For testing vacuum cleaners, I’m not a big fan of using a scientific tester and measuring that the suction on the manufacturer’s website is the same, or close to what the meter says after the test, I much prefer to let my dog, a very active Jack Russell Terrier, run around the house and car, sit on my favourite grandpa chair and generally shed hair everywhere! This dog, even as cute as she is, drops more hair than any dog I’ve ever seen! Now, this test of the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum will combine vacuuming the following surfaces;
- Hard wood floors (dead easy, you can suck most things off wooden floors very easily)
- Steps with tight angles (hard to reach places on a flight of steps can be fun)
- Short pile rugs or carpets (not difficult, but requires more suck than wooden floors)
- Furniture of various types (From a leather chair to a woollen grandpa chair)
- Deep pile rugs (Is ‘deep pile carpet or pizza?)
The five sets of surfaces listed above are fairly standard in most house, most people in those houses will either have a combination of corded and cordless vacuum cleaners of varying quality levels, I set out to see if I could replace my corded vac with the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum. The only valid departure from ‘Well they’re mostly all easy surfaces to vacuum, Simon‘ is that I have a Jack Russell and she drops more hair than any dog I’ve ever met!! I can vacuum the hallway and then the next morning it looks like I’ve skipped hall vacuum day! I wish I were kidding. (The DeeBot X1 Plus helps with that on the daily) but there’s always the in between times, and the Deebot can’t get up on the sofa.
Let’s look at what the Pure One S12 Platinum comes with, and it’s a lot…
- The Tineco Pure One S12
- Direct Drive LED multi-tasker power brush
- LED soft-roller power brush
- Soft dusting brush
- 2-in-1 dusting brush
- multi-angle adapter
- Mini power brush
- Crevice tool
- Flexible extension hose
- Flexible long crevice tool
- 2 batteries
- Pre-Filter cleaner tool
- 2 pre-filters
- Dual charging wall dock
I wasn’t even kidding, it’s a lot, and I found each tool was really handy for different jobs! The direct drive power brush was fantastic on the rugs, and while you could easily also use it for hard floor surfaces, the soft-roller power brush was a little less aggressive and so perfect for my hardwood floors, particularly after the kids have breakfast and cereal invariably ends up on the floor under them both! A lot of the time I can rely on my little four-legged vac, Coco the Jack Russell, but she’s not always around.
No kidding! Dog hair and cereal (yes, we actually properly try these products!)
The myriad of devices came into their own with so many different types of cleaning! Blinds, I have wooden shutters, the soft dusting brush paired with the bendy tube (I’m sure it has an actual name, but it’s just a bendy tube) made light-work of that task. Speaking of light, popping back to the two power brush units, I’ve not had a vacuum with led lights at the front and I will admit I’ve always thought they were a bit gimmicky – I was wrong and that’s ok! Being able to use all of the pivoting easy angles of the S12 tubes and power heads meant that I could have the unit flat and run it under cupboards and couches and into random small gaps and see what I was doing – handy. You’ll get it under anything lower than about 6cm – that’s a pretty handy limbo setting for low cupboards / lounge suites etc.
Moving on from the stuff you can see on the outside of the box, the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum claims to have some very interesting ‘Smart’ features to it, notably the Smart Suction Control, Smart Battery Management, Smart Noise Optimisation, Smart Filter Self-Cleaning and a Smart App Integration. So in the real-world of “Little Wilfred has spilled his biscuit crumbs all over the floor again” what does all of this mean and how can it help you? Well, the suction control senses what you’re working on, for example you don’t need as much suction on a hardwood floor as you might on a rug or carpet, and the little sucking wonder adjusts its suction power to suit – in reality I found this pretty accurate, and as a result you aren’t needing to run the vac at full power all the time, therefore prolonging the time you’ll get out of one battery. The noise optimisation I guess is a part of this as well, lower suction equals less noise – so with the first two ‘Smart’ inclusions, the noise is also adjusted on the fly. It’s actually a pretty quiet unit.. The test I used was to whip it out to clean up some dog hair when the boys were watching a tv show one afternoon – they only turned the TV up from 14 to 18 (which tells you nothing, but when I use my Dyson Big Ball they have to wait until I’m done to keep watching their show)
The Smart Filter can have its own paragraph! The S12 comes with two pre-filters and an automagical pre-filter cleaning tool (and Smart mode to match I guess) You simply pop the Pre-Filter out of the base of the S12 and pop it into the Pro-Filter cleaner, placing the second included Pre-Filter back into the main unit, you depress the power trigger and the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum runs the filter through a cleaning cycle to clean the pre-filter and leave it ready for use next time you need to swap out your filter. It really only takes a minute to clean the filter and swap them out, so I did it every time I used the vac, just for fun. This is the cleaner in action, below.
The last of the ‘Smart’ features is the inclusion of a connected cleaning experience App – I’m not going to tell fibs, I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The app can tracking your cleaning habits and run you a report – my wife is one of the most organised people I know, she loves a spreadsheet but there’s no way she wanted to see my cleaning report. I think this is a ‘Fun to have’ for people that are ultra ‘connected’ in their homes, but I’m afraid that it was my only low scoring feature of the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum. That said, if you don’t have the app, you can use the unit 100% and just fine, so I’m not going to remove points from my ultimate score for the vacuum cleaner, I’m just not going to tell you that you really should download it like right now.
The Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum is a strong little beasty, and sucked up pretty much anything I ran it over, I really love the ability to slide my finger up the very easy to read display panel and have the power instantly increase from whisper quiet to “You want me to suck up nails, sure” The unit has a 150w max power motor that does the job very well. If you set it to high power, you’ll get enough time to vac a regular apartment easily, I do half my double story house (including the stairs and the hallway) and as the unit comes with a second battery and its handy charging caddy, I swap out the battery when it runs to standstill and pop the new one in and finish the house. It’s really quite intuitive in terms of knowing how long your battery will last and what you’ll get done before you need to either switch batteries or recharge the batteries, the clear and easy to read display is right there at the end of your arm, and along with that, you have the iLoop dust sensor telling you if you’re done vacuuming a section of carpet and can move on, the loop around the display will change from RED to BLUE when the dust is all gone and not moving past the sensors into the vacuum anymore. Very smart, and it means you know when your work is done and you can move on without wasting your energy or time, or the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum’s battery.
Another thing I really loved about the S12 is that you can take the little barrel where all the nasty stuff collects and walk it straight to the bin, on its own, you don’t need to wrangle the whole vac, just the barrel – it’s not huge and easy to manage! It’s simply one thumb click the the barrel (or drum or whatever you’d like to call it!) comes out easily, you hold it over your bin and with one click the base opens and everything drops into the bin (I take mine out to the wheelie bin to avoid any dust issues) You can also pop the filter out of the little dust barrel and give it a wipe with a dry cloth to clean it up. The fact that the filter pops out and you can clean it all and clear all of the dust out was one feature that was much better than my existing stick vacs – great design. Obviously this means more moving parts and I have to give the unit back, so I won’t get to come back in six months and tell you how it’s holding up, but for the four weeks I’ve been using it (almost daily) it’s been fantastic.
I don’t have massive hands, it really is this compact.
By way of wrapping up this evidently wordy review of the Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum, I’ll say I’d swap my existing in-house vacs for it right away (That’s my existing floor based big-ball vac, and its stick vac cousin) with a really well thought-out design, the 12 gets my five (of five) stars. Good job, Tineco!
The Tineco Pure One S12 Platinum has a RRP of $1,099 and is available from Godfreys. DRN would like to thank Tineco for providing the review unit.
