Dyson V11 at Dyson.com:
Dyson V10 on Amazon:
One of the most obvious differences between the V10 and V11 is the new display screen on the V11. Using the little button you can toggle between low med and high power as well as auto mode. It shows you an expected battery life time, which changes depending on which mode and attachment you are using. It can also show you when to change the filter and similar alerts.
It does seem that this exact version of the LCD screen is only available on the on the V11 Torque Drive and Absolute versions but not the Animal version but more on those kinds of things in the review this Friday.
Another new feature on the V11 is the High Torque Cleaner head which has a sensor, that can tell if you are vacuuming hard floors or carpets, and it will boost the suction for carpets for a better deep clean. I actually really liked this feature, it did seem to work well and it really does seem optimize battery life.
The other changes are less obvious so lets jump into the tests.
The first thing is the suction power, the new V11 seems to be much more powerful than the V10. We tested its suction at 111 inches of water lift or about 28k Pascal’s which is crazy high for an upright, and borderline ridiculous for a cordless vacuum. But to the point of this video its up from about 84 inches on the V10 which was the highest I have ever seen on a cordless vacuum until now.
As far as airflow which I would consider as much or more important than suction we measured both the V10 and the V11 in several places and on all the power settings and found that on average the V11 had about 32% more airflow than the V10.
So what can you do with all that power, well the other tests showed us, for example we do a carpet deep clean test where we take exactly 100 grams of sand and embed it into a medium pile carpet, and weight the bins before and after.
We tested the V10 and V11 in all of their power settings and found that the extra airflow and suction meant that the V11 pickup up on average about 7% more embedded sand the V10.
I should mention here Dyson has said they want to see cordless vacuums replace upright vacuums, but the main barrier to that is with deep cleaning carpets, again Ill talk more about these results Friday but it’s a big deal that Dyson can now get close to a 100% score even on its medium power which honestly is the best power choice if you want to clean an entire house.
We also saw the power on the crevice pickup test where the V10 took twice as long as the V11 to pick up the debris from both crevice sizes on low power, though they both only took one pass to get the debris on high power.
Basically the V11 gives you much more power, not just on High power but especially on its low and medium settings which is where the power needs to be if you want to maximize battery life.
Speaking of battery life, Dyson has upgraded the battery for the V11 and it really shows. We found it to have on average about 30% more runtime across all the different settings compared to the V10. Which is pretty meaningfull, for example when Dyson released the V10 they said it could get an hour or runtime, and that was true but only if you were using a suction attachment on low power, with the V11 you can actually get an hour of vacuuming with the torque drive head on low power. In general though I think we have finaly hit a threshold with the V11 that means that battery life is no longer a barrier even if you have a massive house.
There are two downsides to the bigger battery which are recharge time and weight.
The recharge time jumped from 3.5 hours to 4.5 hours form the V10 to the V11
And the weight increased almost one pound. Which does make it noticeably heavier on the forearm. Im not thrilled with the weight thing as I have often complained that these cordless vacuums with all the weight near the handle are not nearly as easy to use as people expect them to be and the extra pound just makes this worse. But in general Dyson is really good about weight distribution and the V11 still feels lighter than similarly designed cordless vacuums.
I personally don’t mind the Absolute version with the soft roller not being offered in America yet, I found that with the V10 I almost never used it, don’t get me wrong its great for hard floors but since it cant be used on carpets or rugs, you pretty much have to carry around the other head with you at all times which is silly. In addition I never really liked the way the soft roller handled.
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