Every once in a while I like to go completely off the rails and review something that barely (if at all) overlaps into the technology world. This is one of those times. For Christmas I asked Steve for the Dyson V7 Motorhead cordless vacuum cleaner … in the color fuchsia.
I clearly remember when I was a kid watching Let’s Make a Deal. Someone would have a choice of three doors and they would pick the one with the goat and be really disappointed that they didn’t win the washer/dryer combo. I thought they were nuts! Why would you not want a goat? That would be awesome! Why would you want something that made you do chores? (Thanks to @marinaepelman for the XKCD link to what I’m talking about.)
While I still think it would be cool to have a goat, I now get why an appliance can bring joy. We’ll have to get to the problem to be solved before you can see the joyful part.
Let’s say you’ve got cats as I do, and they seem to find great sport in kicking as much sand out of the litter box as possible when they jump out. Or you’ve got a dog who has never once been allowed on the couch while you’re home, and yet you often catch her with your Wyzecam snoozing on your couch when you’re away. Even without the surveillance cameras, you might be clued in by the dog hair all over the couch when you get home. Or maybe you’ve got a small child prone to knocking over plants or dropping cheerios and smashing them into dust on the kitchen floor.
When faced with these annoyances, you have two choices. A) Drag out the giant vacuum which is always farther away than you wish it was, unwrap the 38-foot cord, find an open plug that somehow is 37 feet from the mess, and then stretch to clean up the mess, and spend a half hour rewinding the extension cord. Or B) pretend the mess isn’t there and wait until it’s time to do a full vacuum of the house making it worth all the trouble of getting out the vacuum. If you’re lucky enough to have a housekeeper, maybe you wait until he or she comes to clean up after you.
I can tell you that I’m much more prone to option B) because it’s such a pain to get out the real vacuum. I even have a Dyson which is a glorious piece of machinery for vacuuming carpets. But it’s heavy — especially problematic if the mess in question is upstairs — and it doesn’t do well on tile which is where the rotten cats play in the cat litter. I also have a central vacuum system, but I can tell you that winding up the hose is a huge deterrent that makes it really easy to procrastinate rather than clean.
Back in 1979, Black & Decker invented the DustBuster to solve this very problem. They came up with this small, handheld, battery-operated vacuum that was a dream come true. But it really only did the small, handheld jobs and we’ve got more problems to solve than that.
Enter the most awesome vacuum I’ve ever owned, the Dyson V7 Motorhead. The beauty of the Motorhead design is that it can be a small, hand-held unit, or a full-length vacuum that reaches the floor with a long tube. It’s so versatile that you can stand and vacuum the couch with the hand-held part or vacuum the floor without bending over. Heck, you can add attachments to the long floor tube and reach the corners of the ceiling to get that creepy spider.
We should talk about the attachments because again, they spark joy. They attach with a very satisfying red click button. My central vacuum hose attachments only go on with friction and they fall off all the time. I’m always having to shove them back on. With the V7 Motorhead, that satisfying click tells me it’s on until I want it off. I know this sounds like a small thing but if it’s joyful it makes you want to use it.
I got the V7 Motorhead with Mattress Tool Bundle, which includes the brushy floor vacuum piece, a narrow attachment for getting in corners, a small round brush and what they call the mattress tool, but I call the “get Tesla’s hair off the couch” tool.
The V7 Motorhead is battery operated, so you have no long extension cord to have to deal with as you move around and no long hose to wind up when you’re done. Steve used the included wall mount to put it up in our laundry room. The mount is really cool because it holds all of the attachments, and of course, the red click button is what holds them in the wall mount. You pop the vacuum in and out and it automatically is charging when you have it in the mount. Very slick.
One of the other annoying things about vacuuming is dealing with the disposal of the things you sucked up. The V7 Motorhead makes this as easy as possible. I won’t go for sparking joy with this one because it’s still gross, but it’s as painless as it could be made. As with all Dyson vacuums, they have a clear chamber so you can see what’s whirling around inside that you’ve captured. No need to wonder if it’s full, you can see when it needs to be emptied.
With the attachments off, you walk to a trash can (hopefully outside) and simply pull up on the top of the vacuum. The bottom of the cylinder simply pops open, dropping all of the nasty stuff out. You then push the top back down and flap the bottom closed and you’re ready to do more spider hunting.
The V7 Motorhead also has a removable filter that “ensures that the air leaving the machine is cleaner than the air you breathe” and it can be removed and cleaned. We should probably clean that filter one of these days…
In practical use, I can say that I’m cleaning up after the rotten cats probably 2-3 times a week now when I used to do it maybe every 2 weeks before. Like when company was coming over. We do have a housekeeper and she really likes it for getting the pet hair off of the couches and for doing the tile floors. She has found that the battery won’t last through both of those projects though. Her strategy is to do one of the jobs right away, put it back on the charger while she does other chores, and by the time she’s ready to do the second job it’s charged enough to complete it.
I tried using the V7 Motorhead to vacuum my car and it really wasn’t the right tool for the job. It’s too big to really be able to manipulate into the corners and get around the seats and such. A pity really because I hate dragging out the vacuum hose to do my car!
If you’ve ever priced anything made by Dyson, you’ll know that they are very expensive. The Dyson V7 Motorhead with Mattress Tool Bundle is $300 on Amazon. I know two other people who have this vacuum and they both swear by it too, so it’s not just me. If you can find a device that sparks joy when doing icky chores, maybe it’s time to make your life a little easier.