No more suctionless vacuums for me!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Effective carpet cleaning with bristles, excellent suction, easy to clean filter, stands upright by itself.

Cons: Dirt doesn't always automatically fall out of the trapdoor canister.

The Bottom Line: 
Great for anyone with carpeted floors. It's pricier, but it's built to last, and its effectiveness and ease of cleaning have made me fall in love with it.

Author's Review
For years, I've lived with mediocre vacuums. My first vacuum wouldn't pick up strings off the carpet. Then my mother took pity on me and gave me her old one, only to tell me months later that she didn't think it was much good either (and she was right). Having seen how well her Rainbow vacuum worked, I tried to find a water-filtration vacuum, only to buy one that ended up having all the suctioning power of a gentle breeze. I was starting to despair of ever finding a good vacuum, and then I decided: this is something that I'm going to be using for years, so I might as well quit spending hundreds of dollars on poor vacuums, and shell out a little extra to get something that's actually effective. So, having read so many raves about the company and their products, I decided to give the Dyson a try.

I live in a small apartment with mostly carpeted floors, and with the vacuums I've been using, I never really felt like the carpet was really clean. The last time it had really been thoroughly vacuumed was when I borrowed my mother's Rainbow about four years ago. So, my biggest concern was to get a vacuum cleaner that did a good job on carpets.

I also wanted to find a bagless vacuum cleaner; the last one I owned was also "bagless" but it had a bag-like filter that got clogged with dust in no time at all, reducing the suction of the vacuum dramatically. And to clean it out, I essentially had to reach in and yank out clods of dust, which of course sent even more dirt into the air. Yuck.

My other concern was to find a vacuum that didn't spray dust back into the air. I wanted one with a good filtering system that wouldn't leave me feeling like I was breathing in dirt and mites while I was cleaning.

Well, the Dyson DC18 has definitely met and exceeded my expectations. When I finally brought it home and tried it out on my carpets, they changed color (from grey back to beige). The carpet bristles start rotating the moment the vacuum is turned on (unlike other vacuums I've seen, where they rotate as you vacuum) and they really seem to do a good job agitating the fibers to loosen dirt. Thanks to the assistance of the bristles, you're not just relying on suction power to pick up hair and strings, so the Dyson picked up every bit of visible detritus on the floor. And, as it happens, the suction seems to be pretty impressive too. It also did a surprisingly good job of vacuuming around the baseboards, which means I won't have to get down on my hands and knees with an attachment quite as often (if at all!).

The bagless filtration is super, with a clear bin that you can watch filling up. (I might add, to give you an idea of how effective the Dyson was, that it only took one sweep of half my tiny studio apartment to fill it up!) The only downside here is that I found it a little difficult to empty. Dyson assumes that once you detach the bin (which, FYI, is very easy to remove and reattach), you can simply hold it over a trash bag, pull up on a little lever, and all the dirt will fall into the bag as the bottom of the bin swings away. This might work if you empty it on a very regular basis, and have nothing but dirt in the bin. However, I suspect I also had a decent amount of hair, which clumped up inside the bin and did not want to fall out. That left me two options: either shake the bin until the dirt came out (which I tried, and only resulted in sending clouds of dust into the air), or reach in and pull it out yourself. Ahh, happy memories of my last vacuum cleaner. Still, it somehow seemed easier and relatively cleaner to do with the Dyson.

The filtration system works beautifully - the air coming back out of the vacuum seemed clean to me, and the filter itself is extremely low-maintenance, only needing to be rinsed out once every three months.

Given that I have a small apartment, I found the compact size of the DC18 to be a great advantage, because I have a limited amount of closet space in which to store it.

My other favorite feature of this vacuum is that when you raise it back up from the vacuuming position, a pair of "training wheels" automatically descends to stabilize it. No more struggling to lean the vacuum against the wall without it falling over! This one stands by itself quite happily.

The one feature I haven't quite mastered yet is the telescoping wand; it looks like it'll be really helpful for vacuuming high areas, but I haven't figured out exactly how it works (having only owned this vacuum for a week).

I was able to purchase the DC18 for 25% off at Linens-n-Things, and it was well worth every penny.