We have never owned a vacuum cleaner like the Dyson Cyclone V10 that needs to be cleaned as often as you use it.
It’s like a delicate flower that only wants to hoover up breadcrumbs and pet hair. As soon as you add dust or powdered dirt to the equation, you have major dramas.
We’ve had this Dyson model for a while now (well over a year) and its whining is starting to wear thin. The V10 ‘pulses’ and chokes telling you a filter needs cleaning. This is endless.
Quite honestly, you’d expect this level of inconvenience from a cheapo brand, not a vacuum that sells for £500. We’ve owned cheap hoovers from Kenwood, LG and Vax in the past, and none of them choked up like this.
Despite Dyson’s innovation claims and pretentious ads on TV, maybe they should go back to the drawing board and invent a premium vacuum that is capable of sucking up some dust and not choking; like a vacuum should.
Today, my patience with it came to an end. We had some dusty work done in our bathroom, and the dust settled into the bedroom carpet. The carpet attachment that comes with Dyson Cyclone V10 is excellent, but after a few minutes, the filter clogged up. Standard practice. When this happens you can’t use it until the filter is washed and has dried naturally.
We put the filter back in a few hours later, and the other alert started flashing, causing the Dyson to pulse again. I dismantled the V10 completely and there are NO obstructions or issues. The filters are clean. Yet it refuses to turn on. It’s beyond annoying and frustrating.
The next step is for us to call their support team and try and figure out what’s wrong.
Dyson Cyclone V10 versus Karcher SE 4001
At the opposite end of the spectrum we have the Karcher SE 4001. Corded. Yellow. Bulky. Collection bag. Not flashy.
But it is unflinching in performance. This vacuum just wants to get rid of dirt and it is supremely good at it. The only fault is the attachments are not good at extracting dirt or dust from carpet fibres. That’s why we bought the Dyson.
Despite its reputation, this Karcher is not an industrial vacuum, and it’s become our go-to vacuum at home – dust, sand, ash, wood shavings, dried mud, dirt. Nothing stands in its way. It’s just what you’d expect from a hoover.
The collection bag gets emptied every 4-5 months, unlike the tiny Dyson container that needs to get emptied every five minutes.
We’re losing faith in Dyson, and very quickly at that. Other than looking flashy and having a great carpet attachment, this is actually a mediocre vacuum with an overinflated price tag. I don’t think we’d buy another one again.
It’ll be interesting if we can resuscitate the V10.
Feedback from Dyson support
Update: 15 February 2020: We contacted Dyson customer support via Twitter. Their response time was excellent. They said that we had not given the washable filter sufficient time to dry – we left it overnight in the airing cupboard.
According to Dyson it needs 48 hours to dry. I raised the obvious issue with them – we can’t use the V10 without the filter as it simply won’t start so what were we supposed to do for two days while it dried. Their solution was to send us a spare filter that we can interchange while it dries.
It begs the question why it doesn’t ship with two to start with, because this filter gets choked up very, very quickly and regularly.
We’ve left the filter to dry for 48 hours, and I’ve given the Dyson Cyclone V10 a good clean inside, and there are no obvious places where it can be blocked. I’m skeptical that the filer drying time is the issue. But we’ll wait and see. Update to follow in 48 hours.
So the update after 48 hours is that the Dyson is working again. But it’s ridiculous isn’t it? It clogs up very, very quickly, and it need two days to dry so you can use it again. Not very innovative in my opinion, and certainly not worth the extortionate price tag.