A new broom sweeps clean. But which new broom sweeps cleanest? And do old brooms also sweep clean?

First, we identified a challenging sweeping task: Cleaning the dining room of rongo's local fraternity, where she lived during college. This is a challenging place to sweep because there are a lot of chairs and not that much space between tables. Plus, they could use a broom update. We selected three pairs of corresponding new and old brooms and put them to the test. The new brooms were purchased at Target and the old brooms were found on-site. (Approximately 4 years old, a Valentine's Day gift from local alums.)

We numbered the new brooms, and lettered the old ones correspondingly.

• Brooms A and 1 were generic, synthetic, angle-cut brooms. Broom 1 cost $8.99.
• Brooms B and 2 were somewhat more stylish synthetic brooms. Broom 2 had the special squeegee feature (lacking in Broom B) and cost $12.99.
• Brooms C and 3 were corn brooms. Broom 3 cost $11.99.

In order to quantify sweeping success, we planted 10 lentils, 10 purple stars, and 10 blue beads under each table for each broom trial. The old brooms were used first, one per table. After the old broom trials, we counted the particles in the dust pan, and then we visually inspected the area under each table and attempted to recover any lentils, stars, or beads missed by the broom. We were able to find all the lentils by hand inspection, but not all the stars and beads. So for the new broom trials, we planted an additional 10 lentils, 10 stars, and 10 beads, marking the new set of beads and stars with a black Sharpie, so that if we swept up any beads or stars that remained on the floor from the old broom trials, we could differentiate them. It turned out that the bead sweeping part of the task was the most challenging, as all of the brooms were able to recover nearly all the lentils and stars.

Broom	beads	lentils	stars
A old	2	10	10
1 new	3	10	9
B old	2	9	10
2 new	7 (+2 leftover)	10	10
C old	6	10	9
3 new	9 (+4 leftover)	9	9
Total old	10	29	29
Total new	19 (+6 leftover)	29	28

The results demonstrated that (1) on average, new brooms do sweep cleaner than old brooms but old brooms are still pretty good for sweeping up lentil or star sized particles (2) corn brooms, whether new or old, perform somewhat better than synthetic brooms, particularly for the bead sized particles (3) the squeegee feature is probably useful. Rongo Rongo personally favors corn brooms, and has an old but not very worn out corn broom at home. Listener is leaning towards a squeegee enabled broom for his next personal sweeping tool purchase.

We tallied up the results, threw out the old brooms, and left the new brooms in the kitchen.