Review: Dyson Big Ball Animal is a beast of a cleaner

Unless you have a very obsessive interest in home cleaning, vacuuming is tedious. There is getting around it. But if you don’t want to be living in your own filth – either obvious or microscopic in nature – eventually you’re going to have push a vacuum around the place. The best thing you can hope for is that it can be done quickly and to a level that means you get another week’s reprieve before you have to do it again.

That means you’ll need a decent vacuum cleaner. My first vacuum I bought because it was super cheap and I liked the colour. The only thing I actually researched was whether it had a Hepa filter (it did). I’ve never made that mistake again. Emptying vacuum bags into a bin – giving the surrounding area a nice coating of dust and dirt in the process – taught me I wanted something bagless. Having to redo carpets because they just didn’t seem clean taught me the wisdom of making sure the vacuum had adequate suction. And awkwardly dragging the (nice-coloured) machine around the place made me swear the next one I got would be easy to manoeuvre.

That's something Dyson has been working on for its Cinetic line. The company brought in the ball design for its vacuum cleaners a while back, with the idea that it would be easier to move around the home. The latest version, the Dyson Cinetic Big Ball, has refined this so the cleaner will re-right itself if you knock it over. It's like a grown up version of the Weebles: it wobbles, but it won't fall down. If Weebles did the housework, that is.

Easier to manoeuvre

It’s possible to upend the previous versions of the Dyson Ball cleaners, but they’re still far easier to manoeuvre than other vacuum cleaners. Still, the engineers at Dyson have done a bit of tinkering and come up with a new design that forces the vacuum to right itself. Every time (I tried it).

That aside, there are two other important differences with the new machine, and they both relate to the bin. The first is that it’s bigger, about a third bigger than its predecessor, so you don’t have to empty it quite as regularly. Personally I prefer to empty it after each use, because I hate seeing the dust and fluff build up, but now you can leave it a few sessions before emptying it. The second is how it empties. Before, you would open the bin, hold it over a rubbish bag, shake out the dust and dirt, and then have to find something long and thin to try to pull out the fluff that had gathered in there and was stubbornly refusing to budge. The previous Cinetic cleaner even gave you a plastic implement to make it easier.

Improved mechanism

The new version goes a step better. Instead of just popping the lid open and hoping for the best, the Dyson Cinetic Big Ball now has a piece inside that forces all the dust and fluff out of the bin. No more chopsticks, no more messing about.

The Cinetic has no filters to wash either, so that’s another inconvenience dealt with, and it has the most recent Dyson digital motor to power it.

The most important thing though is if the cleaner is any good. The short answer? It is. The suction on this thing is amazing. At one point, it lifted some carpet away from the floor, so it had no problem removing a satisfactory amount of dust from the same floor. The Animal comes with tools that will suit all floor types, including the impressive muscle head tool that actually stuck itself to my wooden floors before I realised I needed to change the setting.

The good:

It works. It will pull the dust and dirt you didn’t know had taken up residence in your carpet right out of there and leave it in a small pile of shame at the bottom of the bin. Speaking of dirt, Dyson has made it easier to empty the device, so you no longer need to get at it with a chopstick or a skewer to get all the fluff out of the vacuum cleaner.

The not so good:

Dyson products usually come with a slightly higher than average price tag. If you want, you can pick up a vacuum cleaner for less than €80 that will last you a while and keep your home clean. We just can’t guarantee it will do as good a job, and you’ll probably have to shell out for extra bags and Hepa filters over time.

The rest:

It’s not only bagless, but like its Cinetic predecessor, it’s filterless too. So no filters to keep rinsing every month and your vacuum will still stay in top dirt-sucking form. It’s almost impossible to kick over too, as it rights itself as it goes.

Verdict:

Dyson delivers again – preapred to be disgusted by what your regular cleaner misses.