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- Powerful suction
- Easy to use and lightweight
- Exceptional anti-hair wrap head
- Long initial charge time
- Small bin on board the actual vacuum
The Shark PowerDetect Speed Clean and Empty Pet Pro is the brand’s latest premium cordless vacuum and an update to the Shark PowerDetect Clean and Empty Cordless. Overly complicated names aside, I think this is the best Shark vacuum yet, and certainly the best cordless vacuum I’ve tested.
It has impressive cleaning capabilities, and its “four-point cleaning technology” means it can detect hidden dirt and alter the power levels as needed. It may not come with as many attachments as some rivals, but it has everything you need to keep your carpets and kitchen floor free of dust and debris.
What you need to know
The Shark PowerDetect Speed Clean and Empty Pro is, at its heart, a cordless stick vacuum cleaner, in the same vein as the Dyson V-series of vacuums that have sparked so many copycats over the years.
But this one does things a little differently. It comes with a powered, self-emptying docking station designed to empty and charge the device every time you’ve finished cleaning, so you don’t have to get your hands dirty so often.
It’s also pretty smart, and comes equipped with a raft of sensors that allow it to adapt automatically to various environmental situations. It can detect whether you’re cleaning carpet or hard floor and will adjust its roller speed and suction power accordingly. It can tell if it has encountered a particularly dirty patch of floor and do the same. It can even sense when you’re cleaning right up close to skirting boards and boost power.
Coupled with a new dirt reveal light, odour neutralising tech and the ability to bend in half to clean under low-lying furniture, I think it’s the most capable cordless vacuum on the market right now.
Price and competition
No one could accuse the Pet Pro of being a budget vacuum at a price of £500. However, do remember that this includes a powered, self-emptying docking station, and that Dyson’s V16 and V15 Detect Absolute are each £650 and only come with a charging dock. At the time of writing, the Shark was reduced to £300 on Amazon, which makes it even better value, too.
Another key rival to the Shark in the premium vacuum stakes is the Halo Capsule XR, whose list price is £500. That price tag can rise to between £672 and £757, depending on the bundle you choose. However, it too was 50% off the time of writing.
If the budget can’t stretch to any of its premium rivals, cheaper alternatives to the Shark Pet Pro include the Dyson V8 (£250) and the Henry Quick (£200).
Design and controls
The Shark Pet Pro comes in five colours: you’ll see the vibrant ultramarine model pictured in this review, but it’s also available in four other “luxe” colours: walnut (brown), harbour slate (dark grey), oatstone (light grey) and sagewood (green).
Slightly confusingly, the model name and number changes if you go for one of these more exotic colors; the underlying vacuum, however, remains exactly the same, and it looks great whichever colour you choose. I particularly like that the main floorhead has an orange brush bar that contrasts rather nicely with the rest of the vacuum.
Model names, colours and part numbers
| Name | Colour | Part number |
|---|---|---|
| PowerDetect Speed clean and Empty Pet Pro | Ultramarine | IA3241UKT |
| Shark PowerDetect Speed Luxe Collection Clean & Empty | Walnut | IA3246UKTBR |
| Shark PowerDetect Speed Luxe Collection Clean & Empty | Harbour slate | IA3246UKTBL |
| Shark PowerDetect Speed Luxe Collection Clean & Empty | Oatstone | IA3246UKTIV |
| Shark PowerDetect Speed Luxe Collection Clean & Empty | Sagewood | IA3246UKTGN |
Out of the box, the vacuum is very easy to assemble. Just slide the battery onto the main body, attach the head to the extension wand and the wand to the body and you’re good to go. The dock is equally straightforward to put together: you simply click the charging post into it, slot the anti-odour cartridge into its space on the top of the dock and plug it into the wall.
Once you’re cleaning, it’s a joy to use. It feels light and easy to manoeuvre, much more so than the Dyson V16. The weight just feels better balanced in the hand. The controls are simple, too. There are two buttons on the back of the head: a power button to turn the machine on and off and a mode button next to it for cycling the vacuum through its three different modes: eco, boost, and detect.
The one annoyance is that there’s no percentage indication of how much battery capacity is remaining. Instead, there’s a line with a battery symbol below it that drops down as the vacuum discharges.
Accessories
The Pet Pro takes a minimalistic approach to accessories. Alongside the main anti-hair wrap head, a smaller motorised pet head for use on upholstery and stairs, and a crevice tool with a dusting brush you can slide forwards and backward.
This doesn’t sound like much, but I’d argue it’s all you really need. And when not in use, you can helpfully store all the tools on the dock so that they’re always close to hand.
