Hi all, we’ve been debating what to call the vacuum test portion where we do a quick vacuum (4 strokes and measure dirt removal from carpet) and a more thorough/complete/full clean (10 strokes and measure dirt removal from carpet). What of these make more sense to you?
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Add test to the end eg Full Carpet Clean Test or perhaps Thorough Carpet Clean Result??
Complete to me suggests something like a Steam Clean or a similar process rather than just a vacuum result. Of course others may get the same meaning from full or thorough depending on their usage of the tricky english language 
Maybe “Carpet Cleaning Thoroughness” or “Dirt Removal Effectiveness” or again something along those lines.
Note that we are only looking for votes on what to call the full/complete/thorough clean test. We are still sticking with “quick clean test” for the 4 strokes.
Ahh Thank you for clarifying as your initial post actually references both the 4 and 10 pass tests.
Perhaps then the “10 pass effectiveness test”
“Intensive Clean”? because after 10 passes over my carpets I would be in intensive care 
Complete would mean removing the carpet and replacing it with tiles or timber - to me the only way to properly clean carpet 
And avoids that red dirt staining when the tiles or timber are used.
My tiles are about that colour, so it’s like a top-coat. I do give the floor a vac once a month or so, whether it needs it or not … mop every 6 months. The 5 second rule doesn’t come into play since I have a 5 millisecond cat !
Back on topic - is a single stroke defined as up and back ie a single advance and retract motion, or is that two strokes? and either way, does anyone really give it 4 strokes over the full area for just a normal clean? or would it be more 4 strokes over a zigzag pattern? I think if it needed 10 strokes over the whole area it would be worth calling in a professional. I’m exhausted just thinking about it … glad I have very little carpet …
Your stated options @MattSteen are all open to subjective interpretations. Thorough implies that you have done it several times. It does not indicate 10 times to me. What @grahroll suggested for complete is what came to mind for me with ‘full’, that is using vacuum and then steam or some such. Complete to me means doing it over and over until there is nothing left to clean out.
I agree with @draughtrider, the term stroke is not clear. I though in terms of a vehicle’s stroke which is a full cycle there and back. Perhaps it would be clearer if it were ‘10 passes’?
Quick vacuum - 4 strokes? Does someone have OCD? 
What happened to a single pass? Perhaps two at the most. That is what most people would do when vacuuming. That is what a quick vacuum means to me.
Why not just call them ‘4 pass vacuum test’ and ‘10 pass vacuum test’? Then there is no misunderstanding.
I would be interested to know if there are any significant differences in ranking of machines on the two tests. My guess is that high performance on one would mean high performance on the other. If that is so what difference does it make what you call it, just save time and do 4.
I have what I call a “traffic areas” vac - which amounts to “if you cant see it or walk on it, then it must be clean”. I prefer not to wear spectacles when performing this operation, as it complicates matters 
Thanks - I couldn’t put my finger on why stroke seemed ambiguous - this is why. The difference between interpretations is 100% error. Perhaps something simple to say “4 passes, where for the avoidance of doubt a pass is defined as a single unidirectional non-return traversal of a given area to be vacuumed”
‘Pass’ seems simple enough. When stroking the cat it is a single pass in one direction. Usually only once after which the cat has left. In sport a stroke is a complete cycle back to the beginning. I’d guess cat lovers are more likely to Hoover than sports people.
Depending on the surface our vacuum is used on the method varies. Many carpets (we only have rugs) are a push only so the method is more a lift or glide loosely back to start again. Some hard surfaces are cleaned pushing and pulling. Others it is more a slow push and quick return. The other one of us finds exerting force when pulling more awkward so tends to work away and forwards mostly. A count of uni directional strokes is therefore easier to relate too.
So there is a single stroke test, a four stroke test, a ten stroke test, and the stress test after counting how many lots of ten it will need to vacuum the entire room. While partly off topic, if the surface is not clean after two single passes, is that not a fail for the product?
Most practical vacuuming is done with the head removed, cleaning up those hard to get to places, sucking up the ashes from in front of the wood stove, and when I’m not around seeking retribution from spiders and Asian house geckos. The geckos are ahead since none of our vacuums can reach to the ceiling. Noted Choice does not test for effectiveness in that application.
Why not say carpet vacuum instead of carpet clean… then it doesn’t really matter which of the descriptive words you start with.
I think a a test using 10 strokes is completely unrealistic. Who does that when they clean the floor? For matter, who passes the vacuum cleaner over the same spot 4 times? I would suggest a representative test of a vacuum cleaner’s performance would be 1 stroke, with perhaps a back up “thorough” test of two strokes.
There have been comments on the 4 and 10 stroke test being unrealistic, but a test is not necessarily realistic, it is meant to and needs to be able to separate the good from the indifferent from the bad.
Realistically one of the issues is that a single pass might separate the vacs by micrograms of dirt rather than grams of dirt. Using multiple passes picks up sufficient dirt to differentiate the products using more common measuring devices. The more the superficial distribution of dirt is taken up the more the test ‘assesses’ deeper extraction, so the differences between 4 and 10 tell something useful.
The tester has to mitigate as many variables as possible including the amount and dispersion of dirt on the carpet, the speed of motion over the carpet, and the number of forward-backward strokes. With all of those metrics in a controlled test the vacs can be reasonably ranked as to which got out the most dirt.
Googling shows that few of us probably use optimal vac techniques, and what the optimal techniques are seem to be arguable. However one vacuums a vac that gets out more dirt on the tests is likely (but not guaranteed) to perform better no matter how one vacuums, and that is the purpose of a test.
Who on earth would ever go over one area 10 times? Is that in one secession or over a month?
It might be interesting to measure this using sensitive lab equipment on a per-stroke basis to determine how linear the removal of dirt actually is - given I imagine there are a number of factors that influence this - raw vacuum ‘power’, the manner in which the head beats or massages the carpet, and the type of carpet itself - natural fibre or not, depth, etc. I’m imagining a scenario, purely fictitious, where model A might achieve 80% removal after 1 pass and 90% removal after 10 passes, vs model B that might achieve 60% removal after 1 pass but 95% removal after 10, for a given definition of pass and a given carpet type. Might be nonsense, but who’s to say?
It might also be interesting to perform the measurements by adding a known amount of ‘dirt’ to produce a known weight of carpet+dirt and measure the residual weight of the carpet post stroke rather than simply weighing the dirt that was removed … in an ideal world they would balance, but …
For those who have not wandered into the ‘how we did it’ -
To me it is none of the above! Even 10 strokes is only a partial /quick carpet clean.
I would do just two strokes if I was vacuuming. (i.e. back and forth twice).
Agree! It starts to sound like condom sizes!
