By Kate Harvey
Content Manager | Pou Whakahaere Ihirangi
If your carpet and furniture have a regular coating of fur, a pet vacuum might sound like the answer to your problems.
About a fifth of the standard and stick vacuums in our test results have the words ‘pet’, ‘animal’, ‘cat’ or ‘dog’ in their model name. Vacuum manufacturers must have worked out that marketing their products this way is good for business.
Do you need a pet vacuum for dog hair and cat fur?
When we test vacs, one of the measures we score them on is how well they suck up pet hair. We source fur from a grooming company, methodically embed it in carpet, vacuum the area and weigh the collected fur. Each vacuum then gets a pet hair score shown as a percentage.
Most of the pet vacs get a score of 90–100% for how well they pick up pet hair – but so do plenty of models that don’t market themselves as pet vacs.
Two corded vacuums and one stick vacuum that have ‘pet’ in their name actually didn’t actually do great in our pet hair test. The corded vacs were the $480 Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Turbo 2454F, which got just 60%, and the $818 Sebo K1 Pet90665NZ, which got 70%. The $648 Hoover ONEPWR Emerge Pet F180PSV22J2, a stick vacuum, got 70% too.
If you’ve got a pet, you’d be better off buying a cheaper vacuum that doesn’t market itself as a pet model but scores highly in the pet hair part of our tests.
Just remember to check it does well in other parts of our test too, and make sure it’s a brand that scores well for reliability and customer satisfaction.
The best vacuums for cleaning up pet hair
These are the vacuums we’d be buying if we wanted a brilliant all-rounder that will do the best job of picking up pet hair.
