My spouse and I are tired parents. We’ve come to terms with living in a messy home so long as we have a preschooler and preadolescent living under our roof. While we’re still working on creating those “Okay, you played with your Lego bricks, now put them away” habits, we still have the perpetual, unavoidable crumbs, spills, dust, and dog hair that need to be regularly removed from our kitchen and living room floors. But given all of the above, regularly is an aspirational term.
When we bought our house, we splurged on a Dyson Outsize—the vacuum giant’s biggest cordless vacuum—that’s still chugging after five years. It’s a great tool for cleaning our wood floors and carpets, but some days it feels like just too much trouble to pick it up and give the floor a quick sweep.
So when I saw Dyson’s sleek wand-style PencilVac, the “Dyson” part certainly piqued my interest. But I also brought a healthy dose of skepticism to just how effective such a small sweeper could be. I used the PencilVac in my house for a month to figure out if this was the missing piece of my daily tidying up arsenal or just a $600 (MSRP) broom.
What is the Dyson PencilVac?
Dyson’s cordless vacuums have, to me, always looked like the weapon a cartoonish hero in some kid-friendly video game might tote around. The PencilVac bucks that colorful trigger-action trend, slimming down and streamlining to just the essentials. The result is a vacuum that looks like a slightly beefed up carpet sweeper.
Dyson crammed the battery, motor, and dust bin all into the 1.5-inch diameter handle, which clicks into a hexagonal motorized cleaning head. That shape is unique to the Fluffycones version, which features two pairs of fuzzy cone-shaped rollers at the front and rear of the vacuum head. (There’s also a less expensive, rectangular Fluffy model with a single cylindrical roller.) The microfiber-esque texture, Dyson says, allows for the cones to pick up hair without tangles.
The controls are simple, a button push to turn on and another to temporarily increase its power, turbo mode, if you will. Speaking of power, despite its small size, Dyson claims it’s their fastest motor ever at 140,000 rpm, which can run for 30 minutes. Also on board are front and rear green LED lights that, if you haven’t experienced before, may horrify you as you shine them on undisturbed dust-caked areas of your home you erroneously thought looked in the clear.
The dust bin chamber, housed fully integrated into the shaft of the handle, empties with what the brand calls a “syringe” action. You press a button to release and slide the chamber down while a seal pushes all of the dust and debris straight into the garbage. The cleaning head also clicks off and you can swap for the included “combi” crevice tool, which has that long, skinny attachment you’ve seen with many vacuums along with a connected brush head that pivots to accommodate cleaning at different angles.
The whole thing charges in an upright standing position on a circular base with a magnetic bracket that holds the vacuum in place, plus provides a spot to stash the crevice and brush accessory.
What I liked about the Dyson PencilVac
The one plus of clunkier vacuums with hose attachments is their flexibility in tight spaces. With the right attachments, my rigid Outsize is pretty good at reaching into corners. But the larger motor and chamber at the handle end means the angles you can access are sometimes limited. With the PencilVac and crevice tool attachment, I was able to do unthinkable things, like slip it between my steam radiators and the wall and flatten it down to run under the legs of chairs and bookshelves with the PencilVac’s 3.5-inch clearance. Cleaning the dust out of the corners of my stairs didn’t require nearly as much arm endurance, either. And I found that with the roller head on, there was good edge-to-edge suction in most floor cleaning scenarios, meaning I didn’t have to finagle it at different angles to catch every bit of dirt against a wall or cabinet toe kick. Plus, it was powerful enough for finer bits like hair and dust or larger debris like cereal and the occasional large Lego brick.
The fluffy cones were gentle on our tile floor kitchen and wood floors around the house without fear of scratching or otherwise damaging them (my kids do enough of that already) while still sweeping away most of the visible dirt exposed by that haunting green light. We’ve often got cords and cables strewn across the room or one haphazardly tossed toddler sock hiding under furniture. Unlike the more powerful, relentless rollers on my larger Dyson or other vacuums I’ve used, the PencilVac’s Fluffycones don’t act like they’re reeling in a deep-sea fishing line, tangling up precious laptop wires or shoelaces, and they often stop spinning automatically when they meet such resistance.
At four pounds, it’s lightweight enough to pull out the moment a crummy spill happens. It’s so light, my kids (8 and 3) even wanted to use it, which felt a lot less precarious than putting the Outsize to their tiny hands.
Yes, you read that right. My kids wanted to clean the house.
What I didn’t like about the Dyson PencilVac
A cool feature of my larger Dyson vacuum is that it senses when it’s on hard floors or carpet and adjusts its suction accordingly. I didn’t expect the PencilVac to unearth anything new from the carpet fibers, and it sufficed as a surface sweeper on rugs, but I have a pair of textured Waterhog doormats at the entrances to my home and found that even with the more powerful turbo mode activated, the PencilVac left debris in the recesses.
And though it’s slim, I wish the PencilVac had a wall-mounted charger like other Dyson’s. The freestanding base takes up floor real estate, and it almost seems as though Dyson wants you to display it as a freestanding sculpture in your home. Space is at a premium in my kitchen, and the rest of my crowded, kid-ravaged home isn’t much better.
The syringe-like emptying mechanism works well, but, as this is a small vacuum, it fills up pretty fast. I found I would give the floors a once-over and then need to empty (and charge) the vacuum to be ready for the next use.
Also worth noting: The pads that seal the chamber would get caked with dust and hair a bit, making the sliding action sticky. And, after a while, the dust would even impede the clicking latch that holds the chamber in place from fully closing. This could be solved by removing the whole bin chamber and cleaning off the pads, but it’s not as slick as the Dyson instructional videos made it seem.
Speaking of instructions, the printed ones provided are minimal as Dyson relies on its app to show you to use features.
Should you buy the Dyson PencilVac?
For homes and apartments with wood, tile, or other hard floors, the PencilVac might be the only vacuum you need. It’s versatile enough to clean in a variety of situations while handy enough for daily use.
If you’ve got wall-to-well carpets and you’re buying a vacuum cold, as in you don’t have one at all, I think your first buy should be a larger, more powerful Dyson or Shark stick-style vacuum. With the right attachments, larger bin, and more robust motor performance, you’re going to find it does just about everything you’ll need it to do, plus pull all the dirt and hair from your carpets.
However, if you have one of those already and, like me, you’re finding it sits in the corner or hanging on the charging dock most days, you might appreciate having a sleek little stick vacuum sweeper at the ready for those all those in-between maintenance chores that make your deep-cleaning days a little less frequent or intense. Just make sure you have a place to put it.