I was surprised how easy the vacuum was to push around and maneuver. Like the original PowerDetect before it, the PowerDetect Speed pulls forward a little bit as you vacuum. Compared to some Dyson vacuums, where you really have to put your arm into it to get across a thick rug, the PowerDetect Speed is a breeze to push—It puts the speed in Speed, if you will.
Video: Nena Farrell
The wand also bends, so you can easily vacuum underneath furniture without needing to physically bend over. On my first few runs, though, I found it easy to get the head locked in its upright position, but as I got the hang of the vacuum (and broke it in more) that stopped happening.
I also really like that the PowerDetect Speed's vacuum head can sense the type of floor you're on, plus how dirty that floor is, and adjust its speed accordingly. The Clean & Empty version, aka the version that comes with a base station, also has two lights built into the motor bar to better spot debris: a blue laser light for when you're on hard floors and a brighter headlight for carpet cleans.
Outpacing the Competition
I tested the Shark PowerDetect Speed and nearly every current Dyson vacuum in five different cleanup tests—sand, Cheerios, litter, stairs, and general carpet vacuuming, and scored each one. The Shark PowerDetect Speed scored a 15 out of 20, only ranking behind the much pricier Dyson Gen5Detect ($800) and Dyson V16 Piston Animal ($980). It scored one point ahead of the Dyson V10 Konical and four points ahead of the Dyson V15 Detect and new V8 Cyclone, which is particularly impressive given that the V15 Detect is so much pricier and comes with an extra cleaner head. The PowerDetect Speed only really got dinged for getting stuck upright when I vacuumed the stairs, but that hasn’t been an issue since really breaking it in.
It got perfect scores vacuuming both sand and Cheerios off of rugs, and it also did better on a thin rug than just about all of Dyson's lineup. (Dyson's vacuums mostly struggled with whether or not they wanted to suction up the whole rug, while Shark had no issues.) It did need more passes on hard floor messes (like litter) than some of the Dyson vacuums, particularly the Dysons with the newer Fluffy Optic head, but it performed similarly outside of this special brush head comparison.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Photograph: Nena Farrell
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