Dirt Devil 360 Reach Review - Stairs, Pet Hair and Verdict Review

Dirt Devil 360 Reach – How easy is it to use on stairs?

Handheld cleaners can be absolutely ideal for stairs, being lightweight and easy to manoeuvre. The Dirt Devil Reach 360 certainly ticks those boxes and has reasonable suction power to get down and dirty on your dirt. The whole ensemble in stick form is light enough to use on a step-by-step basis and again the powered brush bar helped to shift some stubborn grime. But it’s a little unwieldy in this form and, most annoyingly, you cannot attach the powered floor head directly to the handheld unit to make it more compact for stairs. You have to use the extension tube.

For more direct hand-to-hand stair cleaning the upholstery tool (also called a stair tool on the box) is really the only choice. As noted earlier, however, it has some fundamental design issues.

With our tape-bodge fix it worked reasonably well on carpets with the red textured edge on the underside of the tool pulling hairs well, even if the cleaner itself didn’t have the sheer oomph to pull those hairs and fluff from the textured material into the actual cleaner. On steps with hard surfaces you would have to use the rather unwieldy tube and floor head with beater bar switched off, or the upholstery tool, neither of which would be ideal.

The Reach 360 has great potential for stairs, but lacks the perfect tool for the job.

Dirt Devil 360 Reach – How does it cope with pet hair?

Like many of the Dirt Devil 360’s test results so far, its pet hair cleaning credentials transpired to be something of a mixed bag. In stick form with the powered beater bar running, it did a damn fine job of removing various length pet hairs from our carpets. Again, we are not talking full size upright cleaner performance in sheer suction, but it was admirable for a stick vac.

It went on to clean our 30cm patch of mixed Collie and Labrador hairs in just over 10 seconds. As 10 seconds is the cut-off time we would give pet-specific cleaners to do the job, that is a good result. Likewise, its hair ball chasing performance over hard floors was fine too
 
Things get rather more hairy, as it were, in handheld mode where the Reach 360 really lacks a suitable tool for pets. The flawed upholstery tool is really the only option and even with our TrustedReviews Modification (patent pending), it simply doesn’t have the suction to draw up hairs embedded in carpet or sofa fabrics. The red Velcro-like material around the base edge of this tool also does a great job of hanging onto hairs tenaciously rather than allowing them to be sucked into the cleaner.

Related: Dyson V6 Absolute

Should I buy the Dirt Devil 360 Reach?

The Dirt Devil Reach 360 is a powerful combi stick and handheld cleaner with great potential, but let down by some niggly design flaws.

The really poor exhaust dust emission, which blows onto your arm and into your face, makes using it in any fashion rather unpleasant. Meanwhile stiff fittings and dubious tools hamper what could otherwise be a versatile little cleaner.

There’s potential here, but we can’t recommend it right now – head to our best vacuum cleaner round-up for better options.

Verdict

Versatility amounts to little with the Dirt Devil 360. It has raw power, but a poor selection of tools and dreadful dust emission a serious marks against it.

Trusted Score