Vacuums: top picks for pet hair.(Buyers guide)(Table)

Pet owners, rejoice: Now you can revel in Fido's and Fluffy's antics without fretting over their sheddings. Our first-ever pet-hair scores show which vacuums were best at whisking away embedded fur and which ones you might want to scratch from your list.

Static electricity and fineness make dog and cat hair a pesky problem for many among the roughly two-thirds of American households with pets. Fortunately, the uprights and canisters that did best at regular cleaning also tended to do best at removing pet hair from carpets in our latest tests.

A rough-and-tumble market is driving new designs and features as the humble vacuum goes high-tech. Some, such as the spinning filter inside the high-scoring Hoover WindTunnel 2 U8361-900 upright, add value--in this case, by helping to keep the filter clean. But some models still put back too much of what they pick up. The new Maytag Legacy U5185-900 upright is one of three in this report judged Not Recommended for releasing visible dust as they cleaned. (See Close Up on page 38.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Our tests of 65 models using pounds of pet hair and the equivalent of 11 miles of carpet and bare floor also revealed that some vacuum claims deliver less than meets the eye. Here are the details:

Tame pet-hair performer. Dyson touts its $570 DC14 Animal upright as "the most powerful upright for pet hair." While that claim is based on upholstery, the DC14 was one of seven uprights in this report to score only fair or poor at removing hair from carpets. Our initial tests of the new DC17 Animal yielded better results. But at $550, it's high on price.

No corner on cleanliness. Bissell says its new $300 Healthy Home 5770 upright traps and seals 100 percent of dust mites, pollen, ragweed, and mold spores. The Bissell aced our emissions test, which measures more minute particles. But so did eight higher-scoring uprights.