When you have three different floors in your house, like I do, using a cordless stick vacuum is the key ingredient to keeping them clean. It’s easy to carry around to different areas, compact enough to vacuum two staircases without pulling a muscle, and still wide enough to vacuum an entire living and dining area in a few minutes.
The downsides, of course, are twofold: the risk of the battery running out, and the canister limit on how much dust and dirt it can gather. I’ve tried a few stick vacuums, but the one that makes these two downsides feel nonexistent is the Tineco Pure One Station 5 vacuum. That’s because it comes with a freestanding charging station that not only holds up and charges your vacuum but also will auto-empty it into the larger canister in said base station. Suddenly, there’s no canister-emptying step to deal with after each vacuuming session: I just pop it in the station, and it takes care of itself.
It’s a pretty handy package that costs a pretty penny as well. But the freestanding charging and emptying base station has made the Pure One Station 5 feel incredibly convenient and less irritating than having to constantly empty a tiny canister. Plus, it’s powerful enough to suck up cat litter and sneaky dust bunnies as well as my toddler’s Hansel and Gretel-esque food trails around the house.
Out of the Box
Photograph: Nena Farrell
The vacuum is easy to build, coming with the vacuum base, Tineco’s ZeroTangle brush, and a tube to connect the two together, plus a 2-in-1 crevice brush and the base station. There’s a little cutout in the base station to store that crevice accessory, plus a power cord to power the suction in the base station and charge the vacuum.
The base station has a 2.5-liter dustbin capacity, larger than you’d find on our favorite floor vacuums like the Dyson Ball Animal 3 Extra—that one has about 1.5 liters. That means you’ll have plenty of vacuuming sessions before you need to empty the base station. The dustbin on the actual vacuum itself is much smaller, but a normal size for a cordless vacuum. I was usually still able to vacuum an entire floor of my house, cat litter and all, without needing to take an emptying break, but households with lots of deep-pile carpeting or fluffy dogs could fill this up much faster.
The station promises to both empty the attached dustbin and self-clean the vacuum by pushing air through the vacuum’s filter, tube, brush attachment, and of course, the recently emptied dustbin. You can hear the sound change when it switches from just emptying into the “cleaning” stage of pushing air through the vacuum. Both stages are pretty noisy and remind me of the sound you hear when a robot vacuum is emptying itself into a similar base station.
