Fresh from IFA: Tineco Pure One Station, a self-emptying cordless vacuum for allergy sufferers

Innovative vacuum specialist Tineco (a sub-brand of popular Chinese robot-vac behemoth Ecovacs Robotics) has just announced the Pure One Station, a cordless stick vacuum cleaner that comes with an automatic bin-emptying system – just like most modern robot vacuums.

A self-emptying cordless stick vac is nothing new – we already have the Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro, the LG Cord Zero and the Ultenic FS1 to name but three – nor is it as silly as it perhaps sounds, especially if you’re fed up with the messy task of having to frequently empty the contents of the vac yourself or suffer from dust allergies.

With the Pure One Station, you simply drop the whole hand and brush unit into its towering charging station and the dusty contents of the vac’s titchy 0.3-litre bin are sucked into a much larger 3-litre bin which doesn’t need emptying for up to 60 days – depending on how grubby the house is.

I’ve actually been using the Tineco Pure One Station for the past few days so let’s find out a bit more about it.

Where can you buy a Tineco Pure One Station?

Although the Tineco Pure One Station has yet to to reach UK shores, it's already available from Tineco USA and Tineco Germany where it sells for an admittedly pricey $799 and €799, respectively.

What are the benefits of the Tineco Pure One Station?

I’ve been weighing up the pros and cons of a system like this and I’ve come to the conclusion that if you find the average stick vac too heavy to use for extended periods and positively hate – or are allergic to – the dust that’s created every time you empty the small bin, the Pure One Station might just be what you’re looking for. 

It really is a simple as placing the whole unit in the cradle and leaving it for 20 seconds or so while it empties the contents of its bin. Actually, it doesn’t just empty the bin, it also cleans the brush head while sucking up any remaining dust particles around the brush head’s housing and its suction tube. 

Granted, 20 seconds is slower than the time it takes to manually empty a stick vac bin, but given that the whole system is totally dust free, I can certainly see a market for this kind of thing, especially for allergy sufferers.

Although the Pure One’s OmniHob cleaning station is pretty incongruous (it measures 112cm in height and 32cm in depth), the whole package doesn’t take up much more space than a wall-mounted stick vac stand and the big bonus is that you don’t need to screw any holes into the wall.

The whole package comprises the cleaning station – packed as three separate items which simply click together – the hand unit, brush roller with LED headlight, a mini motorised sofa-cum-pet bed brush, and a crevice nozzle with brush attached. An optional ‘Fur Free’ kit for brushing moulting pets is also available, comprising a concertina hose and a clever comb-like brush head that collects bunches of hair. When fully matted, simply press a button and the brush head spins to the rear where its contents are promptly sucked into the vac.

How well does it vacuum?

I gave the Pure One Station a brief test on both carpet and hard floors and it performed exceptionally well. Okay, it’s not as powerful a cleaner as the Dyson Gen5 or V15 but I was impressed by the amount of pet hair it collected and when I checked the results using the Gen5 immediately afterwards, there was very little debris in the Gen5’s bin. I was also impressed by the way the Pure One’s tangle-free brush head refused to snatch the tassels of my rugs, unlike the Dyson V15 and Gen5.

Tineco’s stick vac interfaces have always impressed me and, true to form, this model is equipped with the company’s proprietary iLoop sensor system which you can see working by glancing at the gorgeous full colour LCD display on the top of the handle. Like a Dyson, iLoop monitors the amount of dust being collected, ramping up the motor and suction power if necessary. Although unnecessary, a large circular graphic transitions from red to blue to let you know what it’s doing while looking pretty at the same time. 

I’ve used many stick vacs over the years but this one is unquestionably one of the lightest in the hand – just 2.4kgs – and that makes it especially useful when used in handheld mode for sweeping old cobwebs off the ceiling cornices. No, the main brush head doesn’t articulate as much as the Dyson Gen5 or V15 so it’s not quite as manoeuvrable around tight spaces, but the LED headlights are handy for cleaning in dark areas. According the specs, you should get up to 60 minutes of running time out of the Pure One and that’s good enough in my book.

If you’re an allergy sufferer, you’ll be doubly impressed by the Pure One Station's full four-stage HEPA filtration system. According to the blurb it ‘captures up to 99.97% of dust and debris as small as 0.3 μm’. An μm is very small thing indeed.

Early verdict

If you regularly suffer from dust allergies and have enough space to store the OmniHob cleaning station, the Tineco Pure One Station might just be what you’re after. The whole system is pretty effortless to use while being as efficient at cleaning as most of the models in our popular Cordless Vacuum Cleaner guide. Worth a gander.