How we test vacuum cleaners
To help us compare one vacuum with another, we conduct a collection of tests across all vacuums. We measure the suction strength of each vacuum. We test to see how effective they are at picking up various types of dirt, scattering quantities of Cheerios, flour and pet hair on both hardwood and carpet and measuring how much the bin collects from a single pass.
Finally, we also run battery tests in the lowest and highest power modes so you can see how performance will vary across different settings.
Cleaning performance
Suction power on the Shark Pet Pro was impressive, although nowhere near the most powerful we’ve tested. In Boost mode, the gauge recorded 25kPA, with this dropping down to 9.5kPA in eco mode. Compared to the Halo Capsule XR with its astonishing reading of 55kPA on boost mode this might seem low, but it’s equal to other vacuums such as the Dyson V8 Cyclone and the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design corded upright.
One thing to note at this point is that this generation of Shark cordless vacuums ditches the duo-clean head with its twin soft and brush rollers, replacing it with a single brush bar with fins on it to keep the head clear of hair tangles.
Fortunately, this didn’t seem to adversely affect cleaning performance. On hard floor, the Shark Pet Pro vacuumed up 100% of the Cheerios and flour in a single pass, along with 2g out of the 5g of pet hair on eco mode. Raising the speed to boost allowed the vacuum to easily vacuum up all 5g of the pet hair. On carpet, the vacuum removed 25g out of 26g of Cheerios, 100% of the pet hair and 35g out of 50g of flour, all again with eco mode enabled. In Boost mode, it cleaned up 100% of all debris.
These are impressive results that place this vacuum ahead of all other vacuum cleaners we’ve tested. It beats the Dyson V16 Piston Animal, the V15 Detect and even the nominally more powerful Halo Capsule XR.
In real-world, day-to-day use, I was thoroughly impressed with the Shark’s abilities, the anti-hair wrap head in particular. My carpets are usually covered in my long hair and a generous scattering of foster cat fur, and it breezed through all this with no issues and no hair left tangled on the roller.
The other thing that I noticed with the vacuum was the fact that, as I approached dirt and debris on the floor, the floor head seemed to actively pull dirt towards it and into the mouth at the front of the head. That might not mean much when it comes to actual cleaning performance, but subjectively at least it makes it feel like it’s cleaning more effectively.
That’s something the new blue dust reveal light helps with, too. This activates when you’re cleaning hard flooring, turning from white to blue, revealing any dust and dirt on the hard floor you may have missed and providing confirmation of a nice, clean debris-free floor. Generally, it works well, but Dyson’s green light is a tad more effective in my opinion.
Battery life, filters, cleaning and emptying
Shark says you’ll get up to 60 minutes run time in eco mode and I measured the battery life at 59 minutes 40 seconds, so I’d say this was pretty accurate. In Boost mode, the battery lasted 13 minutes 41 seconds.
That’s fine, but do be aware that the battery takes an absolute age to charge: six hours in fact, so you’ll need to use the Boost mode sparingly (or leave the vacuum in its default “detect” mode) or you’ll be doing a lot of waiting in between cleaning sessions.
One of the Shark PowerDetect’s main attractions is its self-emptying base station, which sucks all the dust and debris from the on-board 0.47-litre bin every time you pop it on to charge. It’s super simple, takes around 30 seconds and there’s no mess involved at all. Be warned, that it is quite noisy, although the dock does come with a ‘Quiet Mode’ switch that disables the automatic emptying feature and allows you charge the vacuum without activating it.
The upshot of all this is that the only time you need to get involved in emptying is once the 2-litre docking base bin is full, which Shark says should take around 45 days. When that happens, a warning light comes on, you detach the bin from the base station, carry it to your main bin and release the trap door at the bottom to dump out all the accumulated dirt and debris.
As for filters, there are two of these in the Shark Pet Pro to take care of: one at the base of the docking station and another in the main body of the vacuum. Both need to be removed and cleaned once a month by rinsing under water and allowing to dry.
Shark PowerDetect Speed Clean and Empty Pet Pro review: Verdict
I found the Shark PowerDetect Speed Clean and Empty Pet Pro a joy to use. It’s well-designed, packed with features and easy to manoeuvre. It’s a fantastic all-rounder and the dock isn’t obscenely oversized, making it a good fit for smaller homes, while its large two-litre capacity means you’ll be doing less messy emptying than with most cordless, bagless vacuums.
And although the vacuum’s static suction power isn’t the best around, it performed brilliantly in all our tests, even in the relatively low-powered eco mode.
The only negative is the relatively high price, but when you consider that this includes the auto-empty docking station and it’s still cheaper than its main Dyson rivals, I think it’s more than fair. All things considered, this is our new favourite cordless vacuum cleaner.
