Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: A powerful cordless stick vacuum that won’t break the bank
With effective cleaning and plenty of accessories at an affordable price, the Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity is a versatile vacuum cleaner
Pros
- Generous selection of accessories
- Great dust performance
- Affordable price
Cons
- Weak on large particles
- Not as good as a Dyson
With the right range of attachments, a good cordless vacuum cleaner operates as both a handheld and a stick cleaner. The Eufy HomeVac S11 definitely falls into this camp, with a generous collection of attachments and extras that make it as good at cleaning your nooks and crannies as it is at covering a reasonable expanse of carpet or hard floor.
Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: What do you get for the money?
In the box, you get all the usual add-ons and then some. There’s the main handheld motor unit, naturally, which is accompanied by a standard, motorised floor head and an extension tube so you can use it as a regular upright vacuum cleaner. You also get a crevice nozzle and a brush tool, which doubles up as a wider brushless attachment.
There are a few bonus extras too, including a second, smaller motorised head that’s great for cleaning the stairs, a bendy extension hose for reaching into tricky places, a wall-mount and, best of all, a second battery that doubles the amount of time you can vacuum without having to recharge.
Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: What’s it like to use?
The Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity is relatively light at only 2.5kg with the full motorised floorhead attached, so it’s not too difficult to wield. It glides effortlessly over carpet and hard floor, with a very flexible joint at the floor head to give precise control and access to tricky places, such as under low furniture. There’s also a bright, front-mounted headlight on the floor head that helps you see into dark places.
It has a trigger button you need to hold in to keep the power on, which sounds onerous until you realise this makes it easy to ration battery life and impossible to absent-mindedly leave it running. A second button on the unit is used to control the power, which can be boosted with a single press or moved into low-power mode with a second press.
The dust collector has a capacity of 0.65 litres and is mercifully simple to empty via a quick-release catch on top of the unit. It’s almost as simple to detach the whole bin and remove the washable filter, which makes the whole thing very easy to clean.
Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: How well does it clean?
The Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity performed incredibly well when picking up our test flour spillage, collecting 94% of it from my carpet on a single pass. It picked 100% of our sample flour from the hard floor on a single pass, which is very impressive.
It didn’t fare so well with larger particles, however, and came up short in our Cheerios test. The main problem is that the front of the main brush head sits too close to the floor to collect such large particles. There are a few gaps, which allows some pickup, but the S11 simply collected most of them in front of it as I pushed it along and this happened on both hard floor and short-pile carpet.
Those that did get through quickly blocked up the inlet for the dust collector too. This happened no matter what attachment I used. It’s able to suck the Cheerios up the tube, but they’re simply too big to make it into the collector bin.
Judging by how good the S11 is at picking up smaller particles, I’d probably have been better off treading the Cheerios into the carpet and sucking up the smaller pieces, or simply using a dustpan and brush instead.
With that said, the Eufy S11 Infinity is better than most in its price bracket. It’s more powerful than the £130 Gtech HyLite, for instance, and performed much better in the flour test. The Hylite only sucked up 56% of the spilled powder on short-pile carpet. The Hylite’s brush head does a better (if still imperfect) job of collecting Cheerios.
The Eufy similarly performs better in the flour test than the Vax Blade 4, although it didn’t do as well with Cheerios as the Vax.
Increase your budget to £300 or so and you can pick up the Dyson V7 Absolute (around £300), which is more than capable of gathering flour and larger particles. For perfect performance, the Dyson V11 Absolute costs a lot more at £600, but removes anything thrown at it quickly and efficiently.
Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: How good is the battery life?
Eufy promises 40 minutes of cleaning from each of the 25.2V lithium-ion batteries and the generous inclusion of a second power pack in the box doubles your potential cleaning time.
In fact, it performed better than advertised in my tests, with each battery lasting for 49 minutes in its low power mode. Switch to maximum power and you’ll only get eight minutes, but there’s a happy medium of 29 minutes from standard mode. This is better than the Vax Blade 4, which lasted seven minutes 30 seconds on full power (and only comes with one battery).
The Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity’s batteries do take a fairly long 3.5 hours to recharge, but they’re easy to detach and can be charged independently from the main unit.
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Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity review: Should I buy it?
If you want the very best cordless vacuum cleaner, you still need to opt for a Dyson. However, Dysons are more expensive than the Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity and they come with only one non-user-replaceable battery too. Even the cheaper models, such as the Dyson V7, cost as much as £300.
Although it launched at £279, I’ve seen the Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity widely available for as little as £190. At this price, there isn’t much around for the price that’s better, especially considering that it comes with two batteries in the box. Its performance with larger particles isn’t great but for day-to-day carpet and floor cleaning duties it performs extremely well and it’s a delight to use.