With the improvements in stick-vac performance, we’ve ratcheted up our tests for the category. We’ve made our pet hair tests a bit more challenging, and we now embed dirt in carpeting instead of scattering it on the surface as we used to do. For bare-floor testing, instead of combining all the debris into a messy array, we vacuum up each type separately.
Here’s how we assess stick vacuum performance in the following areas:
Bare floors: In separate tests, we scatter cereal, rice, and sand on a section of laminate flooring. We use four swipes to remove the cereal and rice and two to pick up the sand. We weigh the vacuum before and after to calculate how much debris it picked up.
Pet hair: We embed 1 gram of Maine coon cat hair in a medium-pile carpet and then see how many strokes it takes to remove it, with a maximum of five. We note the number of strokes and see how much fur, if any, is left behind on the carpet or in the brush roll.
Carpeting: We embed 100 grams of sand into a carpet and vacuum the debris at high speed for 16 strokes using a strobe light to highlight the test area. We weigh the vacuum before and after.
Run time: To test battery life, we time how long a cordless vac will run until the battery is depleted, first on high, and then again on low. If a vacuum has a medium setting (not every vacuum does), we test that, too.
