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The best upholstery cleaners of 2024 can tackle all your toughest stains
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Is your furniture looking a little worse for the wear these days? Kids spill food, and drinks and pets inevitably make messes. And there’s always going to be regular dirt, dust, and other debris from the rest of the family floating around. It’s time to revitalize your couch, your cushions, and the rest of your home now that spring has arrived with the best upholstery cleaners of 2024.
You can add your new upholstery cleaner to your home refresh hall of fame — next to your stick vacuum, your electric scrubber, your robot vacuum (or mop!) and all those cleaning supplies. With one of these bad boys, you’ll be ready to tackle just about any mess, whether it’s wine on white fabric or a baby blowout in a recliner. To help you make a buying decision when it comes to which dirt and grime-busting cleaning appliance is right for you, we’ve compiled five of the best options below.
The best upholstery cleaners for 2024
Dirt Devil Portable Spot compact carpet cleaner: $66
Amazon
This affordable cleaner is one of the best on the market, and it’s deceptively simple to set up. It can cut through food stains, set-in grime, pet messes, and much more, no matter where.
It’s a small unit that’s easily ported from place to place at just 11 pounds, and comes with a 19-ounce tank that you can refill quickly when you’re dealing with larger messes. It’s smaller than many of its other, more expensive brethren, but you won’t need that much solution when mixing. It’s the perfect amount for the kind of soiled upholstery most users will be dealing with.
It’s relatively quiet, comes with several tools to use for smaller nooks and crannies, and when you’re done with it, you can put it in a small cabinet or tuck it away under a shelf.
It’s small but mighty, and it’s perfect for those who live alone or have small families. Most importantly, it’s powerful, and it’ll handle whatever you need it to for less.
Bissell Little Green Machine upholstery cleaner: $98
Amazon
This TikTok-famous carpet cleaner is attractively shaped and a pleasant green — that’s where it gets its name from, after all. And it’s an impressive cleaner that can power through some of the most stubborn stains around. Wine, chocolate, pasta sauce, you name it — the Bissell Little Green Machine can handle it all.
This small but mighty cleaner is great for handling any type of fabric, even your car interior. It’s portable and lightweight, and comes with a specialty hose tool and crevice tool to help you reach those more difficult places. It also has a large 48-ounce tank so you don’t have to refill as often.
You can tote this cleaner around to anywhere in your home without breaking a sweat, and use it on carpet, rugs, stairs and more. All you need to do to attack difficult or old grime and dirt is use the tough stain tool or go over things with multiple passes. This little devil will be finished with the task before you know it.
Hoover CleanSlate XL deep-cleaning spot carpet cleaner: $178
Amazon
Love your pets, but not their messes? You’re not alone. That’s why Hoover’s CleanSlate XL machine exists. It boasts a massive 96-ounce tank this isn’t afraid to let you unleash (pun intended) on all the stains left behind by eager pups and cats who either knock their food into the floor or have accidents.
This machine is simple to set up and performs like a workhorse. It also has several different types of tools to tackle different messes, like brushes for chunkier stains and pet hair, with smaller tools to clean crevices and less noticeable stains.
You can’t roll it around — there are no wheels — but this cleaner is light enough to pick up and move from place to place. It’s a little loud too, but these minuses pale in comparison to how annoying things can be when you have no way to clean up after animals.
This machine will give you a satisfying deep clean that’ll make you forget you even have pets.
McCulloch Heavy-Duty steam cleaner: $150
Amazon
Sometimes, a mess is in dire need of not just cleaning, but sanitization. That’s where this heavy-duty steam cleaner comes in. It can deliver a natural, deep clean using hot steam to blast through grime, grease, dirt, stains, and much more.
It’s a massive unit with a 48-ounce water tank that can heat up in just 8 minutes to give you 45 minutes of steam-cleaning power. Scrub down tough and stubborn stain areas and switch over to this bad boy, or just approach your worst messes for a deep scrub.
You get 18 accessories as well as a 15.7-foot power cord and a nine-foot steam hose to reach all those areas that normally elude your grasp. Time to tackle all those messes with some serious panache.
