Welcome back to our College Gift Guide. Here, we physically review various items that may make good gifts for students going off to college (or buy these for yourself!). This isn’t a promotional guide – we really handle the items and try them out in real situations. Our final verdict is to help you decide. Maybe you’ll get some good ideas from this listing. Let’s continue…
Item: Black & Decker 3-in-1 Corded Stick + Handheld + Stair Vacuum (Model #BDXHHV005G)
Our Verdict: Recommended.
Not all of us at Campus News live in the dorms anymore, but when we did, getting our room vacuumed was kind of a pain. We’d have to wait for the janitor to come around and ask, nicely, to borrow their vacuum for a few minutes while they tended to other things.
Some students have the equivalent of a handheld Dust Buster, but that means you have to get down on the floor yourself to get all of that crud that accumulates on dorm floors. And those handhelds only have so much capacity.
So we tried out the Black & Decker 3-in-1. You can find these on major sites like Amazon, Target and Walmart for about $40-50, depending on sales.
This is a stick vacuum with swivel base, and only weighs a few pounds. It will hide nicely in your closet. But you can also snap it apart and turn it into a powerful handheld.
It’s a plug-in unit. That’s more good than bad. At least you won’t have to have the vacuum sitting on a charger on your desk. Just plug it in and it’s ready to go. The plug length is OK. Definitely fine for a dorm room. The plus of a plug-in unit is that it can generate more power than a rechargeable unit. This one boasts 480 watts. While not a beast, this amount of power is adequate for the types of matted carpeting found in dorms, or for hard floors.
The HEPA filter can be easily cleaned in the bathroom sink and there are no bags. This is easy to put together and take apart. You could probably get about four sweeps done of a typical dorm room before you’d have to empty it. You may end up being the hit of the suite, as your neighbors may want to borrow this vacuum.
Whether or not you want to be known as “that person” with the vacuum is up to you. But this one is light and rather nondescript looking, and the price is low enough to make it a worthwhile consideration. It stood up to our testing, and should stand the test of time – at least several semesters.
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