We talked to experts about how to shop for vacuums when getting rid of pet hair is your main concern. They shared tips for narrowing down your options, which we used to recommend a handful of corded vacuums, cordless vacuums, handheld vacuums and robot vacuums across budgets. Neumann also recommends purchasing a vacuum with an automated brush roll. Automated brush rolls spin while you’re vacuuming to pick up pet hair quickly on fabrics, while no-spin brushes only rotate as you manually push your vacuum along the floor. The benefit of automated brush rolls is their ability to pick up pet hair quickly on fabrics, but they can be too harsh for hardwood or tile floors, he says.
This robot vacuum comes with a self-emptying base that can store up to 45 days of debris. It’s designed with a self-cleaning brushroll to prevent pet hair from creating blockages and offers powerful suction. Once you pair the Wi-Fi-enabled vacuum with the companion app, you can control it from your phone as well as with voice assistants. From there we can calculate the percentage of dirt and debris pickup for every run and the average amount of soil a vacuum manages to remove. Additionally, we run anecdotal (visual) pet hair tests for each vacuum, on all three floor types, to help us select the best cordless vacuum. When cleaning is finished, you can stash the thing away on its wall-mounted charging dock.
In these cases, it’s best to swap out the rotating brush roll for a no-spin option if your vacuum comes with one, or turn off the rotation feature if your vacuum allows. Apart from being a strong performer in our pet hair tests, the A11 Hero was near flawless on hardwood floors, vacuuming up 97% of sand and 98% of black rice. It finished just outside the top 5 on low-pile carpet, removing a respectable 83% of sand and a near-perfect 99% of black rice — bissell cordless vacuum and every vacuum that did better in that test costs hundreds more. With all of those extra fibers for dirt to cling to, mid-pile carpet was more of a struggle, as the A11 Hero’s sand score fell to 73%, but it still nailed the black rice test, sucking up 98% of the stuff. The brush head on Black+Decker’s Furbuster vacuum has motorized anti-tangle rubber brustiles that lift pet hair off surfaces and prevent it from creating knots that can cause a clog.
Best of all, the filters are washable, so you don’t have to spend money over time replacing them. Mehmetoglu recommends Dyson vacuums for pet hair and general household needs. ”They are one the more expensive side, but cleaning them is easy and the fact that you don’t have to replace vacuum bags is also an advantage,” she says. The 15 cordless vacuums we’ve tested in recent years range in price from $105 to $899. The Tineco Pure One S11 sits right in the middle of that pack with a retail price of $ but it performed as if it costs a lot more, with outstanding results in each of our main cleaning tests. If you need a vacuum that can deep clean the entire house over an hour of time or longer, a corded vacuum is still the best option.
Shark vacuums are generally better built than BISSELL’s comparable offerings and deliver better overall performance. However, some BISSELL models are a little easier to maintain—many new Shark models use non-removable brushrolls that can be a hassle to clean properly. Cordless vacuum warranties will vary by manufacturer and by model, but the majority of models we’ve tested will offer at least a year of coverage, if not two.
Not surprisingly, the V15 Detect was a powerful performer in our tests, particularly in our sand tests, where it removed the largest overall total of sand from our hardwood, low-pile carpet, and mid-pile carpet test floors. It was our No. 1 finisher on low-pile carpet, with a sand score of 93% and another perfect 100% with the black rice. It’s a strong performer on plushier, mid-pile carpet, too, which is our most difficult test. The Pure One S11 finished in third here, gathering up 78% of the sand and, once again, 100% of the black rice. In our exclusive CR surveys, more than 40 percent of battery-powered stick vacs owned by our members developed problems with the battery within the first five years of ownership. Corded stick vacuums do not have this issue, which is why we give separate reliability ratings for cordless and corded stick vacuum brands.