Shark Ultralite Multi-Vac Vacuum Review

Shark finally appears to have a winner with the Ultralite Multi Vac. I've been buying Shark / Euro Pro products for years, and after showing so much promise when brand new, they are so cheaply made that they inevitably break or self-destruct after a very short time. It appears that maybe Mark Rosen (the CEO) is taking the brand name a little more seriously now. I love this multi vac and I was fully prepared to find fault with it. It's not perfect, but it's a huge improvement. The 5-year warranty shows that they mean business about this product. Here's hoping that their customer service has improved along with the quality of their products. The infomercial really does show what this product is capable of doing. On the down side, I found the assembly instructions not at all intuitive and the shape of the stick vac just seems all wrong when you are assembling it, but once I figured it out, everything went together well. They really need to go back to the drawing board and re-do the assembly instructions so you don't need a PhD to follow them. I had to watch the infomercial again to figure out where the crevice / dusting tool sat on the stick vac because the instructions did not even reference it. In terms of performance, I had just vacuumed with my Dyson Ball before the Multi Vac was delivered and decided to put it to the test. I filled a dirt cup easily, which surprised me. I'm not so sure that this means the Dyson is not as good a vacuum as much as that I was finally able to reach under low furniture that I mostly vacuumed around and it does a much better job on the stairs. No question that the Shark turbo brush did an excellent job with pet hair on the stairs and furniture and far outperformed the turbo brush on my Dyson. There is much more suction available for the tools than on my Dyson also. Another Dyson shortcoming (and I own two of them) is that they tend to snowplow anything that doesn't have the consistency of dust. It just pushes around the dry dog food on the floor by my dog's bowl, and I have to undo the wand to suck up the pieces that way. The Shark stick vac made short work of larger, chunky pieces as well as long pet hair that gets woven into the carpet and furniture fabric. Emptying the stick vac was easy and I didn't have to put my hand in the dirt in order to clean everything out of the dust bin. It all fell out, and that is definitely a first for any Shark vacuum that I have purchased. It was nice that Shark included an extra set of the washable lifetime filters so that you don't have to stop vacuuming while you wait for them to dry. I found transitioning from a stick vac to a modified canister vac easy enough, but it is a more cumbersome process to transition to a hand vac. The instructions referenced a piece of plastic (like a damper) that has to be inserted and I couldn't find it anywhere in the packaging. Turns out, it was stored on the bottom of the hand vac. That would have been nice to know before I wasted a lot of time looking for it. The infomercial uses the hand vac to pick up a pile of dirt and pennies, but the instructions say not to vacuum up coins or other hard objects. There is a little disconnect between what they say and what they do when they are demonstrating it. The stick vac is lightweight, easy to push, gets under low furniture easily, and turns on a dime. The backsaver handle is great in modified canister vac mode to get under low furniture. All in all, so far, this Shark has been a pleasure to use. I can't speak to long-term reliability. It's just too new on the market. A slightly longer cord would be nice. Perhaps the next version could be a little easier to assemble and feel a little more sturdy. If there is one take-home lesson for Shark from Dyson, it is that in the long run, it really pays to use good quality material, like the plastic and the electrical cord, etc. than to do things on the cheap. I'd rather pay more for quality than have to toss this vacuum in 6 months because it falls apart. Right now, I think it's terrific. I hope I feel the same about it a year from now.