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Hey, I'm CNet's Ry Crist standing beside the Soniclean VT Plus.
This is a vacuum cleaner that you might have seen marketed on TV or through a online YouTube ad, but it's got a unique approach to getting dirt out of your carpet.
What it does is it uses vibration to create what it calls sonic cleaning technology, and all that means is it's got a vibrating bar on the bottom of it besides that brush roll.
That vibrating bar is going to buzz and it's gonna shake dirt up out of your carpet and into the bin a lot easier, so Soniclean says.
Now taking a look at this thing, I don't like the design.
It looks dated to me.
It's trying to look futuristic.
It's got sort of a robotic coat of paint.
Looks like a Star Wars droid extra, but that said, minimalism has its upside.
There is a nice lightness to this vacuum.
It only weighs about 11.25 pounds, so if you want something light and easy to push around your living room, this might be the vacuum for you.
That doesn't make it more maneuverable though, because it doesn't have rotating neck or that ball design that Dyson uses, so it doesn't turn quite as easily.
Pretty old fashioned vacuum in that regard.
Something else to keep in mind is that the VT Plus uses bags and not canisters.
So you'll need to change these out and keep purchasing them going forward.
So let's take another look at that sonic cleaning technology, that vibrating bar at the bottom.
And my question as I started test this was, does that vibration agitate your carpets in a different way than the brush roll, which spins brushes through the carpet fiber, already does?
Does that add anything new?
And to test that out, I've got this glass of water here.
I'll show you, if I put it up against the brush roll and let the brushes spin against it, not a lot of movement there, if any.
But then if I take the glass of water and hold it right up against the vibrating bar, you see some T-Rex style ripples going through the surface of that glass.
So pretty unique, pretty different.
There's something going on there that you don't get with a brush roll.
So does that translate to cleaning performance?
Well, actually it performed a lot better than I expected.
In the cheerios and pet hair test, it did among the best of any vacuum we've tested.
The problem though is sand, and to be honest, that's the test I expected the vibration technology to have the greatest impact on.
It didn't.
This vacuum finished in the bottom compared to vacuums like the Oreck Touch and the Dyson DC65.
The SonicClean VT Plus retails online for $200, plus about $30 bucks for shipping and handling.
I don't love the design and I'm not convinced that that vibrating technology adds a whole lot.
That sand test should have been better if that was the case, but it did perform well, and at that price point, it's not a bad deal.
So I say, give it a shot if you like what you see.
For CNET, I'm Ry Crist.
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