Dyson V16 Piston Animal review: is £750 worth it with a dog that moults?

"It's a Dyson, it'll be fine." I must have heard that sentence in a thousand kitchens. Usually it was said while the owner handed me a machine that was very much not fine, with a brush bar wrapped so tight in hair it had stopped turning.

I spent 19 years driving round Sheffield with a van full of spare parts, and plenty of the hoovers I fixed had a Dyson badge, mostly because plenty of the hoovers in Sheffield did. So I came to the Dyson V16 Piston Animal with respect for the motor and very little patience for the fiddly bits. It's the most powerful cordless Dyson you can buy right now, and at £749.99 it's also one of the dearest. I gave it 33 days to show me which of those two feelings was right.

My helper for the test was Bramble, our springer spaniel. Springers have feathery ears, a feathery tail and feathery everything else, and ours sheds on all 365 days of the year. Pauline, my wife, reckons she could stuff a cushion with what comes off him each month. She's probably right.

The piston, the cones and the UK box

Start with the name, because it's literal. Sitting in the clear bin is a plunger that squeezes everything you pick up into a tighter and tighter wad. Dyson's word for it is CleanCompaktor. Press the release and the plunger drives that wad out through the bottom, scraping the inner mesh as it goes. More muck in the same size bin, fewer trips outside.

Power comes from Dyson's new Hyperdymium motor: 900 W, with 315 air watts quoted for Boost. The floor head is the other headline. On the All Floor Cones Sense head, the brush bars are shaped like two cones, tapering so that hair slides off them and gets sucked away before it can coil. The head also senses the floor under it and changes power and brush speed without you touching a button.

Here's the detail worth knowing before you buy in Britain. The standard V16 Piston Animal comes with that one floor head and nothing else for floors. If you want the soft Fluffy Optic head with the green light for hard floors, that's in the Submarine bundle, which also adds a wet roller and costs £899.99 at the time of writing. That matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to it when we get to the skirting boards.

The spec sheet, in plain numbers

How I tested it in a house built in 1934

We live in a stone semi on one of Sheffield's steeper hills. Laminate in the hall, carpet on the stairs and the landing, red quarry tiles in the kitchen with grout lines you could lose a pea in, a rug in the front room and a lot of skirting board. Every hoover we test gets marked against one fixed checklist, and the how we test page sets it out.

• Grit test: 50 g of kiln-dried sand ground into the landing carpet underfoot, then three slow passes, with the bin contents weighed on a 0.1 g kitchen scale.
• Tiles: a mug of porridge oats and rice tipped across the quarry tiles, passes counted until they were clear.
• Long hair: 20 strands from my daughter Joanne's hairbrush, around 30 cm each, laid over the front room rug.
• Edges: a line of plain flour along the hall skirting board.
• Stairs: all 13, timed, with Bramble's hair as the dirt.
• Battery and noise: full charge to flat on each mode, sound measured from 1 metre.

And then the test that decides everything: ordinary life. Three or four goes a week, often in a rush before our grandson Alfie turns up with a packet of biscuits and no plan for the crumbs.

Carpet and sand: numbers first

On Auto, three passes pulled 46.8 grams of the 50 grams out of the landing carpet. On Boost, 48.7 grams. My old corded upright, which I've kept going for eleven years out of pure stubbornness, managed 41.2 grams on the same patch. Five grams doesn't sound much until you remember it's the grit that wears carpet fibres from underneath.

The quarry tiles were more interesting. Rice vanished on the first pass. The oats mostly went too, but on the first run a handful got trapped under the middle of the head and were shoved along for half a metre before they went up. A second pass sorted it. It's a small thing, and it comes from the join in the middle, where the two cones point at each other.

Auto mode earns its place: the brush eases off on the tiles and winds back up the moment it touches the rug. Apart from the stairs and Bramble's bed, I never changed the setting.

Hair: the reason this model exists

If you've ever knelt on the kitchen floor with a pair of nail scissors, snipping hair off a brush roll, you'll understand why I watched this part closely. In my van I kept a hooked blade just for that job. It was the most common "repair" I did that wasn't a repair at all.

In the 20-strand test, nothing wrapped. Not one strand. On day 33 I flipped the head over on the kitchen table expecting the usual. The bars were bare. The only hair was a little clump caught at the join in the middle, and it came away between finger and thumb in about four seconds.

