Dyson debuts lightweight vacuum cleaner 'engineered for Asian homes'

What exactly is an “Asian home”? And how do you engineer a vacuum cleaner just for it?

Let’s just put aside for a moment the fact that Asia is home to around 4.5 billion people with more variety in housing that we can count with all our fingers and toes.

According to Dyson research, an Asian homes is where cleaning is more frequent, and that the prevalence of hard floors demands superior fine dust pick up.

To better meet these needs, Dyson engineers focused on making a lighter machine more suited to frequent cleaning habits, with a shorter wand to complement those with a smaller physique, and with powerful suction to give a barefoot clean.

The result is the new Dyson Digital Slim vacuum cleaner, a pretty remarkable little gadget that weighs in at just 1.9kg. For context, this is just a hair lighter than Apple’s 16-inch MacBook Pro, which weighs in at 2.0kg.

Compared to Dyson’s latest powerhouse, the V11 cord-free vacuum cleaner (at about 3kg), the Digital Slim is 20 per cent smaller and 30 per cent lighter.

The Digital Slim also beats out the V8 Slim – another lightweight model launched earlier this year – by 250g.

Despite trimming out the fat, Dyson claims that the performance of the Digital Slim is comparable to that of the V11 thanks to several design refinements.

Let’s start with the cleaning head. Dyson says it stitched the carbon fibre filament and felt on the cleaner head together instead of using its traditional adhesive, which helped to “significantly” reduce its weight.

The air flow path through the head was also reengineered, smoothing out sharp corners and minimising the edged so that cleaning performance is improved despite its smaller size.

The Digital Slim’s main body is just one single piece, compared to two on the V11. Dyson then pared down the seals, rivets, and thickness of the walls, achieving further weight reduction.

And finally, the Digital Slim features a 15 per cent shorter and 6.3mm thinner wand .

An adapted Dyson Hyperdymium motor spins up to 120,000 rpm , accompanied by 11 scrolled cyclones that have been redesigned to fit the Digital Slim’s smaller body.

All of this adds up to powerful suction that belies the vacuum cleaner’s size. It captures and filters 99.97 per cent of microscopic particles as small as 0.3 microns and keeps it from leaking back out with an airtight gasket around the cyclones and pressurised rubber seal around the filter.

The one downside is the battery life. The Digital Slim is good for just 40 minutes in eco mode, and a mere 5 minutes in boost mode.

This should be sufficient for three to four-bedroom apartments, but if your home is any larger than that, perhaps it’s best to go with the V11 instead (Check out our review of the V11 here ).

The Dyson Digital Slim is available right now in two varieties that cost $100 apart depending on your choice of accessories:

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.