Dyson V7 Animal Cordless Handheld Vacuum Cleaner, Purple, Medium

Product Information

Charging is via a Dyson-designed wall-wart charger, which either plugs directly into the handle of the cleaner or into the convenient wall-dock supplied. The key change is its smaller, lighter battery, and a jiggling of the suction power versus run-time ratio. However, if you don’t want that and have a decent plug-in cleaner, the V7 is a quality cleaner that complements, rather than replaces, your existing cleaner. This tool forgoes the articulating neck, but we can forgive this since its stiff bristles do a great job of picking up pet hair. A single pass on our carpet test area on Max power gave a good account of the V7’s carpet cleaning abilities.

The mix of carpet powder, baking powder and talcum powder was well cleaned in just one pass, leaving behind only a few finer grains of the heavier carpet powder. Richard has more than 20 years experience as a technology journalist, writing and editing on a vast number of publications.It’s nimble, so it’s easy to use it to quickly sweep under the sofa and its cleaning head swivels and pivots smoothly, allowing you to get to clean in tight places. Those figures are way, way down on the previous models and make this cleaner very pleasant to use indeed. It activates the vacuum when you pull it and turns it off the instant you let go so you have to keep it depressed as you clean. Aside from the different variations, the V7 itself sits somewhere in-between the Dyson V6 and V8, in both its design and performance characteristics.

Of course, the Animal version on test here is only part of a lineup that also features the flagship Total Clean model and the slightly more affordable Motorhead edition. Dyson’s class-leading V-series handheld cleaners get even better with the powerful, lightweight and pet-hair-busting V7 Animal. It works well, and not once did we have fluff and hair stuck in the V7 that we had to dig out manually. Its stiff bristles pull pet hairs from even knotty-pile nylon carpets and its smaller form factor concentrates suction power for even better cleaning.The battery isn’t removable, though, so there’s no chance of grabbing a spare battery for an extended cleaning session. We measured the V7 at 61-62dB in normal power mode at arm’s length and a very reasonable 64-66dB on Max power.