Hardwood Floor Vacuum

If you have a hardwood floor in your home, but you want more than just a brush-lined nozzle on the end of your regular vacuum cleaner to clean it, which should you consider a good hardwood floor vacuum cleaner to buy?

Bissell’s 5200 Flip It cleaner—selling for as low as $75 at Walmart or Target—may be what you seek. It is a wet-dry, slender upright that features a reversible cleaning head that turns over for wet or dry cleaning (hence the nickname): one side will vacuum and the other will wash and dry a floor. It comes with twin tanks that are not too difficult to fill and empty, machine-washable mop pads, soft brushes, and an ergonomic loop handle, not to mention weighing a mere ten pounds.

For about ten dollars less, however, you may want to look at Eureka’s Enviro-Steamer—as close to a stick vacuum as a hardwood floor cleaner gets. In fact, the entire apparatus is concentrated in the cleaning head unit, with a long aluminum handle. The package includes a specially-designed funnel and measuring cup for adding tap water—and nothing else; the machine is designed to clean your floor with tap water steam and machine-washable cloths at adjustable water temperatures. The machine also features a preheat and cool-down tray and a twenty-five foot power cord that can be wrapped on the adjustable handle.

Even more lightweight and less ponderous is the Shark Steam Mop. In fact, it looks like nothing short of a powered Swiffer sweeper and works on a similar principle: reuseable microfiber cloth pads wrapped over a flat conductor pad and, like the Enviro-Steamer, uses no cleaning solution but tap water steam that is ready after a thirty-second start-up. At $69 it is a viable competitor to the Enviro-Steamer, though it lacks vacuum capacity.

If that seems too simplistic for you, you want vacuum capability, and you have a little more money to invest in something more conventionally full-service, Hoover’s H3032 FloorMate is getting positive reviews from buyers and professional reviewers alike. With a cleaning head design somewhat similar to the adjustable carpet-and-floor tool featured with its 1950s-1970s canister vacuum cleaners, the FloorMate features six scrubbing brushes covering a thirteen-inch-wide path, dial-adjustable cleaning and washing modes, clear dual tanks for solution and pickup, keeping water from getting back on the floor, and the cleaning head is removable to be cleaned after each use. The package comes with a company-made cleaning solution and sells for around $137.

The similar-looking Hoover H3060 differs in the size of its dual tanks and the fifteen-inch-wide cleaning path, plus seven scrubbing brushes, and sells for $184.

As hardwood floor vacuum cleaners go, these machines may be among the best and more economical choices for your home.