Verdict

Pros

• Large clean-water tank
• Effective stain wand
• Good drying suction
• Handy accessories bag
• Folding handle

Cons

• Excessive carpet pilling damage
• Clean tank is 2.6l and a faff to fill
• Cumbersome; not easy to steer
• Cleaning solution poor
• Failed stain test
• Filter spits dirty water

What is the Hoover CleanJet Volume CJ930T?

Hoover’s Cleanjet Volume CJ930T is available for under £100 but promises to pack a big cleaning punch. It features a 900W motor, good-sized cleaning head, enormous tanks, rotating brush bar and a stain wand. Thanks to a folding handle, its easy to set-up, carry and store too.

Carpet cleaning performance is okay and the stain wand works well, but there are issues. Its cumbersome to navigate, the waste filter spits out dirty water, and the main floorhead demonstrated excessive carpet pilling. It’s fine for a one-off spruce-up of your carpets, but not a great choice for regular shampooing.

Related: Best carpet cleaner

Hoover CleanJet Volume CJ930T – Design and features

Straight out of the box, the Cleanjet Volume is a formidable-looking carpet cleaner. Its large size rather suggests more mass than its not-too-bad 7kg dry weight, and the tanks are properly huge. This is a machine well suited to whole-house cleaning duties, not just buffing a rug or two.

Setup is blissfully simple: it involves simply unfolding the handle. The handle folds down again with ease, making storage straghtforward, and reveals a carrying handle.

The floorhead itself is long and features a 25cm rotating brush bar. Spray jets are aft of the brush and the same sort of width. This means you need to squeeze the trigger to supply solution on the forward stroke and release on the backstroke.

The main clean-water tank is huge. The claimed capacity of 4.5 litres is available only if you ignore the MAX fill line half-way up. Adhere to that fill limit and it will hold 2.6 litres. This remains a good size; but filling isn’t without its challenges.

You remove the tank, flip it upside down and then unscrew the main valve connector. You then need to pull out the valve and tube before filling. Re-assembly is the reverse, but you must ensure the valve and sealing rubber go back perfectly square. If not, fluid leaks everywhere when you turn the tank back over to fit it to the machine. Still, at least we had a carpet shampooer handy to clean up the spill.

The dirty tank is considerably smaller, although just about the right size to match one full tank of clean solution. It lifts from the front of the machine with ease and a simple screw-cap affords emptying. There are two filters to clean. A small plastic mesh basket that pulls from the body when the tank is removed, and a foam filter in the top of the waste tank.

Just behind the waste tank is the connection for the hose and tool, or – as Hoover refers to it – the stain wand. Fitting the hose is easy enough, although you do need to remember to close the cover flap when removed.

Build quality across the main cleaner is plasticky but relatively solid. The main brush bar isn’t easy to remove for cleaning, although it can be taken apart with a screwdriver. Only the stain wand lets the build-quality side down, being rather fragile feeling and poorly painted plastic.

Hoover CleanJet Volume CJ930T – Accessories

In addition to main floor shampooing duties, the CJ930T’s stain wand is attached to a flexible and decent length 2.5-metre hose.

One end of the hose plugs into the port on the floorhead, while the stain wand at the other features a short-handled brush with spray trigger. A clear, turquoise-coloured plastic vacuum nozzle mirrors the design of the main floorhead. The brush part can be removed for ease of cleaning, too.

The trigger sprays your cleaning solution in a wide arc, which you then agitate into the carpet with the fairly stiff brush. As you do this, the vacuum nozzle sucks up the dirty water. These tools are great for spot-cleaning and stains, as they allow you to put plenty of effort into scrubbing deep into the carpet.

Hoover supplies a 600ml bottle of CleanJet Cleaning Solution, but it won’t go far at the recommended solution rate of 40ml per litre. That’s about 100ml per clean tank, give or take a few millilitres. So this bottle is good for only six tanks of cleaning. It does have a pleasant and subtle perfumed smell, though.

The CleanJet Volume is fitted with a nicely long 8.1-metre cable providing plenty of reach, and comes with a mesh bag in which to store the accessories.

Hoover Cleanjet Volume CJ930T – How does it clean?

The main power switch is a foot pedal near the tilt lever. It’s easy enough to access when the cleaner is upright, but does require some Fred Astaire footwork when the cleaner is tilted over.

The business-like look of this Hoover is backed up by the roar of its potent 900W motor. It’s very loud. At 85dB, it’s right on the limit of what a carpet cleaning professional would be allowed to use without ear defenders.

The weight and size with a full water tank make the CJ930T quite a beast to move around the house, too. At close to 10kg wet, it isn’t a shampooer with which you can easily jog up the stairs. Flat on the carpet, those large rear wheels help it roll, but there’s plenty of suck-down drag to overcome. The sheer distance between the wheels and the business end of the floorhead make it quite an effort to steer and navigate.

Out on our cream hallway carpet, our initial impressions were good. All that noise and bluster does a good surface-cleaning job and the suction left the carpet reasonably dry. Yet, as we continued, we began noticing little balls of carpet fluff appearing.

Carpet shampooers can be quite tough on your carpets, as damp fibres tend to stick to moving brushes. All shampooers do it to an extent, but the Hoover is a serious offender. Little balls of fibres were beginning to appear all over the areas we were cleaning. This clearly isn’t a shampooer you’d want to use too often; you’d certainly risk long-term carpet damage.

Moving to the challenging red-wine spill, cleaning with the main floorhead was a little underwhelming. Three passes saw the liquid wine sucked up but the stain was still clearly visible.

Cleaning for a minute, repeating the back and forth action, did start to make an impression. The stain was fading noticeably. However, the number of fibre balls appearing in the area was quite alarming. We carried on for a few more minutes to see if the cleaner could completely shift the stain, but there were still some obviously visible marks remaining.

Strangely, the wood flooring nearby was speckled with water spots. Froth and dirty water was bubbling out of the filter on the top of the waste tank, even though the waste was only quarter-full. It wasn’t a lot of fluid spat out, but certainly enough to be annoying. Very much so if your waste tank is holding very dirty water.

We connected the stain wand tool – ideal for spillages such as red wine. The tool itself is easy to use and its spray is generous, so a little caution is required not to over-saturate the carpet. We put in some elbow grease, scrubbing away at the stain and respraying, but we never managed to get rid of the wine mark completely.

Given the manual agitation and good suction power from the stain wand, we rather suspect poor cleaning solution is part of this failure. To prove our own theory, we set the Hoover up with Rug Doctor detergent and it managed to get rid of the stain completely.

Why buy the Hoover CleanJet Volume CJ930T

It’s cheap, offers plenty powerful suction and comes with a stain wand for spot cleaning, but there’s little else to recommend the Hoover CleanJet Volume CJ930T. It’s noisy, cumbersome to manoeuvre, spits out dirty water, and delivers only passable cleaning results in the process. The stain wand worked to an extent, but the supplied carpet shampoo was far from the best, resulting in so-so stain removal.

More concerning is the tenacity with which the floorhead’s rotating brush bar pills up balls of fibres from the carpet. Most carpet shampooers will pull a few fibres, but the Hoover is by far the worst offender we’ve tested. For a one-off clean this isn’t a major issue, but ifyou intend to use the CleanJet Volume regularly, this level of carpet damage is unacceptable.

Verdict

This low-cost carpet cleaner offers fair cleaning, but it’s cumbersome to use and damaging carpet fibre pilling is excessive.

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