Dog Hair Torture Test: Tineco Pure One S12 Pro EX Cordless Vacuum Review

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I’ve done an alarming amount of vacuum research in past months on a mission to find a single unit that can tackle both household and automotive duty, while simultaneously ridding me of multiple vacuums that I don’t really like.

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What I want is a vacuum I can take from my living room rug to my hallway hardwood to the cargo area of a 2022 Nissan Rogue I’ve been using for transporting 2 dogs to and from the beach all weekend.

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Right now, I’d have to use 3 different vacuums for that process — and none of them do a decent job on dog hair in the car. After multiple attempts, I’d given up on finding a single vacuum that could do it all, while simultaneously delivering excellent performance on pet hair.

If you’re a dog owner planning to run a single vacuum for house and automobile, a few features matter more than many when it comes to enjoyable operation and satisfactory performance, free of annoying hair tangles. I’ll outline those features below, and we’re using the Tineco S12 Pro EX cordless vacuum as the demonstrator.

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This high-end unit is the brand’s flagship offering, and professional vacuum reviewers often rate it at or near the top of today’s cordless vacuum performance charts. My tester ran  145 watts of suction power driven by a 2,500 mAh battery. Users get 600 cc’s of dust and dirt capacity, pre-filter system, full HEPA filtration, and a sleek curb weight of 6.6 pounds. Even with the swappable power-heads attached for cleaning household floors, one-handed operation is possible, and you can lift the S12 Pro EX into the air with little effort. 

This flagship model is a rolling collection of the latest in vacuum design and tech, including a sensor system that counts and measures what’s entering the dust bin in real time to adjust suction power as you go. It has direct-drive brush rolls with their electric motors mounted inside to save space, weight, and complexity. That design feature also enables stronger edge-to-edge cleaning performance.

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To learn more about the S12’s high tech cleaning features, including a sensor that measures dust pickup in real time to optimize motor speed against current load, be sure to watch the video review to see it in action.

There are two specific attributes that make this high-end cordless stick an ideal candidate for the sole vacuum for your house and car.

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First, the all-out power. As cordless vacuums go, the S12 Pro EX is one of the highest-performing on the market. Carry the lightweight main unit to your car with a flexible nozzle and cleaning brush attached, and it picks up sand, dirt and gravel from floor mats and carpeting with the sort of performance I expect from a big, clunky corded. Relative to its size, this thing moves some serious air.

With a soft brush attachment, detailing of nooks and crannies is easily handled with a single pass.

However, when wearing its motorized brush roll, the S12 Pro EX is your most powerful weapon against pet hair in the cargo area of your van, SUV or crossover.

The style and arrangement of the bristles shreds pet hair out of carpeting — even months worth of ground-in Golden Retriever hair — and the sort of fine sand that most dogs track into the car after a swim or hike. The icing on top of this hair-ripping performance is a brush roll that strongly resists tangling. Even after a dog-hair torture test in the back of a 4-dog Mazda CX-5 that hadn’t been cleaned in 2 years, I moved 600 cc’s of hair and sand from the cargo area carpeting into the dust bin in a matter of moments, and with minimal need for multiple passes.

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At the end of the process, dog hair in the brush-roller was nearly-nil and easily removed, and the vacuum pulled almost everything out of the carpeted surface.

By the way, using a power-head to vacuum your cargo area might sound silly, but consider this: the compact size makes the power head light and maneuverable enough to mount directly to the handheld motor unit, without the extension wand between the two that you’d use when doing the rugs inside. This setup gives you a hand-held vacuum with a supercharged, wide-track dog hair brush whose motors live inside of the roller itself. This neat touch eliminates the need for a noisy and troublesome belt drive, and provides excellent edge-to-edge cleaning.

A dog-hair torture test like this one will fill the dust bin, possibly several times, and may require the machine’s pre-filter system be cleaned immediately afterwards. Pre-filters can be washed and dried, or self-cleaned with a special attachment that literally lets this vacuum clean its own air filter. In normal use, pre-filters will need attention every few months, and new ones can be had for $10-$15.

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Two filters, two batteries, two powerheads, full wall mounting hardware, and a variety of useful attachments are included for the machine’s $800 asking price.

If this will be your first high-end vacuum, a few delightful touches help welcome you to the experience. For instance, the LED-fired display screen changes colour in response to surface cleanliness, as identified by a special sensor that counts incoming dirt. The fully automatic setting means set-it-and-forget-it operation, with no need to to adjust motor speed. If you want to anyways, just slide your finger over the touch-stripe on the top of the unit to throttle it up or down. You can also swipe the stripe against any part of your body. When my hands were full, I was able to turn the vacuum speed up by lifting the unit to my face, and sliding the touch-stripe against my chin. That’s how light it is.

Also, it’s remarkably quiet given the performance. All of this helps ensure you feel value for your dollar, and have fun using it in the process.

If you’re making the spend, the S12 Pro EX’s compact handling and maneuverability and exceptional pet hair performance — even during severe use — combine for a compelling reason to ditch your old, corded clunkers.