At a glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Self-emptying dock
- Jointed to fit under furniture
- Anti-hair wrap
- Detects cleaning direction
Cons
- Dock takes up floor space
- Additional tools to store
- Pricey
Our Verdict
If you vacuum often, or have large areas of flooring to keep clean, Shark’s PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet Vacuum Cleaner would be a good fit. It reduces emptying frequency, will spot dirt for you and increase suction, plus its reverse technology ensures great pick-up in both directions. However, it’s unwieldy as a handheld and the chunky dock’s size and shape makes finding a home for it awkward.
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Best Prices Today: Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet Vacuum Cleaner
$399.99
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could empty the vacuum for you? That’s the premise behind Shark’s PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet Vacuum Cleaner (IP3251UKT in the UK, IP3251 in the US): a stick vac that, much like some robot vacuums, whooshes dirt into its charging dock after every cleaning session.
So, not only is the dust cup empty every time you vacuum, you’ll only have to empty the main dock every so often: perfect for busy family homes and pet owners.
Add to this an auto-reversing brush, a detect mode that senses dirt and ramps up suction, and a jointed design that ducks low, and vacuuming large or messy areas could become far less of a chore.
To see how this Shark model stacks up against the competition, have a look at our round-up of the best vacuum cleaners we’ve tested.
Design & Build
- Large dock
- Hair-wrap resist brush rolls
- Vacuums both forwards and in reverse
While the design of most stick vacuums has gone down the route of being unobtrusive as possible and wall-mounted, Shark’s PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet vacuum is a different beast. Here, the emphasis is on providing as much functionality as possible.
For example, you’ll find a sizeable dock (H86 x W22 x 31cm and 4.7kg) that provides its charging and emptying, with a single slot for storing the crevice tool.
This takes up room on the floor, as well as height: while the vacuum can also fold double for storage, when it’s charging on the dock, it’ll have to be upright. And since it’s 1.18m tall, finding a spot for it near a plug socket may be tricky.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
There’s an additional flat section for the other two tools, a soft brush and a motorised pet one, which could live on a shelf. Bear in mind that if you buy it in the US, the motorised pet tool isn’t included.
Fortunately, the trade-off is some incredibly good tech: there are two brush rolls that resist hair wrapping around them, sensors that adjust the speed of the brushes and suction to the floor type, edge detection that increases suction at the sides and corners of a room, and dirt detection that boosts suction when it spots debris.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
What’s most notable though, is that the brush rolls work just as well in reverse, potentially reducing the number of passes for a speedier clean. The controls are also pleasingly simple: there’s one button for on and off, a screen that shows the mode and how much charge is left, and a trigger to switch between eco, detect and turbo suction modes.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Performance & Features
- Floor lights change colour to match the mode
- Scent capsule in the dock
- No spare battery
There are a lot of things theShark’s PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet vacuum does well. This list includes the lights on the floor head that change colour to indicate the suction level in detect mode: making it simple to see at a glance what the vac is up to and a big improvement on squinting at a screen, especially in bright light.
Another is a light on the floor head that turns on when it senses dark areas. The dock also auto empties when you place the vacuum on it – fortunately, there’s a switch to disable it so you don’t wake the whole household.
However, others aren’t quite as laudable. We struggled to find a good spot for the PowerDetect to live while testing it – on the dock, it’s bulky and the power cable isn’t long, meaning that it can’t be too far away from a socket.
Then there are features that exist in a grey area, such as a scent capsule on the dock. This solves the potential problem of odours that the dock could create as it can store mess for up to 45 days. The scent is also spread around your home as you vacuum but it’s subtle.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
We felt that a spare battery would be an improvement as the vac only comes with one. Although it is removable, we couldn’t find replacements in stock at Shark. In detect mode, it ramps the power up when necessary, so it’s easy to run through its charge in 30 minutes or so. If a floor is dirty, it won’t get anywhere near the 70-minute runtime its manufacturers suggest, which is in eco mode without a motorised tool attached.
The cleaning performance does go some way to offsetting these issues, though. We tested the PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet Vacuum Cleaner IP3251UKT on both hard flooring and a mid-pile carpet, using flour as dust and oats as larger debris.
On the hard floor, both flour and oats were easily picked up on eco mode. In detect mode, we noticed that the floor head changed to purple when picking up oats for heavy debris, and pink when it was picking up lighter patches of flour.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
On the soft flooring, we found that the eco mode didn’t have quite enough power to completely pick up the flour on the first pass. We switched to detect mode and vacuumed until the lights turned white (no heavy debris detected) from their pink ‘debris detected’ colour.
When we continued to vacuum the soft flooring, we noticed that detect mode could sometimes ramp up the suction too much. This made the floor head tricky to push around but was resolved by switching to eco mode.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
We also noticed that after about 10 minutes of heavy use, the handle could grow quite warm, so it’s best to choose turbo only when necessary. After cleaning, we noted that there was no hair wrapped around the brush rolls.
We also tried the motorised pet attachment. It was good at picking up fur, but we found cleaning with it hard for long periods, as the handheld vacuum section is quite heavy (1.9kg).
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
The downside of all this tech is that inevitably, there’s more maintenance to keep the vacuum in good working order. Not only is there a filter on the dock to clean as well as the vacuum, each one of the floor head sensors has to be kept free from dirt so they work as designed.
Price & Availability
In the UK, the Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet Vacuum Cleaner has launched with a price of £549.99 and that’s what you’ll pay if you buy from the Shark website or Currys. Still, it’s already available for £500 if you buy it from Very or John Lewis. But Appliances Direct has the best price overall: £465.
In the US, the vacuum is called the Shark Cordless PowerDetect Clean & Empty System and it had a launch price of $499.99, but it’s now widely available for $449.99 from online retailers including Shark, Home Depot, Best Buy and Kohl’s. Bu the best price is currently from Amazon, where it’s $427.49.
If it isn’t the right model for you, see our top recommendations for the best vacuum cleaners we’ve tested.
Should you buy the Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet vacuum?
If you dislike emptying your vacuum often, Shark’s PowerDetect Clean & Empty Cordless Pet vacuum should march straight to the top of your wish list. It’s great at cleaning hard and soft flooring, excellent at picking up hair without clogging, and it’s strangely satisfying to watch dust and mess being whisked away into the dock.
But it’s not without its flaws: its battery and the sometimes power-hungry detect mode aren’t equally matched, especially if you’re cleaning large areas or like to do all your vacuuming in one. In this, it’s better for daily cleans.
