Stop With the Back-and-Forth Motion. Here’s the Right Way to Vacuum

Vacuuming your house or apartment is an unavoidable part of adulthood, and it’s a necessary task for maintaining a healthy and comfortable living space. Vacuuming — next to doing the dishes — might be the chore done most often and it may also be one of the most instantly gratifying. Seeing the dust or pet hair forcefully sucked up while rolling around a powerful machine can be highly satisfying.

It’s a job that can at least make a room feel more enjoyable. If you’re like me, you may not have known that there is a correct and incorrect way to clean your floors. Even if you have the best vacuum on the market, by using it wrong, the tool will not perform at its peak and your floors won’t be as clean as they could be.

We’ve done a lot of in-depth hands-on and lab testing to ensure we are recommending the best cordless, robot and budget vacuums on the market. As we all know, the best tool isn’t going to help much if we don’t use it properly. So, by combining the top vacuums with professional cleaning tips, you’re sure to have tidy floors in no time.

The right way to vacuum clean your home

Those short, quick, back-and-forth motions that the majority of people do when vacuuming isn’t sucking up all that dust, dirt and lint that is embedded into your carpets and floors. The more efficient way to vacuum — and the way professional cleaners do it — is to go forward, in structured rows.

You’ll first start by vacuuming a row of your carpeting in one direction, wall-to-wall. This first pass should be against the nap of the carpet to make it fluff up and to make the deeply embedded dirt come up easier. A way to tell if you’re vacuuming against the nap correctly is if the carpet piles stick up or look a little darker. 

Next, push the vacuum back over that strip you just vacuumed. This will lay the carpet back down flat and will suck up the rest of the dirt you missed on the first pass. Once you’re back to your starting place, vacuum another strip right next to the first, overlapping slightly. Keep repeating this routine until the whole room has been vacuumed thoroughly.

Once you’ve completed that step, go perpendicular: If you were vacuuming north to south the first time, vacuum east to west on this second pass. Yes, it’s extra work and maybe it even seems like overkill, but this method ensures you get every bit of dirt and debris, which will keep your carpet cleaner and looking newer for longer. 

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

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