If you’re a pet owner the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser is a handheld vacuum to consider. Like many Bissel vacuums, this one specializes in pet hair removal, as its name implies. Luckily, it is very effective at vacuuming up pet hair. In fact, it's the best handheld vacuum in our lineup for the task. The attachments with this hand vacuum cleaner are extremely limited, but you can change the head between a pet hair attachment and a flathead attachment that essentially cleans everything else.
Bissell Pet Hair Eraser 33A1B: Performance
This is a corded handheld vacuum and is one of the heaviest in our lineup, so its portability is limited. You can only clean out the car if you are near an outlet. Even using it around the house will require you to disconnect and reconnect to a power source several times. On the plus side, corded vacuums tend to have more suction power, and this Bissell hand vac has a lot of that. However, despite the extreme suction power, it got mixed results in our tests.
One test that it excelled at was the suction test. In this test, we took a box of screws and used the vacuum’s suction to lift it up. The powerful vacuums are able to pick up the box when it’s almost full, but the ones with weaker suction require you to take most of the hardware out of the box before the suction can lift it. With the flathead attachment in place, this vacuum clamped onto the top of the box and easily lifted a full box, with 17 ounces of screws. You can feel the power of this vacuum as soon as you turn it on.
This hand vacuum was also the only one in our reviews to get a perfect score for pet hair removal. The only problem was that while it effectively vacuumed up all the pet hair, some of the hair got wrapped around the pet hair attachment. While it’s decidedly better for the hair to be wrapped around the wrong part of the vacuum than on your floor or chair, it was unpleasant detaching the pet hair and cleaning the vacuum after the test.
As for the other tests, this vacuum was less successful. The extreme suction of this hand vacuum worked against it somewhat when vacuuming up sawdust on carpet and hardwood. It has a side exhaust that would blow the sawdust around, so we had to vacuum twice or more to get everything clean. It did a better job of cleaning up hardwood than carpet, but this kind of debris is not this vacuum’s specialty. We also had a difficult time in our car seat test with the same debris. There was no crevice tool for cleaning in tight spaces, which was an additional challenge with this test.
Should you buy the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser 33A1B?
The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser handheld vacuum has a lot of suction power and does a great job of getting rid of pet hair. A side exhaust has a tendency to blow debris like sawdust around, so you have to take extra passes to clean it all up. This vacuum’s mobility is limited by a power cord, but that accounts for the extra power. For pet owners, this is a good choice, but it’s not as effective at cleaning out cars or loose debris on carpets and floors.
