Dyson V11 Torque Drive Cordless Vacuum

For the past month, my preschooler has been into beads. Because they don’t have to live with her, my friends and family think it’s adorable. They send her printed ceramic ones, pink sparkly ones. She makes dozens of necklaces and bracelets and stores the beads in jars, which she leaves under the kitchen table for me to accidentally knock over and scatter across the floor.

Lately, I’ve been vacuuming the beads up! The Dyson V11 makes this possible. It can suck up beads that are bigger than a half-inch across. As long as you can stand the sound of beads rattling frantically in the vacuum’s bin, you’re golden.

Dyson’s cordless hybrid vacs are an exemplar of the form. For the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of testing a V11 Torque Drive, one of two V11 models. The V11 Animal is the other. The latest in Dyson’s series, it’s incredibly powerful, smart, convenient, and light enough for me to lift with one hand as I stand on a step stool and vacuum spiderwebs from my bedroom ceiling corners (using the crevice attachment).

I’ve owned a Dyson V7 for years, and my one complaint was that it wasn’t powerful enough to get a deep clean on my rugs. But the V11 can lift the rugs off my floor. Dog hair doesn’t stand a chance. Using it makes me feel like a mom in a commercial who derives a disturbing amount of pleasure from using the correct dishwasher soap. I’ve never had such a fun time vacuuming in my life.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the V11 on a variety of surfaces in my home—low-pile rugs matted with dog hair, the plastic and fabric surfaces of my car and couch, linoleum in the kitchen, and the cement in the garage. So far, it’s the best stick vac that I’ve ever used. But I have to admit that the improvements from last year’s V10 are incremental.

This year, Dyson’s engineers tweaked the motor’s design. The motor still runs at a mind-blowing 125,000 rpm, but they’ve introduced a triple diffuser and made the rotating blades longer, thinner, and with a slightly different S-shape. These changes are meant to improve airflow efficiency, increase suction, and reduce the noise. Dyson claims they give it 20 percent more suction power than the V10.

I measured it at 80 decibels (dB) on Boost mode on carpet, which is loud, but not unusually so (most alarm clocks ring in at around 80 dB). It went down to 70 dB on Eco mode on carpet.

The V11 also has an LCD screen. It sits at the top of the vacuum and lets you toggle between Eco, Auto, and Boost mode. In Eco mode, you can get up to an hour of run time; in Boost, I’ve found that a full battery normally gives me 10 to 12 minutes of run time, or enough time to clean a room or a couple rugs.