It comes with a duster crevice tool, a pet multi-tool, and a storage clip, and it also easily transforms into a handheld vacuum that weighs just three pounds (it weighs 7.76 pounds when fully assembled as a stick vacuum). Most importantly, it’s clear that shoppers approve, because the versatile gadget has 3,600 perfect ratings and hundreds of five-star reviews. With the motor, battery and dust cup (the power unit) placed up top, it works like a traditional pole vacuum, making it easy to reach under low furniture or up high to clean ceiling moldings and light fixtures. Move the power unit — and the weight — down by the nozzle and it’s now easier to push and maneuver across bare floors, areas rugs and carpets. And with more of the weight at the bottom, it can now do a better job cleaning deep-pile carpets. Finally, you can detach the power unit completely and use it as a handheld for stairs, upholstery and other above-the-floor cleaning needs.
There’s no LED display to tell you how much power you have left, but the LED lamps on the brush are powerful, working like floodlights to show where the dirt is. However, the real amazement for us came from the nozzle foot release. Tap gently on shark pet vacuum it with your foot and the nozzle detaches from the brush, so you can clean corners or ceilings. Not only do you never have to bend down to clean hard-to-reach places, you don’t have to stretch or struggle with any hose adjustment ever again.
The second cleaner head, the Laser Slim Fluffy, is made of soft microfiber fabric and is specifically designed to snag dust and fur from bare floors. It features a laser light that spookily illuminates dark corners—one moment the dust is spotlighted, the next it’s gone. Designed to deep-clean rugs and carpet, the V12’s Motorbar cleaner head has tooth-like rubber vanes that, Dyson claims, automatically clear wrapped hair during cleaning. In our shark stick vacuum testing, the head readily captured 6-inch strands of hair, but the brush was less effective with 18-inch-long hair. (You can remove the brush, and you can cut off long locks with scissors or a box cutter.) On bare floors, the Motorbar head efficiently cleaned baking soda and seeds, but it tended to snowplow Cheerios. This lightweight model cleverly folds in half for easier cleaning under furniture, and it has an extra-large, 33-ounce dustbin.
The V15 Detect was able to remove 88% in the same challenge, as well as 95% from low-pile carpet. Whether vacuuming across hardwood floors or low-pile or midpile carpeting, the V15 barely left a tuft in its wake. There are plenty of options on the market, and we’ve spent countless hours testing the top models from brands like Shark, Bissell, Dyson, Tineco, Eureka, and Samsung at the CNET product testing lab in Louisville, Kentucky. In our vacuum cleaner evaluations, we run a rigorous slate of tests to determine each cleaner’s capabilities when it comes to picking up a variety of messes on various floor types. However, the cleaner head works extremely well on hard floors, and its self-cleaning brushroll won’t get tangled with pet hair.
In the Cleaning Lab, this Dyson model aced all of our performance tests for bare floor cleaning, pet hair pick-up and edge cleaning. Our pet hair tests are a bit more challenging, and we now embed dirt in the carpeting instead of scattering it on the surface as we used to do. And for bare floor testing, instead of combining all the debris into a messy array of cereal, sand, and rice, we vacuum up each type separately.
Households with pets will need a vacuum that can handle pet hair and if you want to use it to clean more than just floors, you’ll need one that converts to a handheld cleaner and comes with plenty of useful attachments. If you’ve got a bigger home, a larger dust canister is a necessity if you want to ensure your floor cleaning session isn’t interrupted, and thankfully the Dyson V11 outsize offers just this. At 1.9-liters it can hold 150% more debris than the Dyson V15 Detect Absolute (above), and the wider-than-usual cleaning head, means you’ll be able to vacuum your floors quicker than ever too. We also found that the wand can be cumbersome when cleaning overhead and, unlike some other Shark vacuum cleaners, the brushroll can’t be switched off. We found that pick-up and manoeuvrability was good on hard and carpeted floors, and equally as impressive reaching overhead and on upholstery. The 1.9-quart / 1.6litre dust cup capacity is a large size which we feel will suit large homes or indeed, homes with pets, very well.