Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

A nicely designed cordless vacuum cleaner, the Samsung Jet 85 Pet Cordless Vacuum VS20C8522TN has a wide range of tools and a helpful display that shows the battery life in minutes. Suction power hits the spot for a vacuum cleaner at this price, but performance on carpets was a bit below the average, and there are rivals that clean deeper and can tackle a larger area on a single charge.

Introduction

A mid-range vacuum cleaner that sits below the excellent Jet 95 Pro, the Samsung Jet 85 Pet Cordless Vacuum VS20C8522TN has many of the same features as its big brother but a little less power.

This is a decent vacuum cleaner with a long battery life, but its carpet performance is far from the best I have tested. I have been putting the Jet 85 through its paces in my lab over the past few weeks, and here’s my definitive verdict.

Design and Features

• Plenty of accessories in the box
• Live battery life display
• Lots of power modes

The Samsung Jet 85 Pet is a standard cordless stick vacuum cleaner with a wall mount that can charge the vacuum cleaner. If you prefer, you can plug the power adaptor straight into the vacuum cleaner.

There’s one battery in the box, but the battery provided can easily be unclipped so that you can swap it out should it start to age and not hold its charge so well.

With the wall mount, you get a couple of accessory mounts, which I’d use for the tools that I use the most. There’s a lot of choice in the box with this model, with a motorised pet brush, a combination tool (brush and upholstery tool), an extendible crevice tool (great for getting down the back of radiators) and a flexible tool. The latter is an angled arm, so you can point tools down for cleaning on the tops of wardrobes and cupboards.

The motorised floor head is similar to the one on the Jet 95 Pro, with a bristle brush for carpet and a soft roller for hard floors. A combination tool like this is useful, as you don’t have to swap floor heads when moving from hard floors to carpet (or vice versa).

At 2.63kg, the Jet 85 Pet is very light, which makes it easy to move around, or swing up for cleaning around the tops of your ceilings or on cupboards. That low weight makes it very easy to push the cleaner around with its floor head on.

It’s a shame that the floor head doesn’t have any lights on it, to highlight areas to clean in poorly-lit areas of rooms.

Control of the vacuum cleaner is easy, with a single power button on the back. This turns the vacuum on in the Mid mode, which is suitable for most jobs, but there are then Max and Jet modes above this, and a lower power Min mode, which is good for more gentle jobs.

Having these power modes is useful, but three is usually the sweet spot. Once you start getting more modes, it can be hard to work out which one to use.

There’s no automatic mode, which would adjust power based on the surface and level of dirt, on this model.

I like the clear display, which shows the current mode and the current battery life remaining in minutes. Having such a clear idea of battery life is very useful, as it makes it easier to know when to pause cleaning and stick the cleaner back on charge.

A large 0.8-litre dust bin can be removed for emptying. Such a large bin makes it possible to clean an entire house without having to pause to empty it.

This bin also holds the washable filter, which should be cleaned regularly to keep suction power at its maximum.

Performance

• Decent suction
• Not so good on carpet
• Good battery life

I measure vacuum cleaner power at the handle in airwatts (AW) to get a measure of suction performance. With the Samsung Jet 85 Pet I found that its lowest setting delivered just 12AW, which is very low and not much use apart from gentle dusting. On the mid setting, I saw 27AW, which is a little low, although this level of suction should be fine if the floor brush agitates well.

On the highest Jet setting, I measured a useful 153AW, which is good enough for most jobs, although this power level falls behind the 254AW that the Jet 95 delivered.

More suction is particularly useful when using hand tools, as the more suction you have, the larger the particles you can collect from further away. In effect, more suction makes detail jobs faster and easier.

To demonstrate this, I see how far from the nozzle the Samsung Jet 85 Pet can collect rice grains. In this case, it was 1.3cm, a solid mid-level result.

To test real-life performance, I use a combination of tests, starting with my carpet test. Here, I add 20g of flour to carpet, and then vacuum it up. With a single pass through the mess on the middle power level, the cleaner left a relatively clean-looking path through the mess, although edge suction isn’t quite as good.

Finishing the task, I found that the Jet 85 Pet managed to collect only 88.75% of the dust, which is below par. Deeper mess in the carpet fibres were left behind.

Moving to my tough edge test, I put 10g of flour on the carpet tiles, right up to the skirting board. Here, I used the vacuum cleaner on its Jet mode and ran it along the skirting board. With some dust behind, I rotated the vacuum cleaner and pushed it forward into the skirting board instead. At the end of the test 90% of the dust was collected.

Moving to the hard floor tests, I put 20g of rice grains on the floor. Here, the Jet 85 Pet managed to pick them all up, but some grains were thrown around in the floor head and dropped out when I turned the vacuum cleaner off. As a result, only 95% of the mess was collected.

I tested the Jet 85 Pet with cat hair, combed into the carpet. The standard power setting was all that was needed to collect all of the mess.

I then tried a similar test, only this time with long human hair. All of the hair strands were collected, but they ended up thoroughly wrapped around the main brush and I had to cut them away with a pair of scissors.

I measured battery life at 43m 38s on the lowest power setting, with the standard power setting giving me a useful 24m 13s of battery life, and the highest Jet power setting dropping down to 8m 8s. Given the level of power, there’s enough battery life to cover a floor or two of a regular UK home.

This vacuum cleaner is average for sound, peaking at 73.1dB on the Jet power setting. That’s loud, but not annoyingly so.

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