Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner review

You could be easily forgiven for not making Levoit one of your first choices for a vacuum cleaner. As a relatively young company, up until now, it’s been concentrating mostly on fans and air purifiers. However, one of its latest products, the LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner, is worth adding to your wish list if you have more hard floors than soft.

That’s because it’s been designed to tackle cleaning them: featuring everything from an anti-hair wrap brush, to five levels of filtration for capturing pet hair and even the tiniest particles of dander. Add to this an LED headlight for spotting dust, a pair of 2-in-1 attachments for crevices and upholstery, and easy maintenance, and it’s the ideal vac for keeping floors dust-free, hair-free and fur-free.

Design and Build

• Anti-tangle roller
• Easy-empty 0.58 litre bin
• 2.8kg actual weight

Flip the main head of the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner around and you’ll notice something different about its brush. Where you’d usually see bristles – great for sweeping up dust and beating carpet but prone to hair wrapping around them – you’ll spy flexible rubber/fabric fins instead.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

These whisk dust and debris towards the suction, but resist hair tangling around them. Instead, more hair, or fur, ends up in the dust bin. The bin itself is on the small side – a compact 0.58 litres – but effortless to empty whether it’s still attached to the motor or removed. All it needs is the catch at the bottom pressed to release the contents.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

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The vacuum itself feels pretty solid and robust and not too bulky at 110cm tall, with a width and depth of 19.5cm and 25cm respectively. Its slim overall design is sure to appeal to those with limited space, and, while it doesn’t stand unaided – you’ll need to lean it somewhere or lay it down if you’re moving furniture – there’s a wall mount for storage.

Handily, it can either be charged when stored, or the 2.0Ah (amp hours) capacity battery can be removed for charging. This is combined with a brushless DC motor to give a varying suction power of 180W. It’s not the most powerful out there, but enough for cleaning a variety of surfaces.

While it’s labelled as a lightweight vacuum, its quoted weight of 1.45kg only corresponds to the vacuum body and battery. Complete with the tubes and vacuum head in place, it’s 2.8kg, almost doubling it. This is still a light vacuum – but not exactly as advertised.

Performance and Features

• Two power levels
• 30 minutes max runtime
• Battery life bar indicator is imprecise

Presented with a hard floor that needs cleaning, the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner is pleasingly efficient. It can flatten to go under furniture – although you’ll need to bend low with it as its tubes are rigid, not jointed – and the attachments can fit either directly onto the motor unit or onto the tubes, so you can clean curtains as easily as a staircase.

There’s a choice of two power levels: Eco, which is its default, and Turbo, for when you need more power. The latter runs the battery down fast, however. For example, you can clean for 50 minutes on Eco with the crevice or pet tools attached but only 12 minutes with the Turbo setting. Likewise, with the vacuum head in place, it’ll deliver around 30 minutes of cleaning on Eco, but less than half that on Turbo.

There’s a countdown indicator at the side that gives an idea of how much power is left but it’s not exact. Three bars can mean anything from 70% to full power, while one flashing bar could mean you have 10% power left or almost nothing.

In either mode, it’s fairly easy to move around. Most of its weight is concentrated at the top, and there’s not so much suction that it gets stuck on carpeted floors. In testing, it coped well with surface dirt on our mid-pile carpets, picking up both oats (representing larger debris) and flour (representing dust) with a few passes, followed by a burst of Turbo mode to pick up the last few remnants.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

Where it didn’t perform as well was after vacuuming: we noticed that some flour had gathered inside the brush bar and not been sucked up to the bin. This dropped over the carpet as we moved the vacuum to another room, meaning we had to clean again.

In addition, when the LVAC-200 was tested as the main vacuum for a few days in a pet-owning household, it wasn’t effective at picking hair and fur stuck in carpets. We found we had to go over certain areas several times for a satisfactory clean and even then, fur and hair was still visible.

Hard floors are where this vacuum shines though: it easily sucked up fur, hair, flour and oats, and while it could sometimes drop a few pieces of larger debris afterwards, this wasn’t a constant issue. After vacuuming, we found emptying the LVAC-200 to be mostly mess-free – most of the dust bin’s contents dropped out as one clump, although we did have to pull out a few bits of hair attached to a filter. And there was no hair around the brush bar.

Overall, we felt the level of cleaning was better than expected from a compact cordless vac. Perhaps the only design issues are the lack of storage for the tools: there’s no onboard storage for them on the vacuum, no place for them to attach to the wall mount, and no bag supplied to keep them together. Plus, the single supplied battery means that when you run out of power, you don’t have a second to reach for to carry on cleaning – nor is it immediately obvious where to buy a spare.

Price and Availability

At this stage, the Levoit LVAC-200 is only available from Levoit in the US for $199.99. This is competitively priced. Internationally available competitors include the Shark Detect Pro, which has the advantage of its Detect mode, in which headlights come on and power ramps up automatically where needed. The Ultenic U12 Vesla offers a similar feature set to the Levoit, at a slightly lower price point.

Should you buy the Levoit LVAC-200?

If you think life’s too short for detangling a vacuum brush bar or clearing clogs of hair, the Levoit LVAC-200 cordless vacuum cleaner is a great fit for you. It’s ideal for keeping hard floors spotless while being versatile enough to keep your sofa pet hair-free as well.

And, while it won’t suit those with deep-pile carpets or large homes, it might be handy as a secondary vacuum upstairs or for little-and-often clean-ups. The only real frustrations might be the length of time you can reasonably clean before recharging and how long it takes to recharge the battery: in which case, it might be a good idea to invest in a spare one.

If this isn’t the right vacuum for you, have a look at our round-up of the best vacuum cleaners we’ve tested.