Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor Review

Introduction

Dyson might focus most of its efforts on its cordless vacuum cleaners, such as the Dyson Gen5detect, but for those who don’t want to be limited by battery power, the plug-in Dyson Multifloor Ball Animal is a great choice.

Overall performance is fantastic, and with a comprehensive selection of tools, this is a great upright vacuum cleaner that’s easy to manoeuvre.

Design and features

• 90-degree flexible hose
• 1.8l Bin
• No tangle bristles

An upright vacuum cleaner, the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor stands out from the competition because of the large ball at its base. This is designed to make it easy to push the vacuum cleaner around, quickly changing direction when you need to. It really works, too, and this is the most manoeuvrable plug-in vacuum cleaner that I’ve tested.

At 7.6kg, this vacuum is heavier than many cordless cleaners, but the ball makes it easy to push around, so you shouldn’t have to lift it often.

The Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor is simple to use with one button that needs to be pressed to turn the vacuum cleaner on and off, with a single power mode.

Next to the power switch is a button that turns the motorised floor head on and off, with the latter useful for hard floors, where a brush can end up flicking debris around.

Dyson has used its anti-tangle floor head, which has bristles arranged in a pattern to prevent hair from wrapping around them.

A problem with plug-in cleaners can be that they generate so much suction power that they’re hard to push around. To help combat this, the floor head has a slider on the floor head that allows you to adjust air flow.

Dirt is sucked into the 1.8-litre bin, which is big enough to easily hold dust from a whole-house clean. There’s Dyson’s familiar ejection mode, so it’s easy to push dirt out and into a bin without making a mess.

There’s a washable filter inside the bin, too.

The Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor comes with a fantastic selection of tools for all sorts of different scenarios, with storage onboard for two tools. The accessories include a 2-in-1 crevice tool, dusting brush, stair tool and an anti-tangle turbine tool for dealing with pet hair.

Usefully, there’s also a Flat out head, which is a low-profile floor head for getting under hard-to-reach places, such as low sofas.

This tool works well and makes the vacuum cleaner very flexible.

To use the accessories, the handle flips open and a long wand is pulled out. Accessories clip onto the end of this wand, which gives great reach and even makes it easy to clean higher up, such as around the tops of walls.

Dyson also provides a 90-degree hose in the box, which angles tools to make it easier to vacuum on the tops of cupboards, wardrobes and the like.

For the most-part, then, the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor is very flexible, but the wand can be frustrating. As attachments only clip to the end of the wand, and the wand can’t be shortened, I found it fiddly to try and vacuum some areas, such as the top of a counter. The vacuum seems designed for operating at distance.

I also found the clip that holds the plug and wire to be slightly finicky. It often came off and didn’t clip on properly.

Performance

• Great Suction
• Fantastic at tackling hair

To test the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor, first I measured the suction power in AirWatts (AW). At the handle the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor returned a result of 203AW. That’s slightly below the maximum power of the Dyson Gen5detect and a little behind the plug-in Shark Stratos NZ860UKT.

However, this level of suction is constant, unlike with a cordless cleaner that typically produces under 100AW for regular jobs.

This power level is great for using the crevice tool, and I found that this vacuum cleaner could remove rice grains from 2.5cm away. That means that handheld jobs, such as cleaning out a car or sucking up dust from a DIY job should be fast.

Up next was my standard carpet test, sprinkling 20g of flour onto the carpet. Giving the cleaner a pass forwards and backwards across the carpet I found it left a clean strip through the middle of the carpet and picked up well around the edges.

Giving it a few more swipes over the carpet until it looked clean, I found that the cleaner had collected 94.35% of the dirt, which is excellent.

Next up was the edge test, sprinkling 10g of flour on the skirting board. Running the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor along the skirting I found that it had collected 92% of dirt, however some of it did fall out of the bristles as I moved the cleaner.

I then sprinkled 20g of rice a hard floor and then let the Dyson Multifloor Animal pick up the mess. Overall, I found that it collected 100% of the mess which is fantastic meaning you will get impeccable cleaning results on hard flooring.

Moving on to my pet hair test, I combed some pet hair into the carpet. The Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor showed no difficulty picking up the pet hair.

To test the bristles against human hair I dropped some long strands onto the carpet. Once again, I found that the vacuum cleaner had no issue with picking up the hair and it did not become tangled in the bristles and was stored in the bin and ready to be disposed of.

The same is true when using the mini-tool, which picked up long human hair without getting tangled.

At 67.8dB, the Dyson Ball Animal Multifloor was relatively quiet, and I did not find the noise to be intrusive or irritable.

Should you buy it?