Verdict

Pros

• Great carpet cleaning and pile grooming
• Excellent hard floor cleaning
• Great Turbine Tool
• Long hose and cable
• Large easy-empty bin
• Bagless and filter-less

Cons

• Heavy
• Not as manoeuvrable as small ball
• Small upholstery tool
• Big price ticket

What is the Dyson DC75 Cinetic Big Ball Animal?

At the top of Dyson’s upright vacuum cleaner line up, the Cinetic Big Ball Animal is a powerful bagless vacuum cleaner packed with features and innovation. It manages A-rated dust emissions with Dyson’s Cinetic filterless design, saving filter costs and maintenance, offers big ball manoeuvrability and it’s got the chops to deal with furry house mates… and pets too.

The self-adjusting floor head with motorised brush bar has 20% more power than the DC41 and this model comes supplied with our favourite hand tool, the Dyson Tangle-Free Turbine Tool. The hose, wand and cable also offer immense cleaning reach. Everything about the Big Ball is, well, ‘big’ so can Dyson’s finest live up to its equally sizeable price tag?

Dyson DC75 Cinetic Big Ball Animal – Design and Features

You wouldn’t know that the Cinetic Big Ball Animal was such a beast of a cleaner from the compact outer box. There is a reason for that. Unlike many DC-prefix Dyson uprights, which are pretty much lift-out of the box and go, this model comes supplied flat packed.

Well, OK, not literally flat packed, but all of the main parts, tools and accessories are separate and some assembly is required. That means clipping the head, handle and hose to the main body and attaching the on-board tools. After a brief difference of opinion as to which bits went where, we resorted to the diagram-based instruction manual and a fully-fledged Cinetic Big Ball Animal was created some minutes later.

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Dyson’s Cinetic technology builds on the brand’s multi-cyclone design introducing small rubber tips at the end of each cyclone. These rotate very fast in the airflow, further improving dust separation to the point where the machine doesn’t need a filter.

It works too. The EU energy label proudly displays an A rating for dust emission – better than many cleaners with multiple filters – and this model is certified as Asthma & Allergy Friendly. The disadvantage is that is uses a little more energy to produce the same suction power as models like Dyson’s A-efficiency rated DC41. The Big Ball gets a D rating in this department.

Dyson argues that, as there is no loss of suction with either filters or bags blocking up as you clean, the Big Ball is actually more efficient in real-world use than bagged cleaners with filters. If you are familiar with how traditional vacuum cleaner power tapers off when the bag is getting full, that makes sense. As many Dyson users rather neglect filter maintenance too, filter-free Cinetic technology makes this a very easy to use cleaner – simply vacuum, empty, repeat. As the dust bin is over two litres in capacity, you won’t be emptying it too often either.

The main floorhead features a motorised brush bar, switchable from the body, and self-adjusts to the depth of the floor covering it is travelling over from hard floors to deep pile carpets. A slider on the front of the head drops down a rubber blade that further improves deep suction on hard floors to help lift debris from cracks and grooves. The head can be quickly removed from the cleaner – so no more scrabbling around on the floor to clean it out – and the head dismantles on a couple of thumb clips for easy access to trapped hairs and debris.

The cleaning wand unclips and lifts off the back of the cleaner handle and is attached to a fabulously long hose. While the hose doesn’t look that long compressed on the back of the machine it extends many times its length, giving excellent reach. Add that to the mammoth 10.5-metre cable and you will able to cover a vast area of the home without swapping plug sockets.

The on-board tools – crevice, dusting brush and a compact upholstery brush – are well made even if the upholstery brush is a little smaller than ideal. These can be attached directly to the hose for detail cleaning or to the wand to reach more inaccessible places.

Dyson DC75 Cinetic Big Ball Animal – Cleaning

There is no getting away from the fact that the Big Ball is indeed big, and quite weighty too. The football-sized ball and pivoting floor head aid manoeuvrability, but you can feel its weight in the hand. It needs a good shove to get around corners. It is not as industrially heavy as the likes of Miele’s U1 upright, but it is certainly no featherweight to nip around with either. Surprisingly, it is no more difficult to move when running, which is a testimony to great floor head design.

Before

After

And you certainly won’t be disappointed with the results of that little extra effort as the Cinetic Big ball demonstrates outstanding performance on both carpets and hard floors. The powered brush bar and very high suction power really give your carpet pile a workout.

It lifts out deep down dust and leaves the room looking crisp and recently vacuumed with well-groomed pile lines. As we have come to expect from Dyson’s uprights, edge cleaning was absolutely first class with no visible test powder evident even in the dip where the carpet tucks under the skirting.

On hard floors with the brush bar switched off the results were just as good, too. It showed excellent cleaning in a single pass over the test porridge oats and pulled all particles out of the tile grouting with impunity.

For this test it didn’t make any difference whether the front rubber blade was dropped down or not. Only on further tests over floor boards with deep cracks did we find we needed the blade to better extract dust from deep in the grooves. The plastic ball and weighty nature of this cleaner does mean it sounds quite harsh running over the likes of textured ceramic tiles, whereas cleaners with rubber wheels roll more smoothly.

Before

After

Having tested a number of small-bin bagless cleaners of late, the Big Ball’s large bin lasted plenty of time between emptying. There is a single button that you press to release the bin from the cleaner and press again to drop a bottom flap to release the contents. The flap release mechanism is a tiny plastic clip which looks rather flimsy but, as Dyson give a 5-year warranty with the Cinetic Big Ball Animal, the company is obviously confident of its longevity.