Dyson Omni-glide
Is Dyson’s lightest and most compact cordless vacuum a winner for your hard floors?
The Dyson Omni-glide certainly looks different to other cordless vacuums from the brand. Rather than a traditional trigger-style handle, the Dyson Omni-glide has a vertical handle, which houses the swappable battery, with a power button on the front, along with another button to switch to maximum power.
The motor, which generates the suction, and the eight cyclones, which generate 98,000g of centrifugal force to ensure that microscopic dust particles remain in the canister, sit below this, followed by the 0.02-liter dust bin.
As we’ve already mentioned, the Dyson Omni-glide is designed for hard floors, and it ships with just one cleaning head, which has two brush bars. These are covered in soft nylon to capture large particles without damaging hard floors, while anti-static carbon fiber filaments collect fine dust at the same time.
It has two power levels: Eco mode, which is the lowest setting, and Max, and can be laid flat while cleaning so that you can maneuver it under furniture and in tight spaces.
The Omni-glide can be converted into a handheld cleaner in the same way as other Dyson vacuums, by removing the main wand and attaching any of the three extra tools it comes with directly to the dust canister. Weighing in at 1.9kg, it’s the lightest vacuum Dyson has made to date.
In our testing, the Dyson Omni-glide proved very effective at sucking up the fine dust, biscuit crumbs and cereal we sprinkled on hard floors, even on the Eco power setting. It glided easily, and was able to trap all the debris in just one slow pass – we were also impressed that we were able to steer the vacuum in any direction with the lightest of pressure.
Converting the vacuum to handheld mode and back again is easy – as on other Dyson cleaners this requires removing the main wand and cleaning head. However, unlike other Dyson cordless cleaners, the handle is much longer, which makes it cumbersome to use in this mode.
Emptying the Dyson Omni-glide is simple – just disconnect the wand and cleaning head from the canister, then press the button on the back, sliding the canister down. The ‘point and shoot’ mechanism ejects the dust and debris from the canister into a bin in one swift move and works in the same way as other Dyson vacuum cleaners, although the canister is the smallest we’ve seen on a Dyson vacuum, so will need regular emptying if you have a larger home.
The Dyson Omni-glide is a new type of vacuum for hard floors that can be maneuvered in any direction. Its two-brush-bar cleaning head can cover a wider area in one sweep, and its powerful suction is almost on par with more expensive Dyson models. However, it’s expensive compared to rivals offering similar features, and it also has a smaller-than-average dust canister and a short run time. Carrie-Ann Skinner