Ambiano 2-in-1 Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner With Pet Brush

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Aldi has been selling vacuums for years. Our first exposure to an Aldi vacuum came by way of the Easy Home Bagless Upright Vacuum, which we purchased and reviewed back in 2018. We used this model, which we thought did the job adequately enough, for four and a half years before swapping it out for a different model.

In 2022, we also tried the Easy Home Cordless Cyclonic Stick Vacuum. That model proved dead on arrival — it wouldn’t so much as turn on — and we were forced to return it.

Then, in 2023, we found out that Aldi was selling a corded vacuum that was advertised as a “pet vacuum.” A pet vacuum, we soon discovered, isn’t something to be used in place of a normal vacuum so much as a standard home vacuum that claims to be optimized for pets, particularly pet hair. As a cat owner in a house where cat hair is an ever-present nemesis, especially in the summer, we couldn’t help but wonder if this Aldi model could help alleviate some of our pet hair problems.

The Ambiano 2-in-1 Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner With Pet Brush (Product Code: 709718) is an Aldi Find, which means you can only find it in stores for a limited time. Once it’s sold out, you won’t be able to find it in stores again until it comes back, if or when that might be. Aldi doesn’t ship its products online, so if you can’t find one of these in stores, you’re out of luck.

This corded pet stick vacuum currently costs $29.99. I can’t find anything close to that price for either a specialized pet vacuum or a standard corded stick vacuum, most of which cost more in the $50-$150 range.

The vacuum comes out of the box with the following:

1. the main vacuum
2. connector piece
3. spare filter
4. crevice tool
5. furniture brush
6. pet brush
7. floor brush
8. manual
9. warranty card

Contents of the box.

The vacuum comes with a 3-year warranty backed by Kalorik, an appliance maker. This vacuum looks like a dead ringer of the Kalorik Home Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner With Pet Brush, which Kalorik sells on its site for around $100.

Warranty card. (Click to enlarge.)

Assembly and Use:

It’s not a bad idea to read the manual before using this vacuum. The manual not only has all the usual warnings about what to do and not do, but it also has some maintenance suggestions. Among those maintenance suggestions are how to clean the foam / cloth filters.

Once everything is out of the plastic, it only takes a couple of minutes to put this vacuum together. First off, you need to put the connector piece — a small plastic adaptor that everything else connects to — onto the vacuum. (I made the mistake of not realizing I needed this piece and I couldn’t figure out why the telescoping rod kept falling out.) From there, you can either attach the telescoping rod to the vacuum for a full-sized vacuum experience, or connect one of the attachments directly to the vacuum for a more hand-vac-like setup.

The vacuum uses a simple on/off trigger to start and stop. You simply pull the trigger once to turn it on, then pull the trigger a second time to turn it off. It’s easy to use one-handed. Likewise, swapping out the various vacuum heads is a straightforward affair.

Of note: this Ambiano is fairly loud, but no more noisy than other cyclonic vacuums we’ve tried. In fact, the Ambiano is quieter than our Shark vacuum — more on this in a moment.

For floor cleaning, most users will either employ the floor attachment or the pet attachment. Both have their pros and cons. The floor attachment is wider and does have a strip to catch fur, while the pet attachment has a rotating brush presumably more suited to picking up fur and it does better when you’ve got the vacuum more parallel with the ground.

The floor piece at left, the pet piece at right.

The fur attachment deserves some particular mention, since it’s part of what makes this vacuum different. It has a rotating mechanism to pull in fur, but then the fur or hair — the longer stuff, especially — stays there. You can cut it out with scissors, or you can unlock and open the fur attachment. That second option is quite effective at removing the fur, but then you have to put it all back together, which is a bit of a pain. Pick your poison.

Comparing it to a Shark:

Shark at top, Ambiano at bottom.

For comparison purchases, we put the Ambiano alongside our other cyclonic vacuum, the Shark Rocket Pro DLX Corded Stick Vacuum, which currently retails on Amazon for around $170. The $140 price difference alone certainly makes the Ambiano worth a look, but beyond that there are some areas where the Aldi vacuum has its virtues. The Ambiano is lighter, for instance, which is helpful given that the weight of these cyclonic vacuums rests in the handle. The Ambiano is also quieter while seeming to draw a similar amount of pull.

On the other hand, the Shark has a better floor brush, thanks to the ball-joint rotatable design. The Shark is also easier to store, thanks to a design that lets it all stow upright.

The big surprise for us is that the Shark isn’t the runaway winner in this comparison. Sure, it’s got some advantages, but the Aldi vacuum does, too, and that’s not something we thought we’d see out of a $30 vacuum.

The Verdict:

Is a $30 vacuum worth buying? In this case, we think the answer just might be yes. The Ambiano 2-in-1 Cyclone Vacuum Cleaner With Pet Brush — or, if you prefer, the Ambiano Pet Vacuum Cleaner — is easy to assemble, simple to use, relatively quiet, not hard to clean, and, most importantly, effective at getting dirt off the floor. The accessories are good, if not great, but this package has all the pieces you need for cleaning up a space.

Overall, this vacuum compares more favorably to our more expensive name brand vacuum than we might have predicted. We don’t know yet how long the Aldi vacuum will last, but the 3-year warranty, backed up by manufacturer Kalorik, is a nice bonus.