7/10
Open rating explainerInformationWIREDSuper compact, lightweight design that’s great at getting in tight spaces. Magnetic charging base. Compresses debris so it doesn’t need a massive dustbin.TIREDLimited to hard floors. Short battery life. Sometimes spits hair back out instead of into the dustbin.Dyson vacuums have had a pretty consistent look for the past few years. Each model in the famed brand's series of powerful stick vacuums features a hefty handle containing a dustbin, battery, and motor that’s connected to the head of the vacuum by a long tube. It's a design you'll find across other brands' cordless vacuums, too. But with the new PencilVac model, Dyson breaks the mold.
Announced last spring and initially launched in Japan and Korea last year, the PencilVac Fluffycones cordless vacuum fits all of its components into a 4-pound package with a slim 38-mm (1.5-inch) handle. There are a few trade-offs with this streamlined design: It's got half the battery life of Dyson's other cordless vacuums and can only be used on hard floors.
Even with those caveats, it's still the vacuum I find myself reaching for to keep daily debris and my cat's litter tracks under control. It makes for a great companion vacuum to a robot vac-mop that does the bulk of the work every few days, and it's as lightweight and easy to maneuver as a Swiffer broom. It's a vacuum I genuinely enjoy using, and I'm hoping it's a design we see more and more in Dyson vacuums.
Fresh Form
Photograph: Nena FarrellThe PencilVac gets rid of the bulky topper you'd find on any other cordless vacuum, hiding the motor, battery, and dustbin into a 38-mm-wide handle with two buttons and a small screen. Dyson manages this by shrinking the Hyperdymium motor down to 28 mm while still packing in a decent amount of power. It's not as strong as a traditional Dyson stick vacuum—the PencilVac has 55 air watts, less than a quarter of the V15 Detect's power—but for cleaning hard floors, rather than pulling dust and debris up from carpets and rugs, that works just fine.
The battery and dustbin also shrank in size compared to Dyson's other vacuums. The dustbin holds a mere 0.08 liters, but the PencilVac compresses debris to make every bit count. I was able to vacuum most of my main floor (a kitchen, dining room, bathroom with a litter box, and a long hallway of hardwood in the living room that doesn't include my rug) without completely filling the dustbin.
Photograph: Nena FarrellMeanwhile, the battery life has a maximum of 30 minutes, which is half the time you'd get on a Dyson V15 Detect (on sale right now for $620) and less than you'd get on the much, much cheaper Bissell I recommend as a budget stick vac pick. Even fully charged, my PencilVac usually reported it had only about 24 to 25 minutes of vacuum time on Eco mode (the lowest of three power settings). It's only a few minutes I lost out on, but that's significant when it had so little to begin with.
While I'm quick to point out how short the battery life is, it wasn't actually a huge problem in my testing. I was able to quickly glide around my house and even hit the bathrooms on my second floor with a few minutes to spare. Sure, I was watching the minutes count down on the device, but it felt like a Pomodoro timer motivating me to stay focused and finish my task in a certain time.
The PencilVac is also easy to charge thanks to the freestanding magnetic charging base. It's not a self-emptying base, so you need to manually empty the vacuum, but it makes this vacuum much easier to store than a stick vacuum that just sits in a corner waiting to fall down. The PencilVac does need a full three and a half hours to fully recharge, so don't burn through all of the battery in one go if you want to be able to use it again soon after.
The vacuum connects to Dyson's app, where you'll find resources such as how to empty the dustbin and wash the filter, but not much else. It can tell you how long your last vacuuming session was, but no other details, so it's not as interesting or as informative as the data you'd get from a robot vacuum.
Fluffy Face
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Photograph: Nena FarrellThis vacuum's full name is the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones, aptly named for the four fluffy cones inside the vacuum head. Dyson's previous recent stick vacuums all have the Fluffy Optic cleaner head for vacuuming hard floors. While both have a fluffy roller bar, the Fluffycones have a conical shape that Dyson says will detangle and remove hair rather than the hair getting stuck all around it. It did detangle hair for me, but when I vacuumed up larger portions of hair from my bathroom floor (a place where many a stray hair comes to die at the hands of my hairbrush, comb, and towel), it actually bunched up the hair into a ball and spat it back out a few times before finally sucking it up into the dustbin.
Video: Nena FarrellWhile the hair results weren't great, I did love this vacuum for sucking up the cat litter that constantly plagues my home. It did a great job with flour on my hard floors and a solid job with dry oats, but it occasionally just bumped the oats around instead of immediately sucking them up. I was even able to quickly run it over the top of my carpet, but rolling back and forth on the carpet a bunch did stop the cones.
The head is designed to move in just about any direction. The cones make it easy to swivel around, and the green illuminating lights on the front and back help you spot any debris you might otherwise miss. With its compact size that fits in tricky corners, the PencilVac finally lets me vacuum up all the litter around the base of my toilet and pedestal sink. It's part of what makes me reach for this vacuum over and over, even after my robot vacuum cleaned the day before.
Forward Momentum
Photograph: Nena FarrellDo I think this vacuum replaces Dyson's existing cordless options? No. But Dyson has other new vacuums planned that could do that. This vacuum has a specific design for a specific use: smaller homes with entirely hard floors. There's an accessibility opportunity here, too. This lightweight vacuum can be much easier to use for folks with mobility and strength restrictions. The magnetic charging base also makes it easy to store and access for a variety of people, whether they struggle with fine motor skills or can't bend over and grab the vacuum.
The PencilVac showcases new technology from Dyson that I'm hoping points to its next generation of vacuums. Sure, the V16 is coming back this year, but what else could Dyson's future lineup include to follow the PencilVac? There's already a wet version of the PencilVac out, named the PencilWash, and the PencilVac itself came with an extra-long name to add “Fluffycones” on the end. Does that mean more PencilVacs are to come sans this fluffy cone head? One could only hope, and I'm curious where this generation of Dyson vacuums and slim-handle technology will go.
Ultimately, PencilVac itself is a great companion if your home has a ton of hard floors you want to quickly clean, and I especially like it as a cat owner constantly fighting litter. I still find myself regularly using a robot vacuum to mop my hard floors, but if you already have a mop and want a vacuum for quick cleans on wood, tile, and vinyl, this is a handy choice.
$599 at Amazon$600 at Best Buy$600 at Dyson
