Frequently asked questions

No, and every page that recommends anything says so. We do not have a lab and we do not own these machines. What we do instead is compile manufacturer-published specifications, compute three-year running costs, and state the delta against the category flagship in plain arithmetic. The full method is here.

Because everything is checkable. Every figure is the manufacturer's own published number, attributed and dated, and every gap says "Not published" rather than being quietly filled. You can verify any claim on this site against the same documents we used — which is more than a test result you have to take on faith allows.

Scooter M., an enthusiast who reads the manuals, compiles the published specs and does the arithmetic. No credentials, no expert panel, no test lab, and no claim to any of them. The about page states it in full.

Affiliate commission on purchases made through links here, at no extra cost to you. Amazon is currently the only retailer we earn from. Commission scales with price, so a site built around budget picks earns less than one pushing flagships — the disclosure page covers this properly.

No. Rankings are set from published specifications before any link is built, every ranking names a machine to skip, and several pages here conclude that renting or buying nothing is the right answer — all of which cost us commission.

They come from a live lookup refreshed daily and carry the date they were verified. A price older than 48 hours is not displayed at all: the buy control falls back to "Check price on Amazon", which is honest rather than approximate.

Because we have no customers and no test data, so any review or rating here would be invented. We also never emit review or aggregate-rating structured data — our editorial scores stay on the page as content and out of the machine-readable markup.

Five category-appropriate metrics, scored 0-10 and averaged. They are editorial judgments about published specifications, not measurements. The rubric per category is published on How We Pick.

Email the address on the contact page. Confirmed errors are fixed immediately, the page's modified date is updated, and a dated entry goes into the public correction log on the editorial policy page.

Sometimes, and the failure mode is specific: a sealed battery with no published cycle rating, from a brand with no parts network. Buy a removable battery or buy corded and that argument mostly disappears. We work it through here.

Not across brands. Pascals measure sealed static pressure, every manufacturer measures it differently, and none publish the method. Air watts are the comparable unit and almost nobody in the budget field publishes them.

Corded if your floors are mostly hard, if your budget is under about $100, or if you want a machine with no component that degrades with charge cycles. Cordless if you will only use a vacuum that is grab-and-go. The full arithmetic is here.

On low pile, yes. On medium pile, adequately for surface debris. On deep pile, no — and several manufacturers publish "medium carpet" as their own stated upper limit. The detail is here.

On sealed hardwood, according to the manufacturers themselves. Unfinished, oiled and waxed boards are excluded by every machine's own rating. Your flooring's warranty is the authority for your specific floor — the surface guide is here.

Rent if you deep-clean once or twice a year. Buy if you have pets, because accidents are unscheduled and a machine you can deploy in ninety seconds is what determines whether the mess comes up. The comparison is here.

Extraction. A carpet cleaner sprays solution into the pile and vacuums the dirty liquid back out through a second tank. A steam cleaner applies vapor and recovers nothing, so on carpet the loosened soil stays there. It is the most expensive confusion in floor care.

For build quality, a published warranty and a parts supply that still exists in a decade, yes. For runtime or bin capacity, the published figures say no — the V8's 40 minutes and 0.14-gallon bin are matched or beaten by far cheaper machines. The arithmetic is here.

Almost nothing in electricity. At the U.S. average residential price of 18.34 cents per kWh, even a 1,200 W upright run 45 minutes a week costs about $12.87 over three years. The real costs are filters, bags, dock bags, formula and batteries.

If a pet lives with you, it is the most transformative feature in the category — the on-board bin fills every run. On lightly-used hard floors it solves a problem you do not have, and it adds roughly fifteen to twenty-one dock bags over three years.

Bin capacity, converted to a common unit, and the runtime qualifier. Both are published in comparable terms by nearly everyone, and together they predict day-to-day satisfaction better than any suction figure does.