Verdict
Delivering the suction power of a plug-in cleaner in a cordless model, the Dyson Gen5detect is a powerhouse of a vacuum cleaner. In my tests, I found that its powerful suction delivered the highest dust collection results I've seen on carpets and hard floors. It's the neat touches that make this vacuum cleaner a joy to use in stick mode: it's easy to manoeuvre; it senses how much dirt there is, adjusting the power on the fly; the green laser on the Fluffy Optic head highlights dirt on hard floors brilliantly; and its integrated 2-in-1 tool makes it quick to switch to handheld jobs. Yet, as good as this vacuum cleaner is, it's expensive and it's a little bulky to use in handheld mode.
Pros
- Super powerful suction
- Clever integrated crevice tool
- Automatic power adjustment takes guess work out of cleaning
Cons
- Expensive
- Can't use crevice tool at the end of the wand
Key Features
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Type This is a cordless stick vacuum cleaner.
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Battery life In my tests, the Auto mode delivers around 26 minutes of cleaning power – enough to tackle a home.
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Power Tops out at a massive 369AW in my tests – the most powerful cordless stick vacuum cleaner that I have ever tested.
Introduction
Where do you go after releasing arguably the best cordless vacuum cleaner of all time, the Dyson V15 Detect? The answer is a more powerful model, with longer battery life and a nifty integrated 2-in-1 crevice tool with the Dyson Gen5detect.
Genuine plug-in levels of performance crammed into a cordless stick vacuum cleaner is impressive, but there’s no escaping the high price.
Design and features
- Clever built-in dusting and crevice tool
- Floor heads for carpet and hard floors
- On/off button rather than a trigger
Think of the Dyson Gen5detect as a refinement of the V15 Detect, and you’ll know what to expect. In almost every way, the new model is an improvement over the old one, starting with the way that it’s used.
While the V15 Detect, as with every Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner before it, had a trigger that had to be held in, the Gen5detect switches to a simple on/off button on the back. It’s the same type of control as introduced with the V12 Detect and, in my opinion, a big improvement.
Dyson’s argument for a trigger was that it preserved battery life, as you only pulled the trigger and used power while vacuuming; however, battery life has much improved over the years, and holding a trigger down for a whole-house clean is tiring. With a simple on/off button, the Dyson Gen5detect is much easier to use than previous models.
Once powered on, there are three power modes when a handheld tool is attached: Eco, Medium and Boost. As with the V15 and V12 vacuum cleaners, adding either the Digital Motorbar (carpet) or Fluffy Optic (hard floor) heads, and the vacuum cleaner switches the Medium mode to Auto mode, which uses a combination of technology to adjust power on the fly.
First, the Digital Motorbar floor head can detect what kind of surface its on, adjusting the roller speed to move between hard floors and carpets. With both the Digital Motorbar and the Fluffy Optic heads, the Gen5detect uses the Piezo sensor to automatically detect how much dust is being picked up, adjusting power automatically based on how dirty an area is.
It’s a brilliantly reactive system. Just gently vacuuming around, I heard the motor speed up and slow down, as different levels of dust were detected.
To help show whether you’ve cleaned your home properly, the Gen5detect, as with the most recent Dyson models, the has a large LCD at the back. This shows a live graph of the particle count. When the graphs spike, there’s a lot of dust; when they go down towards zero, the Gen5detect has collected all of the mess. I found this to be a very useful tool, particularly cleaning carpets, as the screen told me when an area was clean and dust that I can’t see had been collected.
This screen is also used when there’s an error, such as a blocked airway; an animation shows how to deal with the issue, which saves faffing about searching online.
I would like the Piezo sensor to work with handheld tools, too, as it does with the Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251UKT, as I find that letting the vacuum cleaner use the power it needs is best for balancing battery life against the required suction power to actually clean.
Similarly, I would like Dyson to find a way to combine the two floorheads into one tool, as with the Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251UKT. Not having to switch heads when moving between carpet and hard floors is far more convenient, particularly if you have a combination of hard floors and rugs.
