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A great little spot cleaner, the Vax SpotWash Home Duo comes with dual tools, so you can tackle less hygienic messes separately from regular spot-cleaning jobs. It’s powerful, simple to use and compact, making it a great addition to all households, but particularly those with pets.

A spot cleaner is great option for dealing with minor day-to-day stains, rather than having to pull out a full carpet cleaner. While most work in a similar fashion, the Vax SpotWash Home Duo comes with two sets of tools: one for dealing with messy stains, with the other for more regular dirt.

For anyone who’s had to deal with pet mess and the like, this inclusion will certainly appeal. Lightweight, easy to use and powerful, this is a great little spot cleaner for practically all jobs.

Smartly designed, the Vax SpotWash Home Duo is compact and easy to store. Its hose wraps around the main body, the tools all fit into the provided accessory bag, and the long (5.5m) power cable wraps up neatly. At just 4.5kg, this small spot washer is easy to carry to the area that requires addressing, and the long hose meant that I could mostly use it without having to pick up the main unit.

As with most spot washers, including the company’s own Vax ONEPWR Spotless Go, this model features two water tanks. First is the 1.1-litre clean tank, which holds a combination of cleaning fluid and water. Handy fill levels for small and large areas help you achieve the correct mix of cleaning solution to water.

The second tank is where all the dirty water from cleaning collects. With a 0.72-litre capacity, this tank is a little smaller than the clean water unit, so you may have to empty it part way through a long clean. To prevent accidents, the SpotWash Home Duo has a float in the tank to seal it when it’s full.

The most notable difference between this spot cleaner and others is that the SpotWash Home Duo arrives with two floor heads. The Extra Wide 2-in-1 Wash Tool is designed for most of your cleaning jobs; the smaller Messy Clean Tool is for those unsavoury jobs, such as cleaning up pet mess, for example. 

The addition of an extra set of tools for messy cleaning is a good idea, because there won’t be many who will be happy to use the same floorhead they’ve used to clean up pet mess for spot cleaning a stain on their expensive sofa.

Note that while the heads can be used without attachments for sucking up any mess, they both come with inserts: carpet/upholstery and hard floor brushes for the wide tool, and a carpet/upholstery brush for the smaller tool. These feature an anti-microbial finish, which helps prevent fungal growth. It’s a coating that Vax uses on its other products, too, such as the Vax ONEPWR Edge Dual Pet & Car vacuum cleaner.

You’ll also find a thin crevice tool brush in the box, designed to get right into the corners and edges of a room.

Using the Vax SpotWash Home Duo couldn’t be easier. With cleaning fluid filled and an attachment fitted, a single button turns the cleaner on. A trigger gently releases cleaning fluid to saturate the area being tackled, while you rub the cleaning head over the stain to remove dirt.

Vax includes a 250ml starter bottle of antibacterial cleaning fluid in the box, which will be sufficient for a few cleans. One-litre bottles of standard cleaner cost £9.99, with the same-sized antibacterial version costing £12.99. 

Thanks to the clear heads, you will be able to see the dirt coming out of the carpet. When the liquid runs clear, you’ll know that all the dirt has been lifted.

Once you’ve completed a clean, the clean tank should be emptied and the dirty tank washed out. The cleaning heads come apart nicely so they can be cleaned under a tap, too.

To test the Vax SpotWash Home Duo, I put it through a few tests, starting on carpet. Here, I stained the flooring with ketchup and mud, leaving both patches to dry in.

Starting with the ketchup stain, I used the wide head with the carpet tool, generously saturating the stain with cleaning fluid, and thereafter sucking up the mess.

It took some gentle scrubbing and a couple of goes using the stain-removing fluid to lift the dirt, leaving the carpet as good as new.

Removing the mud stain was even quicker. This required only a small quantity of cleaning fluid, and a gentle pass over the top to remove all the dirt.

What about hard floors? Here, the Vax SpotWash Home Duo was more useful for cleaning up wet messes. For example, a spilt glass of water or drink, or any pet mess. While the hard floor attachment does offer a degree of cleaning ability, I found that a dedicated steam cleaner or hard floor cleaner was better for most types of stain.

At 79dB, the Vax SpotWash Home Duo is quite loud in use. As such, I placed the body as far away from me as possible while cleaning.

If you need to tidy up after pets, the dual tools here are a bonus, delivering attachments for “dirty” and “clean” jobs.

Need to tackle a larger area? A full carpet cleaner will make more sense.

The Vax SpotWash Home Duo is similar to many other spot cleaners, but the inclusion of a two sets of tools, for “dirty” and “clean” jobs, makes this cleaner particularly well suited to anyone who may have to deal with more filthy mess. Powerful all-round cleaning, packed into a compact body, makes this spot cleaner a winner.

Unlike other sites, we test every carpet cleaner we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.

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Tested with real-world dirt in real-world situations for fair comparisons with other carpet cleaners

Both are similar, but the Vax SpotWash Home Duo has a wider main tool.

Yes, but it’s worth testing a small patch in discreet area to ensure the cleaning fluid won’t cause any problems.

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Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.

We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.

Products tested and reviewed since 2003