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Good for a few crumbs Dirt Devil DHM083410 Bagless Stick Vacuum This is a lightweight stick vac that is quite under powered. For the money...

Oh you little devil, you sure can clean the dirt off my hard floors Dirt Devil M084100 Power Stick Bagless Upright Vacuum ** Please note that I am reviewing the Dirt Devil Power Stick Model M084100...

I love my kittens. They’re sweet and playful and purr like little motors. They snuggle when they’re sleepy and spread out in a patch of sun looking like contentment personified. They also have the habit of strewing cat litter around their little room with reckless abandon, apparently relishing the feel of it beneath their feet even when they aren’t in their pans. Honestly, it’s as though they hold litter tossing contests to see who can track the most the furthest with each trip to the pan.

Now someone has to clean this up. They, conveniently, have no opposable thumbs. So that leaves me. I have tried numerous methods for taking care of this task quickly and daily and each and every one of them proved lacking. The big Hoover Wind Tunnel has too much suction and pulls up the whole mat that surrounds the pan (then makes this agonized sound as if I had sucked up a cat itself in there). A dust broom and pan provide me more time with my face an inch away from the litter pans than I really need. Taking the mats outside and shaking them leaves a trail of littler all the way to the door. So when I spotted the Dirt Devil Swift Stick for under $15 at the hardware store I thought I might have found a winner. Rejoice! Well, for a while.

The Dirt Devil Swift Stick is a nifty looking little lightweight bagless vacuum. It stands about four feet high and assembles in mere minutes. There are only three parts and all you have to do is stick them together and you’re ready to go. It comes with a filter inside the dirt chamber that you can knock the dirt off of if necessary when emptying the canister. The box claims “effortless maneuverability”, and an “easy to empty dirt cup”. It does not have a swivel head, but for such an inexpensive vacuum that’s not a big deal. There is even a picture of this baby plowing through a pile of what looks like half in deep confetti leaving a perfectly clean path the full width of the vacuum head. Somebody save me, I think I’m in love!

Oh, except for a few things. For a more organized look at the pros and cons of this cleaning tool, let’s use a numbered system to keep the various features straight. I believe I will call this structure “What I Like” and “What I Hate Like Poison”.

What I Like

1) The Dirt Devil Swift Stick is easy to put together.

2) It is very lightweight and compact.

3) It has gentle suction does not suck the entire mat or area rug off the floor.

4) It has a single attachment that you just plunk on the bottom and poke the whole vacuum in to get tight corners or along wall edges. The attachment increases the suction a bit as well. It’s kinda neat.

5) It is red.

What I Hate Like Poison

1) It has gentle suction that just barely picks up that cat litter from those pesky mats and most certainly doesn’t pick up any other thing from any other surface (tile, hard wood, berber carpet, plush, I tried every surface in the house). Seriously, I could get more suction by trying to pull things up through a drinking straw. In order to clean the mats and surrounding floor, I have to go over and over the same spots at least a dozen times. It comes up, but it’s like pulling teeth. I could pick up each particle in less time.

2) It clogs if you try and use it on anything larger than a single molecule. I tried to vacuum up a few pieces of guinea pig bedding (maybe half an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide) and the thing was clogged instantly. There is a bend that the dirt must pass through to get to the bagless chamber that is simply too small for anything but cat litter or a few crumbs. The only way to clear it is to open it up and take out the filter, stuff the dirt inside and close it again.

3) The cord is too short. They try and sell this as a good thing, you know, because it’s easier to store, but really it’s just a too short cord. You can do only part of a small room before needing to find a different outlet closer to the dirt. I don’t live in a brand new house and do not have an outlet in places like my stairwell.

4) I don’t care what the picture on the box looks like, the Dirt Devil Swift Stick will never, ever clean a swath as wide as the vacuum head. Why, you ask? Well, because the opening in said vacuum head is only about an inch and a half wide. If you’re lucky and have really lightweight, tiny particles of dirt in a pile no wider than an inch and you aim the direct center of this vacuum over said pile, it just might pick some of it up. I don’t know what vacuum they’re using in that box picture, but it sure isn’t the one in the box you’re buying.

5) Why is that stupid filter there? It’s just one more thing to clog and anything that might have been filtered is released directly back into the air when you tap it to clean it. It’s useless and only serves to annoy me further. If that’s possible.

6) Finally, the piece de resistance. The “I can’t believe it just did that, the (insert bad word here)” quality that sent this piece of crap back to vacuum purgatory where it belongs. Believe it or not, the thing dumps everything it manages to pick up right back out onto the floor as soon as you pick the vacuum up. I’m not kidding. Say you manage to pick up a tablespoon of cat litter in your twenty minutes of vacuuming your litter pan mats. Now it’s time to put the vacuum away so you can get medical treatment for your pounding frustration headache. So you pick up your new cleaning tool and realize that the head does not stay in place, but rather flops down when the tool is picked up. No big deal - just something you notice, that it doesn’t have a release function - it is a $15 vacuum after all. Then you notice that there is a nicely piled tablespoon of cat litter on the carpet, right where you picked up your new vacuum. Sure, you saw some stuff swirling around in there as you went over the same places again and again and again, so you assumed that the dirt was going inside the vacuum, but you were WRONG! Only a small representative sample of the dirt was going inside. Perhaps just enough to clog it, or just enough to create the illusion of actual function. But the reality is that it was all just sitting in the head, waiting for you to pick it up so it could flop down and deposit your dirt back onto your floor like a cat throwing up a pill. Arrrrgh! Unfortunately, now your head has exploded and there is another mess to clean up.

The Final Verdict

There are so many things to hate about this product. The lack of suction, the short cord, the crappy overall performance on any and all vacuum related tasks. That it doesn’t try to suck up my kittens along with their litter mess is small solace for the frustration of trying to get it to work in any way or for even the tiniest, most specialized task. It is entirely unsuitable as a vacuum. If you need a shiny red lawn ornament, perhaps it would do the trick. The Dirt Devil Swift Stick is a vacuum that just doesn’t suck enough. And that sucks. You’re better off shredding your fifteen bucks and sucking it up with a real vacuum.

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