7 best pet vacuum cleaners for tidying up after your furry friends

The general performance of the blade 4 was excellent, clearing large open areas of carpet, rug and hard floor with minimal effort, but it had one of the best motorised pet tools on test, which was powerful enough to clear dog and cat beds of hair without us having to wrestle with the bed to keep it from being sucked into the head itself.

Nicely balanced and lightweight with good controls, the suction was one of the best we tested and we didn’t experience any dips in performance while cleaning. The removable dust canister means that you can aim the contents directly into the bin and give it a shake, making it less likely to make a mess, and we didn’t have to continually use our fingers to work the contents out.

Vax advertises 45min of run-time from the battery, but we managed to get almost an hour, and the thing we really liked about it was its removable battery, so, rather than having no choice but to put the whole unit back on charge when the battery ran out, you could just switch it out for a replacement and keep on cleaning. That means you get the power and cleaning time of a corded machine, with the versatility of a handheld.

Read the full Vax onepwr blade 4 cordless vacuum cleaner review

With one of the best suction performances on test for a cordless, the powerclean effortlessly cleaned carpets and rugs of thick dog hair in double sweeps.

Swapping out the rollers to go from hard floors to carpet was very easy – the hard floor head is essentially a soft roller that picks up long hair really well while managing to remain tangle free, while the turbo brush for carpets is also designed in such a way that it never clogs.

There are three intensities, which can be toggled up and down from the hand unit. The highest setting is very powerful and deals with cat litter, hair, dog food and is even powerful enough to act as a suction stick for picking up dog toys from the floor, if you want to save yourself the backache.

The dustbin will fill quickly, but the emptying process is efficient, so you can just make a quick trip to the bin, release the latch and shake the contents in without skipping a beat.

Battery life was sufficient to cover all the testing areas and there is a nice little self-stand function, which means you can free stand the vacuum, so you can move dog beds, etc., without having to find a place to prop it up.

The tornado-like power of the v15 animal was really impressive and it lifted hair on both carpet and hard floors with one sweep, without having to continually go over the same area and waste battery.

We achieved just over an hour on the machine’s eco mode, which can be extended if you have alternating removable batteries, so battery life shouldn’t be an issue even for homes with multiple pets.

You have to keep the power button pressed to operate the v5, but this also makes it very efficient in terms of conserving a full charge, so you’re only calling on the battery when you need it.

The big selling point for pet owners is the laser (safe for humans and pets) on the hard floor cleaning head, which highlights microscopic dust particles, such as pet dander, that you wouldn’t normally see on your cleaning rounds.

We didn’t suffer any hair tangles, largely thanks to a high-torque cleaning head, that literally shreds longer pet hairs as it picks them up, and a hair screw tool, with bristles angled at 45 degrees, that automatically moves pet hair directly towards the intake.

An efficient bin-emptying mechanism also means everything collected ends up in the waste, rather than on the floor.

Read the full Dyson v15 detect review

These cylinder vacuums with their own personalities have always featured in our pet vacuum line-ups because of their superior suction, and the George is no different. It was able to give carpets clogged with hair a real deep clean and the quick switch on top of the vacuum head means it’s ready to do the same on hard floors in an instant.

However, where George can really help out is with the wet suction capacity, which means if you’re puppy training, it can hoover up any accidents or even get rid of wet paw marks that are all over the floor.

The big capacity bags take 15l before they have to be changed and the dirt is trapped inside the bag so you won’t create a mess when you do have to.

The George does have a sizeable footprint, but with zero clogging, plenty of rolling manoeuvrability and a massive 27m cleaning range, it’s a super versatile machine that can handle a wide range of pet-related cleaning tasks.

This is a well-thought-out vacuum, packed with pet-specific innovations and backed up with powerful and reliable suction that’s well suited for both short and long pet hair.

The duoclean floor head means you don’t have to worry about a loss of performance when you move from hard floor to carpeted areas, because the brushes will run faster at the click of a switch on the LED display to cope with the fact that carpet is harder to clean.

Shark has fitted the brush head with flexible silicone fins rather than traditional brushes, which makes the vacuum much less prone to tangling without affecting the ability to pick up hair, while the soft front brush roll makes short work of any muddy paw prints on hard flooring.

The lift-away feature allows the cylinder to disconnect from the body of the vacuum, giving more flexibility to clear hair from hard-to-reach places, such as stairs and furniture, and the motorised pet tool was easy to use and there was no loss in suction when fitted. Bin emptying was clean and quick and you can extend the run-time with another battery, although one charge powered it for just over an hour on the medium suction setting.

This pet-specific version of Miele’s cordless stick cleaner can be configured with the power unit at the top or the bottom of the wand, so you can adapt the ergonomics of the machine according to personal preference.

It’s 4kg in weight, bagless and features a wide, spacious, motorised brush head that allows the powerful suction to work optimally with zero clogging.

The German manufacturer includes a more compact brush head with longer bristles for more stubborn patches of hair, which we used in handheld mode and was perfectly suited to picking up hair on furniture, stairs and areas where pets sleep.

However, if you don’t have pets on your furniture you could probably do without this brush head and save yourself £150 by going for the standard HX1 model (£449, Miele.co.uk).

The dust container opens easily with a single twist and although there has been some criticism on the Miele website that dust gets stuck around the middle filter, we didn’t experience any problem during the trial.

Read the full Miele triflex HX1 vacuum cleaner review

This slightly more affordable robotic option from Roomba boasts some genuinely pet-friendly AI in the shape of the brand’s latest software update for the machine, which means that the j7+ will just get smarter over time.

You can tailor how the bot cleans according to where your pets sleep or where the high traffic areas are, so you can program it to take an extra pass around the dog beds or where they eat their meals.

The j7+ also neatly skirts one of the problems with robotic vacuums in pet households, which is that larger animals can accidentally start the machine if they bump the clean button. However, there is now a pet lock available via the app, so the vacuum stays put.

The software also updates the Roomba’s already impressive visual vocabulary to include solid pet waste – unfortunately, a pooper scooper function is yet to be added to the machine.

On top of all of this, the j7+ has plenty of suction, is self-emptying and has superb manoeuvrability over pet-related obstacles, which means you can leave the machine to clean when you go out and return to a clean home.