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3 hours ago
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The arrival of a new Dyson vacuum cleaner is always exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s interesting to see what Dyson’s engineers have developed to try to persuade us that a £750 vacuum cleaner will be a vital addition to our lives. The other is that it usually pushes down the price of older models, which is great news for bargain hunters.
The V16 Piston Animal has several new features, the most significant being its floor head. Besides the introduction of anti-tangle combs, we haven’t seen such a departure from the status quo since Dyson launched its Fluffy floor head for hard floors back in 2015. There’s arguably a good reason behind this conservatism, because Dyson’s previous designs have performed brilliantly in the cleaning tests I’ve put them through over the years. However, perhaps controversially, this model ditches the duo of brush bar and fluffy roller floor heads that have been a Dyson staple for a decade, using just one combination floor head for both carpet and hard floor.
As I’ve already alluded to, the V16’s £749.99 launch price has already pushed down the prices of its predecessors. At the time of writing, some V15 models are reduced by £150, and the even more powerful Gen5detect (which launched at £850 just last year) has dropped to £549 at some places. The new V16 has its work cut out to persuade us that it’s better value for money than these reliable favourites.
How I tested
I tested the Piston Animal in the same way I tested the other cordless vacuums I’ve reviewed for the Filter. I started by measuring the suction using a vacuum gauge – somewhat problematic with Dyson vacuums because they’re programmed to cut out when the airway is blocked. It still gives an idea of their suction power, but can’t be used to reliably compare them with their rivals.
Next, I tested the battery life by timing rundowns from a full charge, both in a vacuum’s most economical mode and at full power. I then tested the vacuum on a trio of troublesome spillages: flour, cat litter and pet hair. These tests are run on both hard floor and carpet, which makes for a useful comparison between vacuum cleaners, including recent Dyson models, such as the Gen5detect.
What you need to know
The new floor head is an intriguing proposition. Dyson has built its reputation on its vacuuming performance, and while suction strength and battery life play an important role in a decent vacuum, it’s the superlative performance of the two standard floor heads that have helped Dyson to stand out in recent years. The only downside is that you need to switch them over when moving from carpet to hard floor and vice versa.
While the likes of Shark and Vax have tackled this problem by placing fluffy and brush rollers in parallel, Dyson’s new roller (which has the confusing name “All Floors Cones Sense”) uses two conical brush bars that sit side by side. Each cone combines two brushes, one that’s stiff enough to tease dirt out of carpets and another that’s soft and fluffy to lift dust from hard floors. The floor head automatically detects the surface you’re using it on and adjusts the rotation speed accordingly, for a gentler clean on hard floors. It also has a green light to illuminate dust and dirt on hard floors, which genuinely helps with spotting otherwise invisible dirt.
Along with the new floor head, the Piston Animal comes with Dyson’s usual trio of useful handheld attachments: the crevice tool for getting into nooks and crannies; the combination brush and funnel for upholstery; and the Hair Screw Tool 2.0, which, although aimed at getting pet hairs off furniture, is also brilliant on stairs. Annoyingly for owners of previous models, the V16 uses new connectors, so you can’t use your old favourite attachments on this vacuum or vice versa.
Scouring the specifications, there are a couple of other factors worth noting. The V16 has a larger collection bin capacity of 1.3l compared with previous versions that held 0.77l. This is something of a magic trick, with a redesigned interior mesh filter taking up considerably less room inside a similarly sized collection bin. There’s also a new dust compactor mechanism that helps to create more space in the bin without emptying it.
It comes with an easier way of releasing the floor head from the extension wand, with a release catch now at the top of the wand as well as the bottom. That would have been more handy with the old floor head system, but you can still make good use of it if you buy the version with Dyson’s Submarine floor washing attachment (£899).
Specifications
Weight: 3.4kg
Max suction power (quoted): 315 air watts
Max suction power (measured): 21kPa
Battery life (quoted): 1hr 10mins
Battery life (tested): 1hr 11mins
Charge time (quoted): 4hrs 30mins
Dust capacity: 1.3l
Additional filters supplied? No
Dimensions: 25 x 26 x 130cm
What we love
According to the specifications, the V16 is Dyson’s most powerful cordless vacuum cleaner to date. We’ll have to take its word for it because, as I’ve mentioned already, Dyson cleaners cut out when their airway is blocked, and the V16 did so even sooner than the Gen5detect in my tests.
Also improved is the battery life, which Dyson claims to have increased from an hour on the V15 to 70 minutes here. That’s in line with Dyson’s claims for the Gen5detect, but I found the V16 lasted even longer in my tests, managing 1hr 11mins on its Eco setting, compared with 56 on the Gen5detect.
