The Couch That Stopped Looking Furry

The couch was tan when we bought it. It is still tan, technically, but it now wears a grey undercoat that comes off on everything, and that undercoat is Biscuit. He is a 7-year-old mixed-breed rescue, about 30 pounds, and he sheds more than the county shelter warned us about. Juniper, our short-haired tabby, adds a fine layer of her own on the one cushion she has claimed as hers. I vacuum. I have tried the sticky sheets. I have tried the rubber glove trick that goes around the internet. None of it fixed the couch. It just moved the hair around.

What finally worked was not a cleaning project. It was a small plastic tool I bought this past summer and left on the end table so I would actually reach for it. The ChomChom Roller is a manual pet hair remover, 7.5 inches wide and 7.5 tall and 2.5 deep, a bit under 7 ounces, with a handle you grip and a chamber that holds what you pull up. No tape, no adhesive sheets, nothing to peel and throw away. You roll it back and forth, then press the release button to open it and tip the hair into the trash.

The first time I used it, I did what I always do with a new cleaning thing. I tested it on the worst spot so I could be properly disappointed. That spot is the middle cushion, where Biscuit lands after every single walk. Four or five back-and-forth passes, maybe twenty seconds. I opened the chamber and it was full. Not a little full. Full enough that I said something out loud in an empty room.

I emptied it, went over the same cushion again, and got about half as much. Third pass, almost nothing. That is the part that convinced me, more than the first pass did. A sticky sheet picks up hair until the sheet is done, and you find out it is done when you are pressing a used sheet into the couch. This thing does not have a done. It just stops finding hair.

Four minutes later the couch looked like a couch again. Glen came in from the garage, looked at it, and asked if I had bought a new slipcover. That is not a compliment I get often.

A sticky sheet picks up hair until the sheet is done, and you find out it is done when you are pressing a used sheet into the couch. This thing does not have a done. It just stops finding hair.

After the couch I took it to Glen's recliner, which is where Biscuit sleeps when nobody is watching. Then the back seat of the car, which had been a lost cause since a bag of dog food tipped over in it last fall. Then the carpeted stairs, one tread at a time, standing up. All of it worked the same way. I have had the ChomChom Roller about five months now and it still sits on that end table, because a tool that lives in a closet does not get used. That was the other thing I got wrong for years.

The mechanism is simple, which is why I think it holds up. The handle is plastic, the whole unit weighs 6.72 ounces, and there is no motor and nothing to charge. You pull it toward you, push it back, and the hair ends up in the chamber behind the handle. When you are finished you press the release button, the chamber opens, and you dump it out. I empty mine after each use, because a full chamber stops grabbing hair and I would rather spend eight seconds emptying it than stand there wondering why it quit working.

Where It Falls Short

Things that annoyed me. You have to empty it constantly, and if you skip that, you will decide the tool is broken. It wants short, firm strokes, not long lazy sweeps, and it took me about a week to stop doing the lazy version. It does not replace a vacuum, and it will not reach the hair that has worked its way under the cushions or into the seams. For that you are still pulling the couch apart. Cat hair takes a couple more passes than dog hair does, which makes sense given how fine Juniper's is, and on a soft blanket it does less than it does on upholstery. It is a tool for surfaces. It is not a whole-room solution.

If you are deciding between this and a sticky roller, the sticky one costs less up front and works fine for one pass on a jacket. On a couch it is a losing fight. I could burn six sheets on one cushion and then be out buying refills. The ChomChom Roller has no refills and no tape, so that whole question ends once you own it. There is a longer write-up on this site about how it held up over months of daily use, and a straight comparison against the sticky kind if you want the detail.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Here is what I would say over coffee. If you have a dog that sheds and a couch you actually like, this is a small thing that solves one specific, irritating problem, and it does it without a cord or a refill. If your problem is a whole house of carpet, buy a vacuum with a decent upholstery attachment and use this between vacuums. If your problem is that your cat sleeps on one chair and nowhere else, this is probably all you need. And if you are the type to tuck it into a drawer, do not bother, because it only works when it is sitting where the hair is. Five months in, mine still does the job, and the couch still looks like a couch.