If you’ve been dragging your feet on spring cleaning, Amazon’s Big Spring Sale could be the motivation you need. Judging from the deals I’ve seen, this is a great time to pick up a new cordless vacuum. Nearly all of Shark’s cordless models are available for a substantial discount, including CNET’s best overall, the Shark Stratos, and our pick for the best self-emptying cordless vacuum, the Shark Clean & Empty.
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The Shark Stratos is one of the best cordless vacuums we’ve tested
Using the Shark Stratos in the test lab on hardwood flooring gave us impressive scores for sand pickup. You can see our test carpet coming up next.
Normally $500 at full price, you can get the Shark Stratos for a full $200 off, bringing it down to just $300. The Shark Stratos earned top marks in CNET’s lab testing. It boasts powerful suction across flooring types, with 97.2% sand pickup on a hardwood floor. It also has equally impressive carpet pickup, with 94% debris pickup from low-pile carpet and 94.4% from midpile carpet.
“The Stratos is definitely the standout,” said Schylar Breitenstein, associate lab technician who put the Stratos through its paces. “I use it to clean the floors in between pick-up tests because it picks up the most debris by far.”
The Shark Stratos has useful LED headlights to help it find dust.
I also used the Stratos extensively during my lab visit. As a pet owner with three cats that shed like it’s a hobby, I particularly like the brushead, which Shark calls the DuoClean PowerFines HairPro. It’s a two-brushroll system that lets it dig deeper into carpet to remove dust and pet hair, and the self-cleaning brushroll also resists tangling.
Other neat features include automatic dirt detection and suction adjustment, optional odor capsules that release a pleasant scent while cleaning, and an impressive 80-minute battery life for long sessions.
The Shark Clean & Empty spares you from having to empty a dustbin
The Shark Clean and Empty is one of the few to come with a self-emptying docking station.
One downside of the Shark Stratos is that, despite its strong cleaning performance, you need to manually empty the dustbin. The Shark Clean & Empty solves this problem by incorporating a self-empty docking station. It empties the dustbin and charges the vacuum after every use, and delivers similar cleaning performance to the Stratos (although its battery doesn’t last nearly as long). It normally costs $350, but during Amazon’s Spring Sale, you can get Clean & Empty for just $250.
Many other Shark cordless vacuums and robot vacuums are also on sale. We’ve also tested models like the Shark Pet Plus, Shark Vertex IZ492H and others with our intensive lab tests. While they didn’t make our primary list of the best cordless vacuums, many of them offer unique features that may be better suited to your needs.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
