Shark Anti Hair Wrap Review

The Shark Anti Hair Wrap is a cordless vacuum from Shark, a manufacturer and retailer of home cleaning and care products. Originally Shark had some great success in the USA, but have now moved over to the UK where they're enjoying similar success. Shark have been in the UK since 2013, with headquarters in Leeds.

Shark are known for producing very good quality cordless vacuum cleaners, and their Anti Hair Wrap Cordless Vacuum is no exception. In the past we have reviewed Shark Cordless Stick vacuum, which is the predecessor to the Anti Hair Wrap Cordless. Let's see how the new model stacks up.

First things first, how does it clean? Pretty well actually.

Like in all of our vacuum reviews we put the Shark to the test on hard laminate floors, hard stone floors, low pile carpet and high pile rugs. We have a black labrador who malts considerably, so the carpets are often a challenge.

Hard floors

Starting with the hard floors, the easiest test that most vacuums perform well on. The Anti Hair Wrap Shark was no exception, and did very well. On the laminate floor it got up all of our tested dirt on the first pass, and the powered brush head helped with that.

One thing to note here is that unlike other brands of cordless vacuum the Shark doesn't automatically change its cleaning technique between floor types. With brands like Dyson and Vax you'll often notice that the brushbar turns off when moving to hard floors, something which the Shark doesn't do. Instead, you have manual controls to change the settings. Some people prefer the manual control, so it's not necessarily a negative, but something to be aware of.

The Shark Anti Hair Wrap vacuum did well on both the laminate floor and the porous stone floor.

Carpets

The Shark did very well on the carpets, far better than we expected. It took a single pass to pick up most of the debris on the carpet. The motored brush head picked up most of the dog hair on a single pass, and we couldn't find any hair after cleaning the room - that's pretty impressive and better than a lot of plug-in upright vacuums.

We tested the crevice and pet hair tools, both of which did a good job at getting hair from the corners of the room and stairs. The crevice tool is nothing special and similar to any of the crevice tools you'll have seen before.

Aesthetically the Shark vacuum is unassuming and somewhat vanilla. It follows the standard shape of a cordless vacuum by having the motor and dust bin at the top of the vacuum, near the handle.

From there is a long stick on which the motorised brush head attaches. The stick neck has a hinge around a third of the way down, which allows the vacuum to be folded in half for easy storage. This is a feature we really liked, as many vacuums, especially cordless vacuums, are difficult to store with their cumbersome and long necks.

The vacuum can also be operated in 'half mode' where only the smallest part of the vacuum is in use, which makes it much lighter and easier to clean stairs and furniture.

The Shark is heavy, coming in at 4.74kg. That's nearly twice the weight of the Dyson equivalent. The weight is the first thing you notice when you use the vacuum, and there's not getting away from the fact that it makes it more difficult to use than other vacuums on the market.

That said, the reason it is heavier is due to the powerful motor and good battery life. We'll come onto the battery life a little further on in this article, but the motor is powerful and as we discussed in the Performance section the Shark really does deliver.

The extra weight does provide extra downward force onto the floor too, which is useful when cleaning carpets (it doesn't really help on hard floor unfortunately). The extra weight pushes the brush head of the vacuum down into the carpet without you needing to apply any of your own pressure. In theory this results in a deeper clean.

Whether the deeper clean offsets the inconvenience of the heavier vacuum is really personal preference. In our tests it didn't prove to be a problem, but we do know of users of the Shark vacuum that opted to get a lighter vacuum.

Like we said in the Weight section, this is a heavy vacuum, and a particularly heavy cordless. This weight has a negative impact on maneuverability of the vacuum - it's harder to move round the room and it's more difficult to move up and down the stairs.

Another negative from a maneuverability point-of-view is the size of the brush head. It's a fairly large block shape, much larger than other cordless vacuums. From a performance point-of-view this is a positive, but when looking at maneuverability it means that moving the vacuum around corners more challenging and adds even more friction when pushing it over thicker carpets.

However, one positive comes from the neck of the Shark, which can bend to hit hard-to-reach areas around the home, and makes it easy to store. Check out the video above for an example of how this works.

Shark states that the battery lasts approximately 40 minutes on a full charge. Obviously the actual battery life depends on many factors, including what floors you were cleaning, how much dirt you were picking up, starting and stopping, and even the temperature. However, in our test we actually got 41 minutes out of a charge, which is a Which Vac first - we got higher than the advertised battery life! This test is done by simply leaving the vacuum running until it depletes fully, so it's not quite a real-world test, but it still performed better than advertised.

In a more real world test where we were actively cleaning rooms we got 38 minutes out of a full charge. This included 3 pauses to empty to dust bin, and a number of stops to change the mode the vacuum was running in.

Extra batteries

Shark make it very easy to swap out the battery in the cordless, and you can buy the vacuum with additional batteries as part of a set, which increases the run-time to a whopping 80 minutes! Of course you can add as many batteries as you want and switch them out as and when you need them, but it's unlikely you'd ever need more than 80 minutes.

In terms of charge time, you can expect to go from 0% charge to 100% in around 4 hours.