If you haven’t used a vacuum with a headlight, you’re missing out.
Like, you’re actually missing debris.
The naked eye can spot big stuff like tufts of pet fur and crumbs, but individual hairs or fibers or dust might as well be invisible.
Carpets can at least show tracks where you’ve already vacuumed. A bare wood or laminate floor offers no feedback at all. So without a visual aid such as a headlight, you can easily leave tons of hair and dust behind.
Any headlight is good. Some Dyson stick vacuums have a green headlight that’s especially great, as its low angle and high contrast combine to reveal an incredible (incredibly disgusting?) amount of debris on bare floors, even in a relatively bright room.
I’ve reviewed more than 100 vacuum cleaners and seen loads of gimmicks, but the green Dyson headlight is one of the rare features that I actually missed having after I returned the test model.
That green laser made me want to get up and clean, simply because it showed me that I wasn’t wasting my time. I know intellectually that if I can vacuum in straight, predictable lines, I won’t miss any spots on the floor. But it’s easier to stay engaged when I can actually see what I’m cleaning.
Like most Dyson gear, that green headlight does not come cheap. The cleaning head with the built-in laser costs $120, is chronically out of stock, and works with only a few Dyson vacuum models. For a complete vacuum that includes the headlight, the cost is $350 at a minimum, and that’s for a refurbished unit. As much as I love the laser, it isn’t worth that much to me.
My hopes for a reunion were raised when I started seeing ads on TikTok for cheap green lights that can stick to the side of almost any vacuum. If all headlights are good headlights, maybe an add-on light would beat the weak, white LEDs that most other vacuums use, even if it couldn’t match the Dyson one.
Or would it feel more like a frustrating half-measure that mostly just got in the way?
Sticking this lamp to the side of your vacuum cleaner head makes spotting dust, hair, and other tiny debris on bare floors much easier. It’s green, rechargeable, and packed with a handful of extra Velcro strips.
Amazon carries a handful of these stick-on vacuum lights. (And none of them appear to be lasers, like the Dyson light—just green LEDs, though that isn’t necessarily a problem.)
I chose this vacuum light from a storefront called Bahuun because it had the best ratings and was roughly the same price as all the others. Vacuum Wars, a great review channel on YouTube, also found that the Bahuun light was much brighter than its competitors, including Dyson’s laser.
Wirecutter bought a Bahuun light and shipped it to my house for some testing, including a head-to-head trial with the genuine article: the Dyson V12.
My first few minutes with the Bahuun light didn’t inspire much confidence. Mounting it on my old, ordinary-shaped Dyson V11 was kludgy. The bulging lamp is just as ugly and awkward in person as it looks in the ads. And the first time I had to bend over and press the power switch, it hit me that there would be occasions when I just wouldn’t bother to turn this thing on.
But once I began cleaning, I started to really like the Bahuun light, even in comparison with the Dyson V12.
You can see everything. Even in a brightly lit room, the Bahuun light could still illuminate the floors enough for me to spot dust and individual hairs. (It might actually show too much: My wife told me she hated how it lit up all the scratches and divots in our old wood floors.) As annoying as it can be to turn on the Bahuun light at the beginning of a session, it’s nice that the light stays on even when the vacuum isn’t running—the Dyson light, in contrast, illuminates only when the vacuum is actively, loudly cleaning.
Never doubt Velcro. I worried that the bulging Bahuun light would fly away whenever I mushed it against a baseboard or table leg. But even when I intentionally slammed the light against sturdy furniture, it refused to fall off. I guess this is more of an endorsement of the ol’ hook-and-loop tech than the Bahuun lamp itself, but kudos to the sellers for choosing Velcro instead of a regular adhesive sticker.
The mounting is actually pretty flexible. Based on its shape and the logo orientation, the Bahuun light seems like it’s supposed to be mounted on the left side of the cleaning head. That’s a problem for a lot of vacuums—including most Dyson models and some Shark vacuums, among others—because on that side it would block access to the buttons and access ports that make it easier to clear tangles and clogs.
But mounting on the right side works just fine: I flipped mine upside down, and after I did a bit of fiddling to get the positioning right, the lighting worked great. Since the Velcro strips are so strong, the two patches don’t even need to line up perfectly to make a solid connection. On your vacuum’s cleaning head, you need to have space for a stick-on patch that’s about 2 by 1 inches, but as long as that space is somewhere on the side, it should be fine.
So I like this little lamp. I’m also not ready to tell anyone to rush out and buy it, because I think the novelty will wear off, and like loads of other gadgets and accessories that are useful but also clunky to deal with, it’s probably destined for a spot in the junk drawer.
There will be a day when the battery runs out midsession, and I’ll be feeling too lazy to do anything about it, and it’ll just sit there dead for a while. Once I finally get around to plugging it in, I have a feeling it’ll stay attached to the charger for a while.
What everyone should root for instead is more vacuum cleaners with high-contrast, low-angle lights built into their heads, from more brands and at reasonable prices. It’s frustrating that lighting gets treated like a luxury feature when the cost of LEDs and laser diodes is so low—less than a dollar for the raw parts, according to some listings on AliExpress. Dyson was somehow granted a patent for a vacuum cleaner head with a built-in green laser, so other manufacturers will need to find a workaround for the next couple of decades. Blue or red?
On the other hand, the Bahuun dust lamp is only $20, it does exactly what it says it will, and it does that job well, in some ways even better than the version it’s knocking off. Maybe you’ll use yours regularly—at least long enough to bridge the gap to your next vacuum, one with a built-in headlight.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
