Review: Shark Cordless PowerDetect Stick Vacuum

When my husband first saw me vacuuming with the Shark stick vacuum, he asked me dubiously, “Is that a Dyson?” The British company has become so synonymous with cordless stick vacuums that it just didn’t seem possible that we wouldn’t have one. It’s like buying the generic brand Q-Tips. Who does that? Even the Shark’s color scheme deliberately echoes Dyson’s.

I’ve been testing Shark’s latest cordless stick vacuum for a month in order to answer my husband’s, and also your, question: No, the Shark isn’t a Dyson. Overall, the engineering and attention to detail that makes the Dyson the best premium vacuum isn’t quite there. The display isn’t as nice. The build quality isn’t as solid. I do have to regularly unclog one section of the vacuum tube with a chopstick.

But does it keep my house sparkling clean? Does it have a bunch of things that most Dyson vacuums don’t? And does it have all the functionality that you need, and more, for a quarter of the price? Also yes. This vacuum is absolutely worth it—"it" being not very many dollars.

A Place to Land

As you can see, the Shark vacuum is comparable in dimensions to the Dyson V15s Detect Submarine, which is the Dyson I currently have. The Shark is just a few inches shorter, but overall it takes up more space because it comes with a freestanding cleaning station. I loved this cleaning station. While every Dyson does come with a mount that you can easily screw into a wall, I’ve had a hard time finding just the right place in my house that’s also near a working electrical outlet.

If you’re not inclined to rewire your laundry room, a freestanding docking station makes it much easier to plug and go. It’s also a convenient place to store the extra vacuum accessories, like the different cleaning heads—the Shark comes with a crevice tool and a small pet multi-tool head for getting into hard-to-reach places.

I also particularly like that it has a 2-liter self-emptying bin in the base. One of the most inconvenient parts of the Dyson design is how you have to unlatch the tube to empty the bagless bin from the bottom. You have to stick your beautiful, premium vacuum in your filthy, possibly damp garbage bin and knock it around, getting it dirty and knocking dust and dog hair everywhere.

With the Shark, you simply put it back in its dock and whoosh! It’s gone. It's very effective at cleaning the vacuum bin. Shark claims that the bin has a capacity of up to 45 days' worth of debris, but after two weeks of vacuuming all the dog hair in my house, it definitely needed emptying. It's so much more convenient to manually empty a bin once every few weeks instead of every few minutes. It clicks neatly in and out of place and is easy to empty.

There’s also a deodorizing capsule that you click into the emptying station to keep it all from smelling rancid. I didn’t care about it, but I also didn’t find the smell offensive.

It took several hours for the vacuum to charge on the first go-round, but much shorter after that. Shark claims that the battery life is up to 70 minutes on each charge; however, I got nowhere near that. I usually got around 10 minutes of cleaning time per charge. However, there is a very good reason for this short battery life, which I will explain momentarily.

Sniff It Out

The reason that the vacuum doesn’t last very long is because it has to work very hard. The Shark vacuum uses Shark's proprietary PowerDetect technology to parse what kind of floor surface it's on and automatically adjust the level of cleaning power. Lights in the head of the vacuum illuminate dirt as the vacuum passes over it, and there are two different brush rolls—a soft and a bristly one—to cover every possible surface in your home.

To use PowerDetect, you use the trigger to toggle on the round circle shape. On a side note, I also like that, unlike a Dyson, you don't have to hold the trigger the whole time you're cleaning. You turn on the vacuum with a button and the trigger is simply a toggle. I love a good finger workout, but not while I'm trying to clean the stairs.

My house has multiple stories of dense, high-pile carpeting, and I have two children and two big dogs. They’re all filthy (except me). In my house, PowerDetect gets turned to the max the entire time. Shark does not post the suction power in RPMs or pascals as many vacuum manufacturers do, but in my testing I've found it to be remarkably effective.

I’ve used the Shark to clean everything from dog hair to pancake mix that my kids have spilled in the kitchen, tiny splinters of shredded wood chips from my puppy chewing sticks, tiny splinters of plastic from my puppy chewing hangers, and garbage that the puppy has shredded … you get the idea. It edges very well and even sucks up (small) Lego bricks.

It cleans so thoroughly that sometimes I don’t vacuum for more than 20 or 30 seconds before I have to return to the dock to empty the 0.74-quart bin. Having to empty it so frequently does keep the charge nicely topped up, so I never had problems with battery capacity while cleaning my house.

Of course, the Shark does differ from the Dyson in a few ways that aren't so positive. It's about a pound heavier than the Dyson, even though it's smaller, and the build quality just isn't machined quite as nicely. Components rattle more as you push it, ever so slightly. You can hinge the tube to get under tables or chairs, but this feature doesn't make any sense to me since it's a stick vacuum and you have to bend down to clean there anyway.

The light-up screen isn't as clear and detailed as the Dyson's. It doesn't display nearly as much information, like the different sizes of particulate matter that it's picking up (though this bothers me less since the Shark has the pre-motor felt and foam filters, and a HEPA filter post-motor). The battery counter is very primitive.

The one major problem that I have with the Shark, that you would simply never see with a Dyson, or in fact any other stick vacuum that I've used, is that the tube from the head of the vacuum as it curves to go up to the dustbin sometimes gets clogged if I vacuum for too long.

This always happens at the worst possible time. No one wants to be poking a chopstick into a tube at 10 pm on a Saturday, buzzed off two shots of soju, tired and trying desperately to clean up a mess the puppy has made just so you can go to bed. This is a problem that I’ve seen now with multiple Shark vacuums. Still, I empty the vacuum pretty frequently anyway, and now that I’m aware that it happens, I just have to check it every few runs or so.

Still, these hiccups aside, the Shark stick vacuum is amazing at cleaning in almost every way that matters. You just get so much more for your money. My husband has continued to stubbornly use the Dyson, but a little rubber piece in the vacuum's head tore slightly. It's just a little annoying. “You could probably order a replacement piece online,” he mused, looking at it, and then looked at me when I silently pointed to the Shark. Just get a Shark. It does everything you need it to do, and it's so much cheaper.