Dyson V12 Detect Slim Review

One consistent feedback that I’ve had for previous Dyson vacuum cleaners has been their inability to lock the trigger button in the On position. With the V12 Detect Slim, Dyson has fixed that, to an extent. There’s a big red power on/off button that replaces the trigger now, but it’s positioned up top and not where the trigger used to be. So while it’s great to go about your cleaning routine without tiring your fingers, you still have to use the other hand to switch the V12 off, so it clearly isn’t built for one-handed use.

The headlining feature here is the Laser Slim Fluffy cleaner head, which, as the name suggests, actually does use a Class 1 laser to illuminate dust on hard floors which your naked eye simply cannot see. It’s mounted at precisely the right height (7.3mm) above the floor and angled in such a way that it illuminates the floor about a foot in front of the cleaner head, and is similar to shining a UV light during a forensic search. It doesn’t let anything escape from its view, and as the promotional material rightly says, makes the invisible, “visible”. Dyson also chose the colour green for the laser because it is the colour that human eyes are most sensitive to. This is the kind of innovation that keeps Dyson miles ahead of the competition and with the V12 Detect Slim, it doesn’t end there.

Having used a few previous generations of Dyson machines, a problem that I never thought I had until I used the new Hair Screw tool was the tangling of hair around the rollers. Be it the High-Torque cleaner or the Mini Motorised tool, hair had nowhere to go but be rolled around the roller brush, making it ungainly to clean after a few vacuuming cycles. Dyson’s brilliantly indigenius solution to that is a conical tool which is connected to the drive only on one end, so it lets hair spiral off towards the edge of the cone and be sucked into the bin! Being motor-driven, it’s also effective enough to suck up pet hair that’s nestled in upholstery and fabrics.

The readout itself is made up of colour-coded bars that indicate the size of the particles from as small as >10 microns to as large as 500 microns, and the numbers for each rise and fall faster than Tesla stock, again depending on what sort of dust and debris the V12 is collecting. This readout works accurately regardless of the tool attached and over a long period of time, can offer insights into the kind of dust or dirt your house is prone to attracting, so you can take corrective action.

With similar suction power to the V10, you instantly feel the effectiveness of the V12 after only a few seconds of using it on any surface. As before, you do get three different power settings that go by Eco, Auto and Boost, but leave it on Auto and it does a fine job of varying the power depending on how much dust it detects. It’s a different system to the surface-sensing High Torque cleaning head on the V11, which automatically adjusts power depending on floor types. Here, it’s the amount of dust that determines the dynamic power control and the only real inconvenience with the V12 could be that you’ll have to manually change the cleaner head when you move from hard floors to carpeted floors or vice versa. You can’t have it all now, can you?

Undeniably, the star of the show here is the Laser Slim Fluffy cleaner head for hard floors and “seeing” the dust for the first time is indeed a revelation and shock at the same time! It’s also slightly narrower with a lower profile than the regular soft brushes on earlier Dyson models so it can reach further into deeper recesses. You could manually toggle the switch to turn the laser off too, but it’s just so cool and addictive to leave it on and watch it magically swallow all the unwanted stuff off the floor. The same wonder also comes from the Hair Screw tool which is such an elegant yet simple solution to an age-old problem of hair tangling around a brush. It works like a miracle and you wouldn’t want to use any other vacuum after having a go with it. Pity it’s only the mini-sized tool and not on the full-sized brush head for carpets.

Overall, one of the most noticeable changes that you feel is the lighter weight of the V12 and the power button that allow you to keep on cleaning for much longer stretches of time than before. As mentioned earlier, I would’ve still liked the power on/off as a trigger switch so it would make for a more complete one-handed use. But Dyson claims that the power button on top also makes it easier to switch hands quickly should you feel tired and that’s plausible and subjective. Either way, it is still a welcome change to the older “keep pressed for power” situation. Needless to say, the V12 ensures that whatever air is expelled from the back of the unit is 99.99% filtered via a multi-stage pre-motor and post-motor process, so you’re actually putting back cleaner air into your room along with cleaning surfaces.