The Best Under-Appliance Dusters

In many home kitchens, the area under the stove or refrigerator is a desolate wasteland, a place that frozen peas and dust bunnies roll into and never emerge from again. Fortunately, there now exist several products that promise to clean the tight spaces under appliances, sweeping up dust and extricating those errant bits of food. We wanted to know if any of these products were worth owning, so we bought four models, priced from about $8.00 to just over $15.00, and put them to the test.

First, to get a clear picture of how well these tools worked, we built a mock refrigerator bottom according to standard specifications, using plexiglass propped up on blocks. We scattered dust, flour, dried chickpeas, and uncooked rice underneath and used the dusters to remove them; the transparent plexiglass provided good visibility so we could better track performance. To get a sense of how the dusters worked in a real-life situation, we also used them to clean under a number of appliances in our test kitchen.

Slim Pickings

A fundamental problem emerged when we went to conduct our first test: The heads of most of the dusters were simply too thick and bulky to squeeze under a standard appliance. After surveying 40 test kitchen staffers, we learned that the average height of the gap under conventional home appliances is about 1 inch. Just one of the dusters we tested was thin enough to meet that very essential requirement, rendering the others useless for most homes.

To see if any of the dusters worked in bigger gaps, we raised the height of our mock appliance bottom to 1.5 inches and tested them afresh. Though all the products could now maneuver into the space, their dimensions still proved problematic for kitchen cleanup. Most ovens and refrigerators are between 21 and 24 inches deep, but only one of the dusters—the thin model that succeeded in our first test—had a head long enough to plumb those depths. While another model had a telescoping handle attachment that made the whole unit long enough to reach back to the corners, its head was still on the short side, and it was thus less efficient at removing debris than our favorite cleaner. The other two shorter models could only jab in vain at any dust, flour, rice, or chickpeas that sat farther away from our mock appliance opening; their handles, which were too thick for the 1.5-inch opening, did nothing to extend their reach.

The Best Cleaner for Under Kitchen Appliances

With these basic failings in mind, other features that might have contributed to the dusters’ functionality, including material, duster shape, and handle comfort, became distant afterthoughts. We can fully recommend just one ... read more