Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Resistant to brush bar hair tangles
- Removable battery for recharging
- Handy 2-in-1 attachments
Cons
- Small dust bin
- Only runs for up to 30 minutes with vacuum head
- Takes 4-5 hours to recharge battery
- Less effective on rugs and carpeting
Our Verdict
Levoit’s LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner won’t be for everyone. It has a fairly small dust bin, and an absence of bristles on its beater bar means it’s better for hard-surface floors and low-pile carpeting. On the bright side, it’s sure to appeal to those who hate dealing with such common vacuum gripes as knotty tangles of hair, pet fur and dander, and generally messy maintenance.
Price When Reviewed
$199.99
Best Prices Today: Levoit LVAC-200
$139.98
You could be easily forgiven for not making Levoit one of your first choices for a vacuum cleaner. As a relatively young company, up until now, it’s been concentrating mostly on fans and air purifiers. Levoit’s LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner, is worth adding to your wish list if you have more hard-surface floors than rugs or carpeting.
That’s because it’s been designed to tackle cleaning those types of floors: featuring everything from an beater bar that resists hair tangles to five levels of filtration for capturing pet hair and even the tiniest particles of dander. Add to this an LED headlight for spotting dust, a pair of 2-in-1 attachments for crevices and upholstery, and easy maintenance, and it’s the ideal vac for keeping floors dust-free, hair-free, and fur-free.
Hard-surface floors are where the Levoit LVAC-200 stick vac shines: it easily sucked up fur, hair, flour, and oats.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Design and Build
- Brushless roller
- Easy-empty 0.58 liter dustbin
- 6.2-pound weight
Flip the main head of the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner around and you’ll notice something different about its brush. Where you’d usually see bristles–which is great for sweeping up dust and beating carpet, but prone to getting hair wrapped around it–you’ll spy flexible rubber/fabric fins, instead.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
This material whisks dust and debris towards the vacuum’s suction, but resists hair tangling around them. Instead, more hair, or fur, ends up in the dust bin. The bin itself is on the small side–a compact 0.58 liters–but emptying it is effortless, whether it’s still attached to the motor or removed. All you need to do is press the catch at the bottom to release its contents into the garbage.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
The vacuum itself feels pretty solid and robust, but not too bulky at 43.3 inches tall, with a width and depth of 7.7 inches and 9.8 inches respectively. Its slim overall design is sure to appeal to those with limited space, and, while it doesn’t stand unaided–you’ll need to lean it somewhere or lay it down if you’re moving furniture–there’s a wall mount for storage.
Handily, you can either remove its the 2200mAh battery for charging or plug it in while it’s stored. A brushless DC motor provides varying suction power of 180W. It’s not the most powerful out there, but it’s enough for cleaning a variety of surfaces.
While it’s labelled as a lightweight vacuum, its 3.2-pound weight is attributed only to the vacuum’s body and its battery; with its tubes and and vacuum head in place, that weight nearly doubles to 6.2 pounds. It’s still a light vacuum, it’s just not the featherweight Levoit makes it out to be.
Performance and Features
- Two power levels
- 30 minutes max runtime
- Battery life bar indicator is imprecise
Presented with a hard-surface floor that needs cleaning, the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner is pleasingly efficient. It can flatten to go under furniture–although you’ll need to bend low with it as its tubes are rigid, not jointed–and its attachments can fit either directly onto the motor unit or onto the tubes, so you can clean curtains as easily as a staircase.
You can choose between two power levels: Eco, the default, and Turbo, for when you need more power. The latter mode, however, runs the battery down fast. You can clean for up to 50 minutes on Eco with the crevice or pet tools attached, but only 12 minutes on the Turbo setting. Likewise, with the vacuum head in place, it’ll deliver around 30 minutes of cleaning on Eco, but less than half that on Turbo.
A countdown indicator on the side of the vacuum gives you an idea of how much battery power is left, but it’s not exact. Three bars can mean anything from 70 percent to full power, while one flashing bar could mean you have 10 percent power left–or almost nothing.
In either mode, the Levoit LVAC-200 is fairly easy to move around. Most of its weight is concentrated at the top, and there’s not so much suction that it gets stuck on carpeted floors. In testing, it coped well with surface dirt on mid-pile carpets, picking up both oats (representing larger debris) and flour (representing dust) with a few passes, followed by a burst of Turbo mode to pick up the last few remnants.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Where it didn’t perform as well was after vacuuming: we noticed that some flour had gathered inside the brush bar and not been sucked up to the bin. This dropped over the carpet as we moved the vacuum to another room, meaning we had to clean again.
In addition, when the LVAC-200 was tested as the main vacuum in a pet-owning household for a few days, it wasn’t effective at picking hair and fur stuck in carpets. We found we had to go over certain areas several times for a satisfactory clean; even then, fur and hair was still visible.
Hard-surface floors are where this vacuum shines though: it easily sucked up fur, hair, flour, and oats; and while it could sometimes dropped a few pieces of larger debris afterwards, this wasn’t a constant issue. After vacuuming, we found emptying its dustbin to be mostly mess-free, with most of debris dropped out as one clump, although we did have to pull out a few bits of hair attached to a filter. There was no hair around the beater bar.
Overall, we felt the level of cleaning was better than expected from a compact cordless vac. Perhaps the only design issues are the lack of storage for the tools: there’s no onboard storage for them on the vacuum, no place for them to attach to the wall mount, and no bag supplied to keep them together. Plus, the single supplied battery means that when you run out of power, you don’t have a second to reach for to carry on cleaning–nor is it immediately obvious where to buy a spare.
Price and Availability
The Levoit LVAC-200 is available direct from Levoit or at Amazon for $199.99, although there both sources were offering substantial discounts at press time.
Should you buy the Levoit LVAC-200?
If you think life’s too short for detangling a vacuum’s beater bar or clearing clogs of hair, the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner will be a great fit. It’s ideal for keeping hard-surface floors spotless while being versatile enough to keep your sofa pet hair-free as well.
And, while it won’t suit those with deep-pile carpets or large homes, it might be handy as a secondary vacuum upstairs or for small-but-frequent clean-ups. The only real frustrations might be the length of time you can reasonably clean before recharging, and the time it takes to recharge its battery: in which case, it might be a good idea to invest in a spare one.
This review was originally published by TechHive’s sibling site, Tech Advisor.
