Eureka Mighty Mite Review

The Eureka Mighty Mite is not the top vacuum that we have tested, but it does surprisingly well given its lower-than-average price tag. It's great for cleaning up light messes on hard floors, making it perfect for small apartments or dorms. We love how lightweight and convenient it is, but we found that it falters with carpets and heavy-duty messes.

Performance Comparison

Carpet Cleaning

We began our testing process by comparing how well the Eureka Mighty Mite and the rest of the vacuums cleaned up different types of messes on both low and medium-pile carpeting. We used rice, oats, cereal (Cheerios), and flour for this set of tests as our sample messes.

The Eureka Mighty Mite got off to a better-than-average start when it came to collecting rice, as it got most of the grains in just a few passes. But, it took several more passes to fully clean up all the fragments and dust on the low-pile carpet. It didn't do any better on medium-pile carpet — we found that it had a tendency to plow the rice grains around rather than pick them up.

The Eureka Mighty Mite performed a bit below average when cleaning the oatmeal, even after multiple cleaning passes. The Mighty Mite doesn't have a powered brush roll in the head, making this a much more difficult task. It did a lot better with Cheerios, easily sucking them up without crushing them and creating an additional mess. However, we found that you have to angle the attachment back a bit to keep from just pushing the cereal around.

Ease of Use

We moved past cleaning power for our next metric, now looking at how convenient and user-friendly each vacuum was for cleaning all around your house or apartment. We based scores for this metric on each vacuum's reach, ability to clean around furniture, walls, corners, and switching between two types of flooring.

The Eureka is fairly easy to swap between hard and soft floor cleaning modes, using the foot-activated switch on the cleaning attachment. This changes the clearance and contact with the floor — no need to turn a brush roll on or off since it doesn't have one.

The Eureka Mighty Mite does very well cleaning close to the edges and corners of a room, getting debris that's pressed right up to the wall or corner. The cleaning head also has a shallow profile, allowing you to easily clean under furniture like armchairs or couches. It has an average reach of about 30 feet from an outlet.

Handling

For our handling metric, we assessed how easy it felt to push or pull each vacuum across various surfaces, how nimble each vacuum felt, and the amount of effort required to clean a typical set of stairs. The Eureka Mighty Mite did very well in this series of tests.

The Eureka Mighty Mite made cleaning stairs an easy task. The hose is long enough to reach nine steps without having to move the main canister from the bottom. On top of that, this vacuum weighs only 9.3 pounds, so it's very easy to carry up or down the stairs if you need to reach farther. This weight also makes it very agile and maneuverable when cleaning around furniture. The long hose can get a little tangled up on occasion, but the main canister follows you for the most part. It is also very easy to drag across most surfaces, with minimal effort on hard floors, flat, or fluffier carpets.

Hard Surface Cleaning

Here is where the Eureka Mighty Mite really shines. We were impressed with how well it handled flour, rice, Cheerios, and oats on a section of laminate floor.

Starting with fine particles like flour, we found that the Eureka Mighty Mite did pretty well. It could usually clean the surface of the boards without much issue, only requiring a pass or two to clean the area effectively. Unfortunately, that effectiveness didn't extend to removing flour from the cracks between the boards.

The Eureka Mighty Mite did much better with rice and oatmeal. It occasionally pushed the rice into a pile but got the job done after a few passes. We had to angle the head up slightly and pull toward ourselves to remedy this, and that worked just fine, especially when you consider that this canister vacuum is one of the most affordable models out there.

Pet Hair

Our last metric — and one of the most difficult — scored each vacuum on its cleaning skills when removing pet hair from carpeting. First, we weighed the hair, with each canister vacuum getting the same amount to clean up. We then pressed the hair into a section of medium-pile carpet, vacuumed, and weighed the amount left over. Each canister vacuum was also given a percentage score on how much was vacuumed up.

The Eureka Mighty Mite picked up a rather dismal 69.60%, not quite the bottom of the pack, but not the best either. Unfortunately, this little vacuum delivered a far from mighty performance in this metric. So, if you need to vacuum up Fluffy's hair, we'd recommend a different vacuum cleaner.

The lack of a rotating brush head severely hurt the Eureka Mighty Mite in this test, as it struggled to loosen the pet hair from the carpet fibers. This vacuum paled in comparison to the top-tier vacuums that cleaned over 98% of pet hair.

Should you buy the Eureka Mighty Mite?

If you are shopping on the tightest of budgets, then we think the Eureka Mighty Mite is a great value. It does very well considering its cost, particularly if you don't have too many heavy-duty cleaning chores for it.

What Other Canister Vacuum Should You Consider?