This vacuum cleaner is a game-changer in my house. It’s powerful, versatile and light, but the headline here is: it’s got fricking lasers attached to its head. OK, an Austin Powersreference might be a little childish, but Dyson’s illuminated cleaning head makes a huge difference.
It beams out green lines across your hard floors so you can see exactly how dirty everything is and how much hair, dust and debris your Dyson is gobbling up. Maybe it’s the gamer in me, but this basically turns a chore into a life-sized game of Pac-man.
The illuminated cleaning head isn’t unique to this model, but we chose this device as its Dyson’s smallest, lightest product weighing in at 2.4kg. This makes cleaning the stairs, the car and those cobwebs on the ceiling a breeze, especially when Dyson throw a range of heads tailored to all the challenges a busy house will throw at you.
The only compromise here is that to come in at this weight, the dust collection bin is small and so is the battery. These won’t present a problem in a flat, where space is at a premium, but for large homes with two bedrooms or more you might want to consider larger models.
Features - What’s it like to use?
Nimble and agile is how I would sum up the Dyson Detect Slim. The neat footprint of the device as well as the wall mount means it discreetly sits on the door of a cupboard. This model came with an embarrassment of riches when it came to accessories. There are corkscrew heads for sucking up hair without tangles, brushes for deep cleaning carpets, flexible heads that’ll reach under furniture and more.
Between sand, human hair and dog hair, the Dyson devoured everything with little fuss. Plus, with older Dyson models we’d have to clean the actual vacuum cleaner itself when we were finished, untangling un unholy amount of hair that had twisted itself around the spinning brush head. That’s not the case here.
In a three-bed house the size of the vacuum will be a problem. The smaller volume dustbin needs frequent emptying and at full power the battery lasted around 10 minutes per clean, 40 minutes if we switched the low-power mode, which was adequate but it felt like coasting in sports car.
That said, the power delivered by this smaller model was impressive. By Dyson’s own measure of power, Air Watts (AW), the Dyson Detect Slim delivers a maximum suction of 150 AW, compared to 240 AW by its bigger sibling the V15. So theoretically it’s less powerful, but in practice it was more than sufficient.
There’s another neat trick that the Detect offers: it monitors and counts the particulates it snaffles up and presents the data on its screen.
It’s sort of useful to see the rate of particles coming in go slow down as the floor gets cleaner, but I’m not sure what I’d actually do with the information. The screen is put to better use by pressing the button that tells you how much battery life you have left in minutes at your current power setting (Eco, Med, or Boost).
Design – Is it easy to use?
Ergonomically speaking, Dyson is always tough to beat. Accessories clip on and off with ease, the main body sits simply on a docking station for charging and the dust bin empties with the push of a lever.
This model does away with the traditional trigger that’s usually pressed to switch on the power. The power button has been moved to the top of the device instead, which seemed odd at first, but actually it makes Dyson’s cordless vacuum cleaners much easier to operate since you can hold it however you want when cleaning: (no claw-hand after holding down the trigger the whole time).
It's also easy to maintain and clean when you need to. The design has been thought out in such a way that you don’t need special tools to take apart the accessories to keep them in good working order. Obviously it gets a bit more complicated when it gets to the motor which we’d advise against tinkering with.
Verdict – should you buy one?
If you have the budget, and you need something small and light to clean up your apartment, we wouldn’t look any further than the Dyson V12 Detect Slim Extra. The size doesn’t hold it back when it comes to the standard of cleaning, or its ability to pick up dirt, however the battery life and dust bin size will cause headaches for those with larger homes.
In those cases, you might be better served one of Dyson’s V15 models, though this model is around £100 more expensive depending on what deals are available.
Ultimately, Whether Dyson intended it or not, adding the illuminated head has gamified the act of cleaning the floors. This, more than anything else, means my floors are a lot cleaner than they used to be, which, in my mind is the real value of a product in this price range.
Alternative
Dyson Gen 5 Detect
This is Dyson’s most powerful cordless model that comes with all the accessories you could ever want, including an improved laser tool and a dust and crevice attachment. It is however much more expensive coming in at £849.99.
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