Chances are, you probably don’t need a wet/dry vacuum every day. But if you want the option of cleaning up wet spills as well as dry (we’re looking at you, parents), the Dirt Devil QuickFlip Wet/Dry Hand Vacuum is an excellent choice. —and is cordless, so you can use it around your place with ease.
And with such a long battery life, you could vacuum your apartment multiple times or clean an entire two-story house before having to charge it. For all of these reasons, plus the easy three-minute assembly time, this is our top pick. The vacuum cleaner glided easily across hard floors, although there was some resistance on carpet since it’s a heavy cordless cleaner. The flexible wand proved useful for reaching under furniture, as did the six LED headlights on the floor-cleaning head – they made it easier to see the area we were vacuuming.
Most stick vacuums are cordless and run on a rechargeable battery with limited runtime and are generally pricier than their plug-in counterparts. That said, the lack of tangled cords makes them easier to operate, so you can quickly tackle dirt and debris—even in hard-to-reach spaces—and in much less time. That means we are giving you more decision points to help you choose whether you want a stick vac or a full-sized vacuum. As a result of these changes, our pet hair tests are a bit more challenging and we now embed dirt in the carpeting instead of scattering it on the surface as we used to do. And for bare floor testing, instead of combining all the debris into a messy array of cereal, sand, and rice we vacuum up each type separately. All-in-all, we’ve made our stick vacuums better reflect real-world situations where it may be your only vacuum.
For a mix of bare floors and rugs, the surest bet is to get a vacuum that lets you turn the brush roll on or off. An aggressive brush can scatter certain kinds of debris on bare floors, or even scratch certain types of flooring, so it’s helpful to be able to switch it off. Most plug-in vacuums (including the upright and canister models we recommend) have this option, though it’s less common among cordless vacuums. The best cordless stick vacuums are lightweight and maneuverable without sacrificing the cleaning power of a corded model (and without costing too much, either). We experimented with the three attachments when cleaning stairs and found the crevice tool to be the most helpful, as the other two attachments are really designed with upholstery and drapes in mind. While cleaning the stairs was a bit time-consuming, since we opted to use the extension hose, rather than the motor head, the vacuum’s suction was still plenty powerful through this alternative mode.
We also had to pull some hair out of the dust cup from crevices that did not initially empty. 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 irobot vacuum cleaner 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.