Review: Bissell 2001 Hard Floor Expert Cordless Canister

• January 3, 2017
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of the Bissell 2001 Hard Floor Expert Cordless Canister, received as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Struggles with Carpets, and Limited Battery Runtime

Having recently torn up the carpet in the first floor hallway and living room (the two rooms having already been done), and finding some really nice hardwood floors, we were excited to see the Bissell 2001 Hard Floor Expert Cordless Canister available for review.

Since we had been using a broom and a Shark brand vacuum cleaner, our first few experiences with the Bissell were pretty amazing. It did a great job of vacuuming the hardwood floors, picking up almost everything but larger pieces.

However, switching on and off the device ended up being a little tricky, since it doesn’t roll as nicely along the floors as you’d expect. What we both ended up doing was picking it up and hitting the knob against our leg or knee to turn it on/off in a hurry.

My girlfriend has a lot of plants, so as they started getting moved back into the living room, and we vacuumed the other rooms in the house, we found that even the smaller leaves required using the second head attachment (seemingly designed for carpets) or just using a bare hose.

Speaking of the carpet attachment, it’s currently sitting upstairs, where it’s been for the last couple of weeks, unused. While I tried using it a couple of times on the rugs and carpets, it doesn’t work. My girlfriend thought it was for the hardwood floors originally, but didn’t do that very well either.

The next point is the battery life. The product specs say that it will give up to 45 minutes of runtime on a charge. We end up running the Bissell at the highest speed setting, which might be why I believe we experience runtimes lower than that pretty consistently. I do wish that it had some sort of plug-in option so that it wouldn’t run out while in the middle of cleaning. At least once I was glad we already had another vacuum cleaner.

Finally, we have the weight of the device and carrying it around. The vacuum is actually fairly light, however the handhold is in, what I find to be an awkward spot, leading to odd balancing. However, this is something I ended up getting used to.

So I have pretty mixed feelings about the Bissell 2001 Hard Floor Expert Cordless Canister. It’s light and does well on hardwood floors. On the other hand we found it necessary to run on full speed, which cuts into the runtime, and it’s useless on carpets and rugs.

Given that we’re slowly moving toward more hardwood floors in the house, we’ll undoubtedly get more and more use of it. If, on the other hand, we had more carpets than we do, this wouldn’t replace a standard vacuum cleaner and broom. For this reason, I give the Bissell 2001 Hard Floor Expert Cordless Canister four of five stars.

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