Choose the type of carpet cleaner to suit your house. Shampoo cleaners tend to be big and heavy, but they’re the best way to lift spills, deep stains or ingrained dirt from soft floor coverings in a single room – or even a whole house. A spot cleaner is for sucking up smaller spills, or dealing with localised staining; you can’t clean a whole carpet with one. Neither type is usually designed to clean hard floors. Steam cleaners are great at cleaning hard floors, and you can usually turn them to all sorts of other jobs such as window or oven cleaning. They’ll do a decent job of lifting dirt from carpets, but it may take more work, and the carpet could end up pretty damp. If you have a mix of floor coverings, however, they could be ideal.