You could be forgiven for thinking the vacuum cleaner market isn't particularly innovative. That's not the case though: in just over a year of testing and writing about vacuums I've seen vacuums with lasers, vacuums that are powered by AI, and vacuums that can tell you exactly what they're sucking up as they do so. And that's ignoring the more hum-drum but still impressive improvements to suction and battery life.
In all my testing, there's one feature that impressed me most... and it's even more notable because to start with, I was not sold on the idea at all: auto-emptying docks.
These are essentially a base that the vacuum slots into. Like any dock, it charges the vacuum up and provides somewhere for it to live when you're not using it, but it goes one step further than that by also emptying the onboard dust cup.
Pop the vacuum onto its perch and all the dust and debris accumulated on the previous cleaning session will whoosh out, via a closed system, into a larger bin in the base. You can see it in action in the video clip below.
I first saw one of these bases in action last year at a Shark press event. Auto-empty docks are an option on both the Shark PowerDetect Cordless and Detect Pro Cordless, and the Shark representative explained to me that this was going to be a big focus for the brand going forward. I was not sold at the time. Who would want one of these bulky docks in their home? And how hard is it to empty a cordless vacuum yourself, anyway?
A few months later I was sent a Samsung Bespoke AI Jet Ultra, which has an auto-empty dock as standard. As I set about testing it, I was struck by just how easy the emptying process was. Literally nothing was required of me – I simply put the vacuum into its dock and it did everything for me.
But what really drove home the benefits was when I started doing testing to compare the Samsung Bespoke and Dyson Gen5detect, which lacks a self-empty base. Suddenly, even with Dyson's ultra-smooth engineering, manually emptying a dust cup felt like something from the dark ages. There was dust getting down the side of the bin liner, and more floating in clouds around me. I had to stick my fingers in and dislodge a clump of hair.
It occurred to me at this point that the self-empty system would be great for allergy-sufferers. Everything is being sucked out via a closed system, so there's no opportunity for dust and allergens to escape back into the air. You then only need to empty the dock dustbin once in a blue moon.
Another benefit is that it means the manufacturer can get away with shrinking the onboard bin. That, in turn makes the vacuum lighter and more streamlined – both useful traits for a cordless stick vacuum.
The self-empty approach is very common amongst today's best robot vacuums. These have even smaller onboard bins, and are designed to be hands-off solutions, so it makes a ton of sense to offer self-emptying functionality there.
Shark is very much embracing the auto-empty dock approach with its manual cordless vacuums already. Provided you have space for the dock, I think they're a solid investment, and something we'll be seeing a lot more of in the future.
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