Bissell Little Green Pro carpet and upholstery cleaner: $165
Amazon
Is your new car’s upholstery in need of cleaning and you don’t feel like taking it to be detailed? DIY a deep clean with this handy little carpet and upholstery cleaner. As one of Bissell’s most powerful spot cleaner, it can tackle grease, grime, and any other suspect stains.
While you can of course use it to scrub down carpets, sofas, stairs, and other areas in your home, it really shines as a great option to clean your car. It’s good at digging up embedded dirt, so it can cut through grime in your floorboards, or your seats — even the roof if you need it to. You’ll be left with a nice, polished scent and look when done.
Use the deep stain tool and other included goodies to make your car look and ffeel brand new again, and then take this small but mighty cleaner inside to handle all the rest of your other messes. It even comes with small trial-size bottles to get you started.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday vetoed a landmark bill aimed at establishing first-in-the-nation safety measures for large artificial intelligence models.
The decision is a major blow to efforts attempting to rein in the homegrown industry that is rapidly evolving with little oversight. The bill would have established some of the first regulations on large-scale AI models in the nation and paved the way for AI safety regulations across the country, supporters said.
Earlier this month, the Democratic governor told an audience at Dreamforce, an annual conference hosted by software giant Salesforce, that California must lead in regulating AI in the face of federal inaction but that the proposal “can have a chilling effect on the industry.”
The proposal, which drew fierce opposition from startups, tech giants and several Democratic House members, could have hurt the homegrown industry by establishing rigid requirements, Newsom said.
“While well-intentioned, SB 1047 does not take into account whether an AI system is deployed in high-risk environments, involves critical decision-making or the use of sensitive data,” Newsom said in a statement. “Instead, the bill applies stringent standards to even the most basic functions — so long as a large system deploys it. I do not believe this is the best approach to protecting the public from real threats posed by the technology.”
Newsom on Sunday instead announced that the state will partner with several industry experts, including AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, to develop guardrails around powerful AI models. Li opposed the AI safety proposal.
The measure, aimed at reducing potential risks created by AI, would have required companies to test their models and publicly disclose their safety protocols to prevent the models from being manipulated to, for example, wipe out the state’s electric grid or help build chemical weapons. Experts say those scenarios could be possible in the future as the industry continues to rapidly advance. It also would have provided whistleblower protections to workers.
The legislation is among a host of bills passed by the Legislature this year to regulate AI, fight deepfakes and protect workers. State lawmakers said California must take actions this year, citing hard lessons they learned from failing to rein in social media companies when they might have had a chance.
Proponents of the measure, including Elon Musk and Anthropic, said the proposal could have injected some levels of transparency and accountability around large-scale AI models, as developers and experts say they still don’t have a full understanding of how AI models behave and why.
The bill targeted systems that require more than $100 million to build. No current AI models have hit that threshold, but some experts said that could change within the next year.
“This is because of the massive investment scale-up within the industry,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in April over what he saw as the company’s disregard for AI risks. “This is a crazy amount of power to have any private company control unaccountably, and it’s also incredibly risky.”
The United States is already behind Europe in regulating AI to limit risks. The California proposal wasn’t as comprehensive as regulations in Europe, but it would have been a good first step to set guardrails around the rapidly growing technology that is raising concerns about job loss, misinformation, invasions of privacy and automation bias, supporters said.
A number of leading AI companies last year voluntarily agreed to follow safeguards set by the White House, such as testing and sharing information about their models. The California bill would have mandated AI developers to follow requirements similar to those commitments, said the measure’s supporters.
But critics, including former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued that the bill would “kill California tech” and stifle innovation. It would have discouraged AI developers from investing in large models or sharing open-source software, they said.
Newsom’s decision to veto the bill marks another win in California for big tech companies and AI developers, many of whom spent the past year lobbying alongside the California Chamber of Commerce to sway the governor and lawmakers from advancing AI regulations.
Two other sweeping AI proposals, which also faced mounting opposition from the tech industry and others, died ahead of a legislative deadline last month. The bills would have required AI developers to label AI-generated content and ban discrimination from AI tools used to make employment decisions.
