I’ve been trying out the Dyson DC 25 animal and groom tool and I should point out this is not a paid advert, this is a genuine review.
Now we have 2 dogs and 3 cats in the house, so there is plenty of animal hair wafting about the place, building up on the floor, sticking to furniture, and coating the carpets, so I was looking forward to putting the machine through its paces.
You do need to read the directions on how to assemble some parts of the vacuum, but if I can cope with that anyone can!
Perhaps what will interest dog owners most is the groom tool which actually vacuums your dog direct. Obviously if your dog is very scared of the vacuum this won’t work for you, but Buddy had no objections to it at all. I introduced it gently with lots of treats, and groomed him without turning the vacuum on first to make sure he was familiar with it. I also let the vacuum run near him while treating him before I used the groom tool on him. The groom tool has a flat slotted surface, through which you push lots of little spikes so it resembles a slicker brush. You then brush the tool over the dog a few times, causing fur to accumulate on the spikes. Now here’s the clever bit – when you release your pressure on the spikes, they retract back into the tool, leaving the fur on the flat surface, and all the fur gets sucked into the hole in the middle of the tool and never gets to waft anywhere – which is good news. I would imagine that the hairier your dog the more hair you’ll get off him with the tool, but it certainly collected a lot of Labrador hair. It makes great sense to me to eradicate loose hair on my dog before it sheds around my house, and the tool is easy to use with a few practises.
But what about the hair that does make it to the floor and furniture? Well being a special animal model one of the head tools that attaches into the hose has many brushes that spin round and they’re very effective at getting dog hair off furniture, although they had more trouble with the fabric covered shelf in one of our cars, in which the hairs seemed to stick more effectively, needing a lot more strokes of the tool before they came off.
There is also a head tool without brushes, a thin tool attachment to get into narrow spaces, and the vacuum can work on carpet or hard floors.
I have to say that I really enjoyed the manoeuvrability of the vacuum which turns this way and that very easily thanks to the ball system rather than wheels. I found the groom tool very effective on Buddy, and the tools coped well with animal hair on furniture. I realised that all this time I’ve been saying I didn’t like vacuuming, I just hadn’t met the right vacuum!