Combining hard-floor and carpet cleaning into one floor head is a genuinely useful feature, because switching floor heads regularly can be quite annoying. Indeed, I suspect there are more than a few Dyson owners who don’t bother switching to their fluffy rollers because the standard roller bar does a sufficiently good job. This new floor head incorporates some of the benefits of the old fluffy roller, including the very useful dust light, and its automatic surface detection is a nice touch too.
It doesn’t have the same open-ended front, though, which seemed to help the fluffy roller trap and pick up everything from dust particles to larger lumps such as cat litter. Instead, it’s enclosed in a plastic shell similar to the standard floor head, except that it has a split down the middle with two brush cones, one on either side.
We’ve seen a conical, anti-hair wrap concept before in Dyson’s Hair Screw tool, which has been included with top-end Dyson vacuum cleaners for a few generations. The idea is that it doesn’t just comb hair out from the roller, but also pushes it off the end of each cone, thanks to the single point of attachment and the diminishing screw shape.
In practice, this worked a treat when it came to avoiding tangles. I tested it on my daughter’s bedroom floor, which is usually awash with long hair, and there was no sign of any tangling on Dyson’s new floor head. Annoyingly, it sometimes ejected clumps of hair off the end and left them on the carpet, though, which I haven’t experienced with Dyson’s previous brush bars.
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What we don’t love
Unfortunately, most of what we don’t love about the Piston Animal is related to its most important attribute: its performance. With such a high price tag, it ought to be approaching perfection in my cleaning tests (just like its V15 and Gen5detect predecessors), but sadly, it fell short.
In the cat litter test, I was left with more uncollected cat litter after a single forward pass and backward pull than I was with the Gen5detect, both on carpet and hard floor. The V16 was good at picking up pet hair, but no better than its predecessors, which are also excellent at this job.
Flour was the most disappointing test. On both carpet and hard floor, the V16 Piston Animal failed to transfer about 30% of my test spillages into the collection bin. Some of this was left on the floor, particularly in a central smear where there’s a gap between the two rollers. I also found flour in various nooks and crannies around the floor head, including a surprising amount inside the rollers themselves.
Dyson has designed the new floor head to reflect the angular shape of the cones inside, so it has a point in the middle and tapers back at each side. Without a straight edge at the front, it’s impossible to push right into the corner of a room, so you’ll have to use an attachment to pick up dust and dirt from such places.
The vacuum has a colour screen that tells you how long the battery should last in minutes and seconds, which is genuinely useful, but it also flashes up information about how many microscopic particles it’s collected, of which I can’t see the point. New to this model is also a smartphone app, which I installed but didn’t appear to do anything useful.
Warranty, repairability and sustainability
Dyson’s cordless vacuum cleaners come with a two-year warranty, which covers defects in the materials and workmanship. It doesn’t include wear and tear, blockages or replacement filters.
All parts are available to buy as spares, from replacement rollers and filters to the main body of the unit. This means you should be able to keep a Dyson going for as long as the company keeps the parts available. To give you an idea of how long this might be, the oldest cordless vacuum that the Dyson website still has parts available for is the V6/DC56, which was launched in about 2013.
The Dyson support website is good, with plenty of instructional videos available to demonstrate cleaning and maintenance. There’s also a full library of manuals available as PDFs and a helpline if you need to speak to someone. If you’re not inclined to fix your own, there are plenty of independent repairers who will service Dyson products and attempt to fix things for you.
You can buy a refurbished vacuum from Dyson at a reduced cost. They come with a reduced one-year guarantee and might have small scratches and blemishes from their previous owners, but are delivered in full working order.
All Dyson vacuums come packaged in recyclable cardboard packaging.
Dyson V16 Piston Animal: should I buy it?
Dyson’s latest vacuum cleaners are never cheap, and this one is no exception. However, new models usually perform better than their predecessors, which goes some way to justifying the price increases. That doesn’t apply here, with the new All Floors Cones Sense head failing to perform as well in my cleaning tests as Dyson’s previous models.
That’s a huge disappointment for the V16 and one that makes it difficult to recommend. However, its arrival has conveniently pushed down the price of the better-performing Gen5detect to its most affordable yet at some places – at least at the time of writing – and that vacuum is well worth a look.
For more cleaning inspiration from the Filter:
The best cordless vacuum cleaners for a spotless home
The best robot vacuums, tested
The best steam cleaners and mops
Andy Shaw is a consumer journalist and technology addict. Having reviewed tech products professionally for more than 30 years, his favoured working environment is a small desk surrounded by big boxes. His greatest weakness is that he never, ever remembers how things came out of their packaging, so they rarely fit back in again when it’s time to return them