Some residents east of Atlanta were evacuated while others were told to shelter in place to avoid contact with a chemical plume after a fire at a chemical plant.
Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDaniel told reporters that a sprinkler head malfunctioned around 5 a.m. Sunday at the BioLab plant in Conyers. That caused water to mix with a water-reactive chemical, which produced a plume of chemicals. The chief said she wasn’t sure what chemicals were included.
A small roof fire was initially contained, but reignited Sunday afternoon, Sheriff Eric Levett said in a video posted on Facebook as gray smoke billowed into the sky behind him. He said authorities were trying to get the fire under control and urged people to stay away from the area.
People in the northern part of Rockdale County were ordered to evacuate and others were told to shelter in place with windows and doors closed. Sheriff’s office spokesperson Christine Nesbitt did not know the number of people evacuated.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division were both on site, county Emergency Management Director Sharon Webb said. The agencies are monitoring the air “to give us more of an idea of what the plume consists of.”
McDaniel said crews were working on removing the chemical from the building, away from the water source. Once the product is contained, the situation will be assessed and officials will let residents know whether it is safe to return to their homes, she said.
An evacuation center was opened at Wolverine Gym in Covington.
Washington — Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will face off on Tuesday in the first and only vice presidential debate of the cycle, as the two candidates look to prop up the Republican and Democratic tickets with fewer than 40 days until Election Day.
The debate, hosted by CBS News at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City, will be moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” moderator and CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan.
Here’s what to know about how the candidates are preparing for the debate:
How JD Vance is preparing for the VP debate
The Ohio Republican has been preparing for the debate for more than a month, a source directly involved told CBS News, including with “murder board” sessions with a small team that includes Vance’s wife and his advisers, along with senior Trump adviser Jason Miller.
Among Vance’s main focuses during the preparation has been studying Walz’ debate style and policy record, the source said, noting that Vance will attempt to highlight what he sees as the Minnesota governor’s left-wing views during the debate.
Vance told reporters last week that his plan is to break down what the Trump-Vance administration would do to make “life better” and connect that to policy.
“So, we’re studying up as much as we can on the issues that matter to the American people, and I’m looking forward to it,” Vance said.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Republican, is standing in for Walz during Vance’s debate prep, four sources familiar with the preparations told CBS News. Emmer and Walz have deep roots in Minnesota and are close in age.
Emmer told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he’s known Walz for decades and has spent the last month working to “get his phrases down, his mannerisms.”
“My job was to be able to play Tim Walz so JD Vance knows what he’s going to see,” Emmer said.
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How Tim Walz is preparing for the VP debate
Walz has been preparing for the debate with a close team of advisers, a source familiar with the preparations told CBS News. Some of the people involved also helped Vice President Kamala Harris take on former President Donald Trump, among others, like a long-time aid to Walz who worked with him during his bids for governor.
For Walz, whose name recognition was until recently limited outside of Minnesota, the focus is on continuing to introduce himself to the American people, according to the source. He’ll also work to highlight Harris’ vision for the nation’s path forward.
“You’ll hear me talk like I have about things that impact Americans, making sure they have the opportunity to thrive, making sure that we’re being factual in how we talk about that,” Walz told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow of the debate earlier this month. “And so I’m looking forward to it. I’ll work hard, that’s what I do.”
During debate prep, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is standing in for Vance, a campaign official familiar with the preparation told CBS News. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also assisted Harris during her debate prep in 2020, and is close in age to Vance.
When and how to watch the presidential debate
Debate coverage on CBS News 24/7 begins at 4 p.m. ET, with the debate getting underway at 9 p.m. ET on Oct. 1.
The 90-minute debate will be streamed on CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ across all available platforms and CBSNews.com. The debate will also be simulcast across other broadcast and cable networks.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes first-in-nation AI safety bill
Residents in Georgia ordered to evacuate or shelter in place after fire at chemical plant
Israeli airstrikes kill dozens across Lebanon as Hezbollah confirms a 7th top commander was killed
California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoes first-in-nation AI safety bill