"I used to charge people £35 to cut hair off a brush bar. On this head there'd have been nothing to cut." Clive, day 33

The small motorised tool deserves a mention too. It did Bramble's bed, the back seat of the car and the arm of the settee where he's not allowed and always sits. The settee arm came up a shade lighter than Pauline remembered it.

The piston bin, from a man who has unblocked a lot of bins

My previous stick needed emptying after nearly every room in spring, when Bramble drops his winter coat. This one went five or six days between trips to the bin, and each time it was about three quarters full.

The squashed block drops out in one piece. No grey cloud in your face, no hair clinging to the rim. Pauline gets hay fever from May onwards, and she noticed the difference before I said a word about it.

The cleaning action of the plunger promises more than it delivers. Most times, a grey haze and the odd hair were still stuck to the clear wall afterwards. It's far better than older Dysons, but not spotless. Every other Sunday the bin came off for a rub round with a dry duster.

Where it falls down: the skirting boards

If I could only tell you one thing before you spend £750, it's this. Look at the head from above and the front edge isn't flat. The two cones meet in a shallow V, so the head physically can't press square against a skirting board.

Along the hall, the flour test left a white stripe roughly a centimetre wide tight to the skirting, whatever angle I tried. The join between the cones also left a faint trail through the flour on one stroke across the laminate. On carpet you never see it. On a light laminate floor you do.

American buyers get a slim, flat-fronted head for hard floors thrown in. The standard British box leaves it out, so every hall clean finished with me on one knee and the crevice tool. It works. It adds a couple of minutes. At this price it's the sort of thing that makes me wonder whether anyone at Dyson hoovered a terraced hallway before launch.

Weight, stairs and the battery

Fully assembled it's around 3.5 kg, and because the motor and bin are up by the handle, your wrist takes the lot. Rolling across a floor, you'd never guess. Lifting it step by step up a staircase, you would. Our 13 steps took 6 minutes 40 seconds on Boost with the combination tool, and by the landing my forearm had an opinion. Pauline has arthritis in her right thumb, and she used it on the floors and left the stairs to me.

The battery was solid rather than astonishing. Four complete runs on Auto with the floor head, over our carpet, laminate and tile, averaged 44 minutes. Boost emptied it in 15 minutes 35 seconds. Back on the dock from flat, it was full again in just under three and a half hours.

Noise at 1 metre: 65 dB on the tiles on Auto, 73 dB on carpet, 79 dB on Boost. Bramble tolerated Auto and left the room on Boost, which is his right.

What I'd expect to wear out first

A machine I have to give back doesn't get the screwdriver, but I went over the wearing parts with a torch and a lot of suspicion. My money is on the battery going first, typically somewhere in year three or four if it's used daily. On this model it clicks out by hand, which is a proper improvement on the Dysons I used to open with a screwdriver on customers' kitchen tables.

There's a washable filter on the end of the machine, and the screen nags you when it wants a rinse. What I'm less sure about long term is that plunger. Anything that slides back and forth in a cloud of dust and hair is, in my experience, where the phone calls start. On day 33 it still moved sweetly. I'll say so here if that changes.

Should you buy one?

Other hoovers worth a look

Dyson Gen5detect and V15 Detect. The previous top models are still strong performers, and you'll often find them well below the V16's price. You give up the plunger bin and the cone brushes, and a bit more hair winds round, but if nobody in your house sheds you'll struggle to tell the results apart.

A robot for the everyday fluff. With a moulting dog, the setup that worked best in our house was a robot every morning and the stick at the weekend. I've had one running alongside the Dyson, and how it copes with our five door thresholds is in my Roborock Saros 20 review. And if Bramble's nose prints on the back door glass are your other battle, I timed a window vac against a bucket in the Kärcher WV 6 Plus review. All our scores sit side by side in our reviews.

After 33 days

Of all the cordless Dysons I've owned, borrowed or taken apart, this is the one I'd pick for a house with a dog. More grit out of the carpet, no hair round the bars, and a bin you forget about for most of the week. When a wet spaniel comes in from the park on a Sunday, nothing else on the spec sheet matters as much.

Those skirting boards still annoy me, and at £750 I shouldn't have to put up with them. But I'll take two minutes with a crevice tool over ten minutes with a hooked blade any day of the week. Bramble, meanwhile, is moulting exactly as much as he did before it arrived.

Your Dyson V16 questions, answered