The Beatles’ “We All Live in a Yellow Submarine” is blaring over the speakers as I nod my head bewilderingly at my twins, who are crying. There are a few songs that cheer them up in these moments, and this seems to be one of them. Because of this, I never thought I’d love a submarine as much as Ringo’s yellow one—but then I met Dyson’s, a teal wet mop that lifts stubborn spills with stylish ease.
The Dyson v15s Detect Submarine ($950) is the brand’s first wet-dry vacuum cleaner, and it’s made for moms who find themselves suddenly panicked about the state of their floors (ahem: yours truly). Earlier this year, Dyson performed a study that indicated over half of Americans are only motivated to dust when they see it on the floor (ahem: yours truly again). The problem with this is that most dust is microscopic and once you see it, it can make it hard to get rid of because dust can easily become airborne and just float to a different surface.
What’s more, shoes, “act as a vector, picking up dirt, dust, mold spores, chemicals, bacteria, and viruses wherever we go,” Colorado-based infection control nurse, Lauren Bryan, RN, MPH previously told Well+Good. So if you’re wearing your shoes outside and then don’t take them off, you’re probably going to have all of that to contend with on your floors as well.
As a new mom of twins whose kids are soon to be scooting across these surfaces and near all the germs, I was looking for a solution to get my floors dirt and dust-free. In perfect timing, Dyson released V15s Detect Submarine, which—with one machine—lets me get my floors squeaky clean so I don’t have to worry about the state of them all the time.
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What is the Dyson v15s Detect Submarine?
The Dyson v15s Detect Submarine is a cordless, do-it-all machine that marries wet and dry cleaning technology. It’s technically a mop-friendly version of the Dyson v15 Detect ($750), which is one of the brand’s intelligent cordless vacuums. In short, the Submarine is just the same vacuum with a mop-head attachment that snaps on when you need to wash your floors. And no, before you ask, you can’t just buy the Submarine attachment and stick it to your pre-existing v15 Detect machine; the new Submarine has technology that senses the Submarine has been attached to initiate mop mode.
Dyson, Dyson V15s Detect Submarine — $950.00
Includes three cleaner heads, four accessories (combination tool, crevice tool, hair screw tool, and wand clip), a drip tray, charger, and docking station.
Weight: 9 lb.
Filtration: whole-machine HEPA filtration
Bin volume: 0.2 gallon
Suction power: 240 AW
- Can be used on carpets and hard floors
- Wet-mop technology
- Powerful suction and filtration
- 60-minute run time
- 2-year warranty
- Cordless and bagless
- Expensive
- Long charging time (4.5 hours)
What’s included
Being cordless, each Dyson v15s Detect Submarine includes a dock, a charger, and a drip tray. Most important, though, are the three different rollerheads that come with each machine. Let’s break ’em down.
Dyson Submarine wet roller head
In 50 years, your grandkids who are listening to Cardi B’s classical song “WAP,” are going to have no idea what a bucket and a mop are because the Dyson (and sure, its knockoffs) will have put them out of business.
The Submarine roller head is your mop and it solves three key issues: maneuverability, ease of use, and pick-up performance. The first is that many wet-dry vacs often are bulky and don’t get in and out of the crevices as well as you’d like them to, but the sub has a low profile, that makes it easy to glide under furniture or cabinets where most spills occur. When you’re using it, the pick-up performance allows you to get the right amount of hydration-to-absorption ratio, so that you can tackle spills and stains at the same time. It also easily separates the dirty water from the clean water so that you don’t feel like you’re just spreading mud and gunk all over every surface of your house.
And lastly, it’s super simple to use. The roller head can be disassembled and washed with anti-bacterial detergent to make sure that you’re getting it clean for the next time that you’re ready to use it. What’s more, while the device was meant to be used with water alone, you can use any sort of household cleaner in the head (aside from bleach) to give you a deep, good-smelling clean.
