Do you ever feel like you’re drowning in pet hair? The hair can get everywhere and sticks deep into the carpets. Your old vacuum cleaner may have lost the battle of the pet hair, and you feel it’s time to replace it.
You decide to buy a new vacuum cleaner and notice that all major manufacturers have pet hair models. You have a pet hair problem, but are these vacuums better than a regular vacuum cleaner?
NO…. Well… yes, in a way.
I want to talk about this and also give you an option I bet you never thought of, below.
What You Didn’t Think Of
To understand how to get pet hair out of carpets the most effective way, I need you to think about your own head. When you comb your hair, the comb pulls out old hair between the bristles.
Combing your hair is a super-effective way to get the old hair out, but I’m not going to take my little brush and comb the carpet. That would be insane?
It would be great if someone made a large comb, so I could comb my carpets and free the hair from it. Well… they do, and it’s called a carpet rake. Click here to see a carpet rake (Amazon Link Ad).
Most people don’t know about carpet rakes, and they got to be the best way to get the hair out of carpets. They also work great to loosen up the carpet fibers to make the vacuum more effective at cleaning. I would not recommend using a carpet rake on berber-style carpets (loop carpets).
What Vacuum?
To be honest, with a good carpet rake, the vacuum you need won’t matter so long as it has good suction. I have never seen a vacuum cleaner get up as much pet hair as using a carpet rake.
What I do is comb the carpet with the carpet rake and pile up the hair in one spot and use my vacuum cleaner’s hose attachment to suck it up.
Pet Vacuum Cleaners Have Perks
Yes, most of them do offer some unique features that make them worth it. When it comes to carpets, you need a vacuum with a beater brush, the rotating brush under the vacuum, to thoroughly clean the carpets. For hardwood floors, the beater brush needs to be off or not there.
This beater brush is known for getting clogged with hair all the time; it’s just the nature of the beast. What many pet vacuum cleaners have is the ability to clean that brush easily. I have even seen some with a super-easy way to clean the brush by sucking up the cut hair into it.
Let’s not forget that many of the pet vacuums also include an upholstery cleaner. Pet hair doesn’t just land on the carpet; it gets on everything. So, it is nice to have an upholstery cleaner when you have pets.
You do have dander, and a carpet rake is not going to clean that, but most regular vacuum cleaners filters can take care of that. For some allergies, a HEPA filter vacuum is needed.
What Should You Do?
The best option is to use both a carpet rake and a pet-style vacuum cleaner. If the price of a pet vacuum is out of the budget, then just a regular vacuum cleaner and a carpet rake will work.
Having both a carpet rake and a vacuum cleaner is a must to make sure you get all the hair out of the carpets.
One of my friends even takes this a step further and has a backpack vacuum on while he uses the carpet rake. She’s a carpet cleaning machine at that point.
If I had to pick a pet hair vacuum, I would go with the Bissell 1650A Pet Hair Eraser Vacuum (Amazon Link Ad). Bissell really thought this thing through and includes a tangle-free brush roll like how we mentioned above. This is a huge thing, it’s not fun cleaning hair out of a brush roll and the easier it is the better. Another feature I like about it is that it’s easy to disconnect and start to clean the sofa or stairs. You’ll be amazed by the amount of hair that gets trapped on the stairs. Cleaning stairs is a whole other issue that I go into more detail here.
Here is something interesting about most pet hair vacuums, they also work well for people with long hair. People shed too, and those long hairs can get clogged on the roller brush of vacuum cleaners too. This is why having a pet hair vacuum is a must for people with long hair.