to clean your floors. Even if you have the best vacuum on the market, using it incorrectly will prevent the tool from performing at its best, creating more work for you in the long run.

We’ve done a lot of extensive hands-on and lab testing to make sure we recommend the best budget-friendly cordless, robotic vacuum cleaners on the market, but the best tool won’t help us much if we don’t use it. correctly.

If you make sure to combine our best vacuum cleaners with these professional cleaning tips, you’ll be sure to have clean floors in no time.

The correct way to vacuum your home

Those short, quick back-and-forth motions that most people make when vacuuming don’t suck up all the dust, dirt, and lint embedded in carpets and floors. The most efficient way to vacuum (and the way professional cleaners do it) is to move forward, in structured rows.

You will first start by vacuuming a row of your carpet in one direction, from wall to wall. This first pass must be against the wool of the carpet so that it fluffs up and deeply embedded dirt comes out more easily. One way to tell if you are vacuuming lint correctly is if the hairs on the carpet are sticking together or looking a little darker.

Then, push the vacuum back over the strip you just vacuumed. This will leave the carpet flat again and absorb the rest of the dirt that was lost in the first pass. Once you’ve returned to the starting spot, vacuum another strip right next to the first, overlapping it slightly. Keep repeating this routine until the entire room has been completely vacuumed.

Once you’ve completed that step, go perpendicular: If you were vacuuming north-south the first time, vacuum east-west on this second pass. If you think of your floor as a grid, you’ll want to go over each square both ways for best results.

Yes, it’s extra work and may even seem excessive, but this method ensures that you remove all the dirt and debris, which will keep your carpet cleaner and looking newer longer.

For more helpful vacuum information, explore the best Roomba alternatives to keep your floors clean and the best robotic vacuum deals available now.

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