Think you’re a clean freak? Well, Dyson has news for you

I used to think I was a clean and tidy chap, until my Dyson V15 ­Detect cleaner arrived.

Dyson V15 Detect stick vacuum cleaner.

I used to think I was a clean and tidy chap. My apartment is full of tech but everything has its place. Everything is spick and span, or so I thought until my Dyson V15 ­Detect cleaner arrived.

It has a laser green light that shows where the dirt is on your floor, and a bar graph of statistics on an LCD screen on top.

The screen also shows how many minutes of operation you have left. You start at about 60 minutes of battery.

I loved the idea of these stats until I read them. The V15 Detect picked up 242,490,228 tiny dust particles between 10 and 60 ­microns on its first run. Yikes.

That’s brilliant monitoring by the V15, but my self-image of cleanliness came crashing down. Dyson had just told me that I am a grot, a sloth … the quarter-of-a-billion-dirt-particle man. These 242 million particles are pollens and allergens, the stuff that can make you persistently sick.

The first run detected 242 million tiny particles.

The V15 Detect picked up 2.7 million particles from 60-100 ­microns (microscopic dust), and 1800 larger particles above 500 microns, dust which is the size of a grain of salt. It doesn’t graph anything larger, which are particles you can see.

I then vacuumed the apartment the next day; I was expecting massively less dust, pollen and allergens. Certainly the volume of dust was about a quarter. Bizarrely, my pollen and allergens particle count was more than three times: 863,415,458. I have my work cut out, getting that figure down over time. (Adding the two readouts truly makes me the billion dirt particle man.)

I asked Dyson whether these big numbers were at all credible and the company assured me that they were.

The other signature attraction is the laser light on the “laser slim fluffy cleaner head”, one of seven attachments. It isn’t the main attachment for carpets, rather a slightly smaller cleaner head for harder surfaces.

The laser lights up the region of the floor ahead of you in green. Dyson says the light is angled to highlight particles such as sugar and salt that you drop on the kitchen floor. You can see where you have vacuumed and where you should go next.

The green laser light is supposed to highlight the dust and show you where you haven’t vacuumed, but I didn’t find it useful.

In practice I didn’t find the green laser useful. It’s only for hard floors and it only displays larger particles.

I liked having the time displayed on the screen. If you get low on battery with a bit to go; you’ve got time to speed up and get the job done.

The battery gives you one hour of use in Eco mode. Medium or auto mode varies the suction of the V15 Detect depending on the floor surface, so battery time is variable. The Boost mode which is for intensive spot cleaning of ground-in dirt offers the least battery time.

One hour’s battery life was no problem when cleaning my apartment. If your house is large, you might need a recharge mid-job. However, battery charging time can be more than four hours, so you won’t finish cleaning in one go.

There is no on/off switch, instead the V15 Detect is trigger operated. I found that keeping the trigger depressed was less taxing when grabbing it with all fingers closed, rather than operating it with my index finger continually pressing inwards.

The seven attachments are the high torque cleaner head with anti-tangle comb (the main head), the laser slim fluffy head (with the laser light), combination, crevice and hair screw tools, and soft-dusting and dirt brushes. The V15 Detect has a conically-shaped brush that spirals hair off into a bin.

Dyson V15 Detect stick vacuum cleaner

As with other Dyson units I’ve tried, the cleaner, wand and attachments click nicely together and the big red buttons make it easy to pull components apart.

Finally there’s the filters. Dyson says the closed filtering system doesn’t blow out particulate matter. That seems to be the case as I didn’t smell dust circulating in the air when I had finished the job.

There are two versions of this vacuum. The more expensive V15 Detect Absolute Extra has a HEPA filter and costs $1,449. Dyson says the two-layer HEPA filter should last the life of the vacuum. It needs to be washed and dried every 1 to 3 months. An algorithm detects when the filter needs cleaning and displays an animation on the LCD screen.

The other mode, the V15 Detect Total Clean is $1,399.

Both are available at Dyson’s web site.

It’s the thoroughness of the V15 Detect’s cleaning that makes it an attractive proposition. Having the LCD screen and statistics is fun for data fiends too.