Watch enough television, and you may start thinking cleaning your house can be a breeze with the "right tools." TV commercials and infomercials are touting all sorts of products to help you get the job done. But before you spend a dime, Consumer Reports ShopSmart has the 411.
Sick of spending time cleaning? Or –– want sparkling windows, without a lot of effort?
Bernie Deitrick/Consumer Reports: "Many cleaning products claim to do a great job with little work, but do they really?"
Consumer Reports' tester Bernie Deitrick rounded up some of the more heavily advertised cleaning products to see how they work. Take this $15 Smart Mop.
It did do a fine job cleaning floors, but when you try and wring it out by twisting the handles, the pole can slip.
Then you could end up having to use your hands to get out the excess water!
The $15 Perfect Squeegee was also less-than-perfect!
Bernie Deitrick: "But the pad also stops the blade from getting into deep corners."
For about $40, the Deluxe Hi-Reach Cleaning kit, with its flexible dusting head, helps you clean some pretty "hard to reach" places, as promised. But the head often popped off.
And flexing eventually led to breaking.
The best money spent was the six bucks on the Fuzzy Wuzzy Microfiber Mitt. It's double-sided, so you can sweep over screens with ease and then turn it to tackle other dusting jobs.
And because you wear it, it single-handedly can make at least one cleaning job a breeze.
Plus, the Fuzzy Wuzzy is machine washable. Keep in mind that although Consumer Reports found it worked, the Fuzzy Wuzzy was no more effective than other products you can use to dust furniture and clean computer screens.
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