That said, the Fluffy Optic makes sure it’s worth swapping too, and I found it as impressive here as it was when first introduced. Using a green laser, this floor head highlights dirt on the floor, making it visually easy to find any dirty patches or spots missed. It is an excellent cleaning tool, but also a touch disgusting; my hard floors looked clean until the laser showed just how much cat hair was blowing around.
Using a combination of the laser to highlight dirty areas, and the screen to show when an area was clean, I felt as though the Gen5detect made it easier to thoroughly clean my home.
Unbox the Dyson Gen5detect for the first time and there would appear to be one important tool missing: the crevice tool. Never fear, rather than it being a separate tool, Dyson has hidden the two-in-one dusting and crevice tool inside the main wand. Just hit the release button, and the main handheld tools are ready and available to go.
It’s a fantastic idea, and one that saves quite a bit of time trying to swap accessories around, making cleaning quicker and faster.
I do have some minor complaints. First, while the two-in-one tool will connect to the wand, the wand then can’t connect to the vacuum cleaner. If you like using your crevice tool around the edges of the room, then you’re out of luck. Secondly, when the wand is removed, it pulls the brush down over the crevice tool. Given that I use the crevice tool the most, I’d prefer not to have to slide the brush back.
Finally, you can remove the wand while the vacuum is running; reattach it and the vacuum cleaner keeps going, but doesn’t automatically provide power to a floor head. Instead, the Dyson Gen5detect must be turned on and off, which is a little frustrating.
Otherwise, the box contains a Low reach adaptor, which gives an angled joint to make it possible to clean under sofas, beds and other furniture without having to bend down. It’s a handy little tool, although not quite as convenient and easy to use as the MultiFlex in Shark’s IP3251UKT.
There’s also a Combination tool for dusting and detail work, plus the Hair screw tool for cleaning sofas, pet beds and the like, which is designed to prevent hair tangling around the brush.
Previous Dyson vacuum cleaners shipped with an accessory clip that attached the wand, letting me carry around my favourite tools; that’s not available here, presumably because Dyson felt that integrated 2-in-1 tool negated the need for this.
There is a wall dock that will take two accessories, as well as providing power for the vacuum cleaner. It’s a similar design to the dock on previous vacuum cleaners and one I really like: I just drop my vacuum cleaner in, and it starts to charge.
A removable battery makes it easy to swap out the power pack, should the one you have develop a fault or fade with age.
The Dyson Gen5detect weighs 3.5kg, which is a touch heavier than the V15, although not so much that you’d particularly notice when in normal stick mode, vacuuming floors. With the weight of the vacuum cleaner pushing down on the floor, the Gen5detect is quick and easy to push around, dashing around chair legs and under sofas easily.
Given that there’s the built-in crevice tool, the extra weight is a fair trade off. Weight is well balanced, and it’s easy to go from cleaning carpet to raising the vacuum into the air to clean around the ceiling provided you don’t have any mobility issues.
If you struggle a little with heavier cleaners, then the Gen5detect in handheld mode could pose problems for you; that’s the trade-off of having something so powerful. If you want something lighter, the Dyson V12 Detect Slim is just 2.4kg.
I was sent the Prussian Blue/Rich Copper variant, which is a Dyson exclusive; buy from another retailer, and you’ll get the Purple version (also available as a choice via Dyson).
There’s a massive 0.77-litre bin, which is more than enough to take all the dust in a whole-home clean. There’s the same eject mechanism, as on previous Dyson cleaners: stick the head in the bin and then use the slide-eject mechanism to cleanly dump. Sometimes, particularly after dealing with pet hair, I needed a couple of pumps to dump everything, but I still managed this without making a mess.
I could also remove the entire front assembly to give the main body a full clean. This was useful on the odd occasion where the inlet was blocked. For example, once, a piece of packing foam wedged in the inlet, blocking suction until I removed it.
There’s a single filter at the rear, which unscrews and can be rinsed under a tap, taking 24 hours to dry. If you want to keep cleaning, then buying a spare filter, so you always have a one ready to go is not a bad idea.
