The best handheld vacuum cleaner for pet hair

You have to ask yourself sometimes. Is the best handheld vacuum cleaner for pet hair really as good as all the magazines say? After thousands of requests from pet owners who want to end the ubiquity of summer pet fur as easily as possible, a blue-ribbon consumer panel was formed to address this same problem.

After years of analyzing the data, it was finally determined that the best handheld vacuum cleaner for pet hair depends on several things: price, inactivity and specificity. Here are three of the best models.

Black & Decker manufactures the Pivot Vac which was the best cordless vacuum cleaner in Consumer Reports' tests. It picks up debris from various levels of roughness, and the battery holds a charge long enough to do real work on it. Folds flat for storage in a wall charger and has a nozzle with 10 pivoting positions. It's roughly double that of the next best pet portable vacuum cordless, but it also comes with a two-year warranty, which is double that of other brands.

The Shark SV736 costs approximately half that of the Black & Decker. It has a motorized brush that does a good job of lifting pets' hair. It also has a washable filter, a charge indicator and a tool to reach the cracks.
The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser is not wireless, but the cord is 16 feet long, so you can move around with it and not worry about the dead battery. It weighs 4 pounds. And it works well to remove debris from hard, carpeted surfaces. It has two nozzles and a washable HEPA filter.