Digital Motorbar cleaner head
This head is your workhorse. It can be used on both hardwood floors and carpets to lift dust, dirt, and impurities thanks to two key pieces of technology. The first is detangling technology, “designed to solve the problem of having to de-tangle hair from the brush bar by hand. Inspired by a detangling comb,” explains Asaph Ooi, head of product programs for floorcare at Dyson. This works because of precise angling to pick up hair—from your head, your pet, strangers—and usher it directly into the waste bin.
The second is something called “Dynamic Load Sensor” technology, “which senses when the floor type changes by monitoring brush bar resistance, automatically communicating with the motor and battery’s microprocessors to adjust the suction power when going across floor types,” according to Ooi. This means that you can just move from surface to surface without paying much mind to stopping what you’re doing to add on a different head.
Fluffy Optic cleaner head
This head haunts my dreams—or at the very least has made me incredibly aware that vacuuming every day with babies crawling on the floor is a complete necessity. The fluffy optic cleaner head is engineered with illumination technology of a green LED light that shows you particles that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. “The idea came about when a Dyson engineer noticed that airborne particles in their home glistened in the sun,” says Ooi. “They began to research how they could take this notion and apply it to the fine dust we cannot see in our home.”
The result is that when you pull the trigger, a green light illuminates the floor in front of you in a sci-fi manner to show absolutely disgusting your floors are. As Dyson’s previous study indicated, we really should be vacuuming much more than when we see dust, and anyone who’s ever used this roller head will understand exactly why.
Accessories
In addition to the charging dock and three roller heads, the vacuum also comes with three additional accessories:
- A combination tool that toggles between a plastic nozzle and a wide brush.
- A crevice tool for getting into hard-to-reach spots.
- An anti-tangle hair screw tool, for sucking up human hair and pet hair alike.
- A wand clip that stores the combination tool and crevice tool on the wand of your vacuum for seamless storage.
What I like
Convenience
Not only do I live in New York City, where I take the subway or walk everywhere I go, I have a dog who lives in New York City and takes the subway or walks everywhere she goes (shh—I have an Ikea bag to follow the rules). Even if I’m taking off my shoes when I get in the house, my dog is not. I used to just live with it in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of way. Now, that’s less of an option because I don’t want my twins to get something from the floors.
This vacuum, potentially even above other Dyson models that I’ve had before, gives me so much peace of mind. Between the LED light that shows me what’s actually on my floor and the wet-vac modality, my floors stay much cleaner without a ton of hassle on my part. The week after I got my Submarine, I hosted Thanksgiving, and not only was I able to troubleshoot the few messes and spills that happened that day super easily, I was also able to quickly clean the floors back to their pre-Thanksgiving glory in under 30 minutes. (Again, I live in NYC so I don’t have a particularly big place, but this still felt like an Olympic-sized achievement).
Power and suction
True to the Dyson brand, it’s powerful. It gets the job done on a variety of surfaces, no matter what you’re cleaning up. Pet hair, juice, olive oil, mud, milk, mysterious baby fluid (it happens!)—the cleaning power and suction of this thing is top-notch. They’re not quite crawling yet, but when they do, I’ll have no worries about them milling around my floors with this device by my side.
What I don’t like
Cost
There’s no way around it—this device is expensive. At $950 a pop, the luxury price tag is tough to swallow. That said, it is a premium product and comes with a two-year warranty, including parts and labor.
It’s not *technically* a 3-in-1 vacuum
While it is a convenient tool to have in your cleaning quiver, I can see how it can be inconvenient to stop what you’re doing and switch to an entirely different head for different circumstances. There are other true dual- and triple-action floor cleaners on the market that require no switching of roller heads or attachments—you simply press a button and the thing automatically shifts between wet and dry modes. This isn’t that product and—although it takes virtually no time to swap out the heads—can be a downside.
Final thoughts
I think what’s the most impactful is that when it comes to parenting you’re always striving to do the most and be the best, which can feel like a Herculean feat. It’s like all of these feelings of not being good enough are dust invisibly collecting on the floor each day. To be able to have a tool that shows you that you’re doing fine—that you’ve got this—is such a relief. One even Ringo hasn’t been able to top.
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