Performance
- Doesn’t get tangled with hair
- Hugely impressive pick-up
- Power settings should be chosen carefully
I started measuring how much power the Dyson Gen5detect has, measuring its suction power in AirWatts (AW) at the unit. AirWatts combine a vacuum cleaner’s lift (suction) and airflow to give a more accurate impression of how powerful they are.
In Eco mode, I measured power at a gentle 30AW, upping to a powerful 75AW on Medium. On Boost, I measured power at a staggering 369AW. That’s the best I’ve ever seen from a cordless vacuum cleaner, and puts the Gen5detect on a par with some plug-in models.
Why is so much suction important? Well, it’s particularly useful when using handheld tools to suck up mess: more power means that the tool doesn’t need to be put as close to the mess, and you can do a clean sweep in less time.
I put rice on a desk in a line, then put the crevice tool at the end of a tape measure to see how far away from the tool it can collect the mess. Here, I managed a suck rice up from just over 3cm away, when on maximum power – again, the kind of performance I’d expect from a plug-in model.
In real life, this made it really quick to clean up some hard-to-reach areas, such as vacuuming out my car, where dust and dirt get into crevices. Similarly, the high suction power let me suck up loose bundles of cat hair that migrate under my console table and bed.
Next, I moved to my standard tests. First, I sprinkled 20g of flour onto my test carpet. I then ran the Dyson Gen5detect through the middle of the mess (backwards and forwards) on Auto to see how it coped.
At first, the Digital Motorbar head stopped moving as soon as it made contact with my test carpet. As my test carpet has a rubber backing, which blocks air flow, the Gen5detect’s suction was too powerful, and the motorised brush shut down to protect itself. I found that I had to drop the vacuum cleaner to Eco mode to get it to work on this test carpet.
Regular carpet has a fabric backing and is sat on underlay, which allows more airflow through the carpet fibres. I then switched to regular carpet to complete the tests. However, given the power in the vacuum cleaner, I found that I had to adjust the gate on the front of the carpet brush at times, which opens up airflow to make the Gen5detect easier to push around.
On Auto mode, I single pass forwards and backwards was enough to remove most of the dust in the cleaner’s path.
Next, I tackled the mess at the bottom with Eco mode (clean sweep), and then tried to tackle the top with Boost mode, but I found the Gen5detect too hard to push.
The redesigned tools maximise contact with the floor, but the huge amounts of suction can make the cleaner difficult to move. Far from being an issue, it shows that the lower power modes are enough and Boost mode is something that I rarely needed during a standard clean.
After my tests, I weighed the bin and found that 98.25% of the flour had been collected, which is very impressive, and the best result I’ve seen from a vacuum cleaner. I didn’t see any trace of flour left, so the ‘missing’ dirt will be in the vacuum cleaner head or wand.
Next, I placed 10g of flour on the edge of my carpet tiles. Running the cleaner down the skirting board, with the vent fully closed, I managed a clean sweep. Here, my measurements show that 95.3% was collected, the highest that I’ve ever seen.
To test the anti-tangle capabilities, I put lengths of human hair onto the carpet, then let the cleaner pass over the top. Nothing was caught around the brush at the end. That’s great news for me, as I live in a house with long-haired people, and cutting tangled hair away from a brush bar is not a fun job. Here, I’ve never had to cut tangled hair on either of the Gen5detect’s floor heads, despite using it almost daily since the vacuum cleaner launched.
I had a similar result with my pet hair test. Combing cat hair into the carpet, I found that the Gen5detect picked it all up, without tangling any.
Moving to the hard floor, I sprinkled 20g of rice onto the hard floor then used the Fluffy head in Auto mode. Here, I got a clean sweep with 100% of the dirt ending up in the bin.
In general use, the Gen5detect handles larger particles of dirt brilliantly, rarely flicking anything around the floor, as other cleaners often do.
Battery life is very good, with Dyson saying the Gen5detect will last up to 70-minutes. That is without a motorised head on on the lowest power setting. On standard settings with the Digital Motorbar attached, I measured battery life at 57m 31s on Eco, 35m 36s on Medium, and 9m 28s on Boost.
