Vacuum Cleaner Specialist

Top picks for pet hair by Consumer Reports

Pet owners, rejoice: Now you can revel in Fido’s and Fluffy’s antics without fretting over their sheddings. Our first-ever pet-hair scores show which vacuums were best at whisking away embedded fur and which ones you might want to scratch from your list.

Static electricity and fineness make dog and cat hair a pesky problem for many among the roughly two-thirds of American households with pets The uprights and canisters that did best at regular cleaning also tended to do best at removing pet hair from carpets in our latest tests.


A rough-and-tumble market is driving new designs and features as the humble vacuum goes high-tech. Some, such as the spinning filter inside the high-scoring Hoover WindTunnel 2 U8361-900 upright, add value -- in this case, by helping to keep the filter clean. But some models still put back too much of what they pick up. The new Maytag Legacy U5185-900 upright is one of three in this report judged Not Recommended for releasing visible dust as they cleaned.