Typically, the vacuum costs $500, but it’s marked down to $370 now, so why not finally add it to your virtual cart? Ditch the dirty work with a vacuum that automatically empties itself for hands-free debris disposal.
You want a quiet appliance
Registering 88db on carpet on its most powerful setting, this vacuum cleaner is one of the noisiest we’ve tested. There’s a 1-quart / 0.7-liter dust canister and two attachments for when the vacuum cleaner is being used in handheld mode. Shark is a brand that’s very quickly become well known in the vacuuming world.
All in all, the vac turned out to be a great cleaning partner that never quits on you because it’s not powered by a battery. It was able to easily pick up all of the debris on a low-pile carpet, but we docked a bit off its effectiveness score for slightly struggling on a high-pile rug and not easily navigating the hardwood floor. Because it doesn’t stand up on its own, either, you’ll have to lean it against your furniture or gently rest it on the floor if you need to pause your vacuuming session. However, like many other stick vacs, you can use the Shark Rocket in handheld mode, with or without an extension, to clean furniture, ceilings, stairs, and more. 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.
However, they also tend to have a similar but slightly worse performance on carpet. Their upright vacuums usually perform better on all surface types than BISSELL vacuums. In addition to sucking up pet hair quickly, we love this vacuum’s large dust bin because you won’t have to worry about emptying it mid-clean. When it is time to empty the dust bin, keep in mind that it’s a little tricky to pull apart.
However, when it came to hard floors, we did find the wheels on the back of the cleaner head flicked some of the oats around the floor, rather than collecting them. This meant we had to make several passes to ensure the mess was cleared. Detaching the wand and floor-cleaning head turns the cordless stick vacuum into a handheld cleaner, to which you can connect any of the two included tools.
You can easily shift between carpet and hardwood floor cleaning by tapping a convenient footswitch. The Shark NV360 Navigator Lift-Away Deluxe Upright Vacuum, our Best Upright pick, is a great choice, too. This more basic Shark vacuum lacks features like a self-cleaning brush roll, but still qualifies as a quality dyson robot vacuum upright vacuum, thanks to its fully-sealed system with HEPA filtration and a lift-away canister option. While the Navigator series is now one of Shark’s more basic lines in terms of advanced features, this model still has a removable dust bin and plenty of cord length for cleaning average-sized rooms.
Currently, our top-recommended cordless vacuum overall, the Tineco Pure One S11, offers 130 air watts of suction power. Meanwhile, our top performance pick with the best overall suction is the Dyson V15 Detect, which offers an advertised 230 air watts of suction power. Manufacturers will often boast about their vacuum’s suction power in terms of air watts, a figure that quantifies airflow in terms of power usage.
For all the Shark models we selected, the batteries are easy to take out and replace. Mary H.J. Farrell is a senior editor at Consumer Reports whose real passion is for cooking and all that entails. She has expanded CR’s cookware category to include not only more pots and pans but also other essentials like stand mixer attachments, sheet pans, and vacuum sealers. Mary also covers vacuums but finds cooking way more fun than cleaning. Since the mid-1990s, Mary has held senior positions at People.com, MSNBC, and Ladies’ Home Journal.
Best overall|With powerful suction and seven cleaning attachments, this cordless stick vacuum outperforms its competitors. The Shark IONFlex ultralight cordless vacuum weighs in at 8.7 pounds and does well on both hard floors and carpeting. Like the ION F80, the IONFlex features DuoClean technology, which utilizes two brushrolls to effectively clean a variety of different surfaces. The brushead also lights up to illuminate small particles in the vacuum’s path.