He is a professional engineer and uses his review platforms to help consumers determine which vacuum cleaners are the best for their cleaning needs. Follow Nigel on facebook or view his vacuum review videos on the Vacuum Cleaner Advisor YouTube Channel. FILTRATIONThe vacuum has three pre-motor filters – one foam, one felt, and one metal mesh.
All in all, the vac turned out to be a great cleaning partner that never quits on you because it’s not powered by a battery. It was able to easily pick up all of the debris on a low-pile carpet, but we docked a bit off its effectiveness score for slightly struggling on a high-pile rug and not easily navigating the hardwood floor. Because it doesn’t stand up on its own, either, you’ll have to lean it against your furniture or gently rest it on the floor if you need to pause your vacuuming session. However, like many other stick vacs, you can use the Shark Rocket in handheld mode, with or without an extension, to clean furniture, ceilings, stairs, and more. Capture dry debris and spiff up your hard floors with a multi-purpose vacuum like the Shark VACMOP—one of our favorite cheap vacuum cleaners. It is designed for use on sealed hardwood, tile, or laminate floors, and glides effortlessly on them all.
The suction is strong enough in every model that even the cleaning heads with air-powered, turbine-driven brush rolls outperformed many other brands’ electrically driven brush rolls in our tests. The Calima was second best in our debris-pickup test on short-pile carpeting, vacuuming up 84 percent of the sand–and–baking soda mixture. Although our main pick, the Shark Navigator Lift-Away, picked up nearly all of the debris, we think the difference won’t be noticeable to most people. For cleaning carpet, a spinning brush roller works much better than suction alone by agitating the carpet and sweeping up the dirt and hair as they bounce around. This is a defining trait of most upright vacuums, but you can get a brushroll head for many canister vacuums.
Because the weight is distributed between the canister itself and the powerhead, they’re easier to move around than upright vacuums. All of the cleaning heads made for carpets use no-stretch geared belts to drive the brush rolls, so they maintain their spin speed and cleaning ability over time. If they do clog (which can happen to any vacuum of any type), Miele vacuums come apart at all the major joints, without needing any tools.
Notably, you can also make this vacuum more compact for storage; the handle can fold in half. Its canister converts into a handheld vacuum you can use, too, but we found the handheld vac to be decently heavy. It may be fine for grabbing a few cobwebs, but don’t expect to use it overhead for a long time.
It also does a decent job on hair, and the self-cleaning brushroll does help to limit hair tangle but will not completely eliminate it. Edge cleaning and handling large debris were weaker areas for the vacuum. The canister also houses a 25 ft retractable power cord, three filters, and the dust canister. 25 ft is also a decent length for a canister vacuum (perhaps not for an upright). There’s a reason Shark vacuums are a top buy—the brand’s offerings come with powerful suction, fully-sealed HEPA filtration systems, and comprehensive warranties, all at affordable prices. Plus, in recent years, the brand has come toe-to-toe with its more expensive rival, Dyson, to release innovative designs for robot vacuums and handheld models.
One accessory that sets apart the most expensive vacuums is a small powered rotary-brush tool, specifically designed for grabbing pet hair that sticks to furniture. Less-expensive vacuums sometimes include an air-powered version that might be worth trying out, but those are ineffective for tougher jobs like cleaning carpeted stairs. We tested the top-of-the-line Shark Apex and found it to be a good vacuum, shark pet hair vacuum but probably not worth the extra cost over the Navigator. It has a dual-brush cleaning head that supposedly helps it pick up hair and dusty debris off of bare floors. But that adds a lot of bulk to the vacuum, and we never found bare-floor pickup to be a problem with the single-brush models in the first place. You probably don’t need HEPA filters—for most people, regular filters are totally fine.
DUST CANISTERThe dust canister is easy to detach and we found it fairly easy to empty, although there is a large plastic insert in the center of the dust canister (where the metal mesh filter resides). As such, we found that we often had to reach into the canister and pull out dust/debris. We’ve seen this kind of thing with many (but not all) bagless machines. Carpet testWe created debris from a mixture of split green peas, flax seeds, chili flakes and ground cheerios. This is designed to mimic fine-to-medium size debris (approx 56g in total).
We noted the vac essentially pulls itself, and we gave it a perfect rating for maneuverability. We noticed that we got the same results whether or not we used an external microphone. We held the phone up to our ears (with the vacuum cleaners and brush rolls on at their maximum power mode) while vacuuming medium-pile carpeting shark robotic vacuums and then a concrete floor. These are the features that a vacuum cleaner needs in order to clean your entire home (bare floors, carpets, and some surfaces off of the floor, too) and to work reliably for more than a few months at a time. The turbine-powered brushroll on the Electrolux – EL4021A didn’t help much, though.
This Shark model is a little bulky for a handheld vacuum, but we think the extra-large dust bin makes it worth it. The attachments are what make this vacuum really shine, but there’s no included storage for them, so you’ll need to repurpose a box or bin to make sure you don’t lose them. Overall, we said this vacuum’s performance was very impressive given its size and single suction setting.