For those times when fine dust and stuck-on scuffs, stains and grime mar your wood, ceramic, laminate and vinyl plank floors, what you need is a good mop.

It can reach high enough temperatures to kill bacteria on hard floors in places that may need more attention like bathroom floors and pet areas. Also, steam mops should never be used on any unsealed, peeling, glued or unfinished floors and even though mop manufacturers claim it is safe, we caution against using them on wood and laminate floors, too, even on the lowest steam settings. The dry cloth has deep ridges and grooves that conform to the surface of your floor to trap and lock dirt, dust and hair, while the wet cloth dissolves dirt and grime and traps it away giving you an amazing clean. Few hardwood floors are in perfectly sealed condition and if steam seeps under the finish, it can damage them. While it does offer more control than steamers that continuously pump out steam, we still don't recommend any steam mop for use on hardwood or laminate floors.There's an attachment that snaps on to help freshen carpets, though we've never found these to be particularly useful or effective on any steamer we've tested. To grab any pet hair and dust bunnies before wet mopping, start Braava Jet out in dry-sweeping mode and the electrostatic pad will pick up the debris. Manual spin mops provide 360 degrees of floor cleaning and are easy to maneuver into tight spaces and corners. To keep the sponge intact, it must be used with a non-bleach cleaner applied to the floor or diluted in a bucket. We evaluate how easy the pads, mop heads and cleaner bottles are to attach, remove, replace and, where appropriate, refill.

This Swiffer Sweeper is safe for all floor surfaces and, because the head pivots and locks at 90º, it can even be used to dust vertical surfaces like walls. We especially like that the cleaning solution only dispenses when you press the trigger, so you have better control over how wet the floor gets — a real plus when cleaning hardwood.Steam mop: If you’re looking to kill germs on your floors without the use of cleaning solutions, a steam mop is the answer. Wet mopping with the Swiffer is as easy as dry dusting, however, the wet cloths can dry out if left unused for too long and a second wet cloth may be necessary to finish especially large jobs. Thanks to a scraper on the brush roll cover, the brush roll gets cleaned as the vacuum moves forward, ensuring that messes don't build up and get re-deposited further along on your cleaning path. while the wet cloth makes the best wet floor cleaner as it dissolves dirt and grime and traps it away giving you an amazing clean. The mop head is taco-shaped, so it not only cleans flat surfaces with your favorite spray floor cleaner, but it squeezes into narrow spaces, like between the refrigerator and the wall, or around the toilet.

Most are rechargeable, have separate clean and dirty water tanks and mop floors by dispensing a cleaning solution onto the floor via a spinning microfiber brush roll.Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. Even if your home is covered in wall-to-wall carpeting, you likely have bare floors in the kitchen, bathrooms and other areas that need both dry and wet cleaning. While there’s no exact time frame for when to replace a mop, a good rule of thumb is to check its condition regularly and — depending on how often you use it — replace the mop head or pads at least once or twice yearly. Swiffer has long been a GH Seal star and favorite of the GH Cleaning Lab for how well its disposable cloths grab and trap the fine dust other tools miss and its ability to reach under low-profile furniture where most vacuums can't go.

In fact, we like to say that when Swiffer was introduced over 25 years ago, it changed the way Americans clean, making it easy to mop floors whenever you had a few spare minutes. The package includes two dry-dusting and two wet-mopping microfiber pads that were easy to attach and washed well in our tests. Swiffer WetJet: The mop holds a bottle of cleaning solution distributed onto the floor through a battery-operated dual-nozzle sprayer. If you’re in doubt, be sure to check with the flooring brand as some types of mops, such as steam mops, can void the warranty if the floor gets damaged from it. Self-cleaning models are the easiest to maintain and most have app connections, multiple cleaning modes and voice prompts to guide you.Carolyn Forté brings more than 40 years of experience as a consumer products expert to her role as executive director of the Good Housekeeping Institute's Home Care and Cleaning Lab. The microfiber pads are easy to attach, have scrubbing fibers to remove stuck-on grime and hold up well to washing while the cleaning formula dissolved dirt and dried stains quickly, easily and safely. She meets regularly with floor care industry experts to develop testing standards for appliances like steam mops, robot mops and more.