The best upholstery cleaner for your favorite furniture pieces is, believe it or not, your vacuum cleaner. If you maintain your upholstered furniture well by using a vacuum weekly, you'll prevent most dirt build up. Your house vacuum should have an attachment specifically for handling upholstery.

If you've got a spot that the vacuum can't handle, while the best upholstery cleaner is of course the one recommended by the manufacturer of your furniture, you'll find that most high quality carpet cleaners can double as upholstery cleaners too. A good spray carpet cleaner is typically designed to handle a wide range of stains, from pet stains to spilled wine. With upholstery, you'll need to be gentler than with a carpet; otherwise you risk damaging the more delicate fibers in your upholstery, causing either weak and threadbare patches or faded spots. If you are going with carpet cleaner or any other commercial product, before you treat the whole stain, test out the product in an inconspicuous spot. The undeside of an arm cover is one of my favorite options for testing. If the tested area fades, you can try diluting the cleaning product and test again until you determine the solution that will be the best upholstery cleaner for that piece of fabric.A number of common stains may not require a commercial cleaning product at all. The most typical upholstery stains arise from spilled beverages or food. One of the easiest drink stains is coffee. All it usually takes is a bit of soap or watered down laundry detergent blotted lightly with a wet cloth -- just don't rub too hard. This works well for beer stains too, though you may find you need to spray a light vinegar solution afterward to completely clean the stain. The best upholstery cleaner for juice stains can be made at home by adding a dash of ammonia to a diluted vinegar solution. While red wine sounds tough, often the best upholstery cleaner for those spills is plain old table salt! Leave a nice layer of salt over the stain for a while to soak up the wine, and then vacuum it up. Greasy marks from dropped food can often be handled the same as wine.

Of course, with especially bad or resistant stains it's probably best to consult a professional. The best upholstery cleaner is one that has the experience to know which chemicals are best suited for different types of fabric stains (the best upholstery cleaner for an ink stain may not be the one best suited to a blood stain). A real pro can also penetrate deep into the fibers -- all the way through to the stuffing -- but can do so delicately.

There are plenty of innovative solutions for upholstery care that can save you a bundle. For more cleaning tips, visit www.cleaningsecretsinfo.com and sign up for Pam's free email course.