The best cordless vacuum? Dyson DC35 review.

Posted By Laura in In the Home | 2 comments

I always yearned for a handheld vacuum. One that will whir it’s way into life and enable me to zip through the car, or clean up the coffee granules I just threw over the kitchen floor, or suck up the dog hair blowing its tumbleweed way around her bed.

But they’re always so disappointing. They suck, because they don’t really SUCK, if you see what I mean. The plug-it-in ones are annoying with their needy need for plugs and things when you’re in your car and a gazillion miles from a wall equipped with a plug socket, and the cordless ones just whisper at the floor a bit without actually removing anything.

So then in step those clever bods at Dyson with their DC35. Catchy name, huh?

Well I agreed to review it with dismissive nonchalance. It was cordless, ergo it wouldn’t be very good.

Ahem.

I might have been a bit wrong.

This baby totally SUCKS (in a good way)!

It’s rather like having a real vacuum – but without the wire, obviously. Which is ten kinds of good!

There’s no scrabbling about on the floor if you don’t want to, either; the long pole extension beings it to the height of a normal upright vacuum.

The power is excellent, and with the motorised floor tool it pretty much goes anywhere.

But. It IS a cordless thing, and so it has it’s limitations.

You can only use it for around ten minutes at a time before the power runs out. It’s surprising how much floor you can cover in ten minutes – Olympic Vacuuming the children call it.

The head is small – this is good for stairs, under tables and in the car. This is bad when you want to ‘do the living room before the in laws arrive’.

The attachments are rather unwieldy, and I preferred to not have them ‘attached’, as they defeated the object of the versatility of the design.

Actually? I like it very much a lot. It’s just a fabulous not-very-little thing to have charged up and waiting in the cupboard for you, keen to leap into action at the slightest hint of a floor emergency. I’ve used it to clear up sequins after one of the daughter’s ‘craft’ sessions, whizzed up the stairs countless times (it’s so much easier than the main vacuum for our steep narrow staircase), my car has never been so immaculate and the dogs bed has never been cleaner.

But.

And this is quite a big But.

With a painful £230 price tag, I’m not convinced I would spend so many of my own hard earned pennies on a ‘second vacuum’. Neat and nifty though it is, my own upright Dyson with its extension hose can do all those jobs. It may be a bit heavier, a bit more cumbersome and a bit noisier – but nothing to outweigh that ouch the DC35 gives to the bank balance simply to give the upright an afternoon off.