However, it’s Auto mode that this vacuum cleaner is likely to be used in. To test that, I vacuumed the test lab, which hadn’t been cleaned in a week, to get a rough estimate of real battery life. I found that the Dyson Gen5detect lasted 26m 13s. That’s actually very good, as the quality of the clean means that a lot of distance can be covered; there’s enough power for me to clean my three-bedroom house properly, and shows that battery life figures in minutes aren’t as important as how far you can actually clean in that time.
To put it another way, you can get vacuum cleaners with longer battery life, but as you spend more time going over each area to suck up all of the dirt, you can’t clean as big an area as the Dyson Gen5detect can.
It takes 4.5 hours to fully charge the vacuum cleaner from flat.
I measured sound at 72dB on Auto mode, which is about right for a cordless: quite loud, but not painfully so. Impressively, the Boost mode only hit 75.3dB, which is quite quiet.
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Should you buy it?
You want the best cordless cleaner
The highest suction, the best cleaning results and excellent battery life, this cordless cleaner has the power of a plug-in.
You want a better value cleaner
This model is hugely expensive and you can buy a cordless cleaner that cleans almost as well for less.
Final Thoughts
The Dyson Gen5detect has a staggering amount of power. In fact, its Boost mode is so powerful that it’s unlikely that you’ll need to use it for most jobs. For most regular cleans, I found that Auto mode was all that I needed, letting the Gen5detect adjust power on the fly to collect dust.
And, collect dust is what this cordless vacuum cleaner does well, scoring the highest for hard floor and carpet collection in all of my real-world tests.
It’s not just about raw power and results, the Gen5detect is a pleasure to use, too. Its nicely balanced for stick mode, and simple to push around, letting the Auto mode handle power settings, while the screen at the back tells you when the area is really clean.
In that regard, the Gen5detect delivers is the power of a plug-in with the convenience of a handheld, adding that extra bit of flexibility with the integrated crevice tool. If you want the best, there’s not another vacuum cleaner that can touch this one for power.
That said, there are some drawbacks. For starters, the cleaner is quite bulky to use in handheld mode, and anyone with mobility issues may want something smaller and lighter. It’s also frustrating that you can’t use the integrated crevice tool at the end of the wand.
There’s no getting around the price, either: this is a very expensive cordless vacuum cleaner. The V15 Detect is still a great alternative and a few hundred pounds cheaper. If you want value, the V15 is the better choice; if you want power, the Gen5detect is for you. Check out alternatives in my guide to the best cordless vacuum cleaners.
Trusted Score
How we test
We test every vacuum cleaner we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- Used as our main vacuum cleaner for the review period
- Tested for at least a week
- Tested using tools to measure actual suction performance
- Tested with real-world dirt in real-world situations for fair comparisons with other vacuum cleaners
FAQs
This is built into the wand, ready for action whenever you need it.
In Automatic mode, I found that the battery lasted for around 26 minutes. Given the power of the cleaner, that’s enough time for me to clean a three bedroom house.
Test Data
| Dyson Gen5detect | |
|---|---|
| AirWatts (low) | 30 AW |
| AirWatts (medium) | 75 AW |
| AirWatts (high) | 369 AW |
| Sound (low) | 68 dB |
| Sound (medium) | 72 dB |
| Sound (high) | 75.3 dB |
Full Specs
| Dyson Gen5detect Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £850 |
| USA RRP | $949.99 |
| EU RRP | €997 |
| CA RRP | Unavailable |
| AUD RRP | Unavailable |
| Manufacturer | Dyson |
| Size (Dimensions) | 250 x 276 x 1276 MM |
| Weight | 2.5 KG |
| ASIN | B0C55PG8TV |
| Release Date | 2023 |
| First Reviewed Date | 21/06/2023 |
| Model Number | Dyson Gen5detect |
| Vacuum cleaner type | Cordless stick |
| Provided heads | Fluffy Optic, Digital Motorbar, built-in dusting and crevice tool, hair screw tool, low reach adaptor, combination tool |
| Bin capacity | -1.23 litres |
| Bagless | Yes |
| Modes | Eco, Medium (Auto), Boost |
| Filters | 1 (washable) |
| Run time | 70 mins min |
| Charge time | 4.5 hrs |