Shark Rocket Pet Pro Review

If you are looking for the best stick vacuum for a home with pets, the Shark Rocket Pet Pro is a great choice. The brush roll is self-cleaning and digs deep into the carpet to extract hair.

Performance Comparison

Convenience

Our first metric deals with the different features and functions that make these products more convenient and easy to operate compared to traditional vacuum cleaners. We looked at how easy it is to clean areas of your home besides the floors, the weight of each vacuum, their reach or runtime if they are corded or cordless, and how easy they are to store. The Pet Pro delivered phenomenal results, meriting it the best score of the entire group.

This vacuum is one of the more versatile options for cleaning non-floor areas of your home. It includes both a brush/pet tool and a crevice tool — like the majority of the other vacuums --, but we absolutely love how the "stick" part of this vacuum can be detached, transforming it into a top-notch handheld vacuum.

We like that this vacuum isn't overly heavy, tipping the scales just shy of 8 pounds. The Pet Pro is a cordless vacuum with an easily swappable battery, adding versatility. It lasted quite a long time in economical mode — just under 21 minutes — and about 13 minutes in carpet mode. We also found that it charged much faster than the manufacturer listed time in our tests, taking about 2.5 hours to charge, compared to the claimed four hours.

Another favorite thing is its ability to store in a freestanding position when folded. Most other products need to be propped against something or hung from a mounting bracket for storage. While it might not seem like much, we found this feature made the Pet Pro considerably more convenient to use overall.

Hard Surface Cleaning

Our next set of evaluations for the Pet Pro focused on its cleaning abilities on hard floors. For this metric, we used five different types of test messes (rice, oats, flour, cereal, and pet hair) on a section of hardwood laminate floors, noting how much mess was left behind after cleaning and how many passes it took to get there.

The first test mess we tasked the Pet Pro with cleaning up was rice grains. This product did exceptionally well, crushing this cleaning challenge and collecting all the rice. It didn't have any problems with flinging grains to the side, though we had to go just a bit slower to keep the vacuum from bogging down than some models with a powered front brush roll.

Next, we assessed how the Pet Pro did at sucking up flour. It again continued to impress, collecting the bulk of the flour with just a few passes. We were a little concerned at first, as the wheels left some small streaks, but it ended up cleaning the mess entirely without leaving any residue whatsoever. It also does a great job of pulling flour out of the cracks between boards, no matter what direction you vacuum in.

The Pet Pro continued its domination in our cereal and oat cleanup challenges. It sucked up all the spilled Cheerios at once — even without snowplowing them around first. It performed similarly to the rice when it came to oats, though we noticed just a bit more streaking from debris caught on the wheels. Compared to some of the front brush roll models, the slight dip in performance was also more noticeable with this type of mess.

Finally, we looked at pet hair. As expected, the Pet Pro excelled, earning a top-tier score. It quickly and efficiently cleaned up all the hair, with it all making it to the collection bin, rather than getting wrapped up around the brush roll.

Ease of Use

Next, we rated and compared how easy it is to use the Pet Pro while vacuuming. Scores are based on how far each vacuum could reach under furniture, how close it could clean along walls, its noise level, the number of cleaning modes available, and how nimble the steering is. As expected at this point, the Pet Pro performed exceptionally well, earning one of the best scores of the bunch for being supremely easy to use.

This vacuum has three different cleaning modes: Hard, Carpet, and Boost. We saw a noticeable difference between the speed of the brush head when switching between Hard and Carpet modes, while the Boost mode momentarily increases the suction power when you squeeze the trigger.

The Pet Pro does quite well at cleaning along the edges of a room if you vacuum parallel to the edge, but we did find a noticeable strip of an uncleaned area at the edge of the room if we approached head-on. It also does very well at cleaning under furniture, reaching a whopping 37" under our test pieces when using the flex mode.

This vacuum does run a bit on the louder side — one of the few flaws we found. Still, this was relatively minor, with many other vacuums in our lineup being louder. Finally, we like how agile and maneuverable this vacuum is, with swivel steering on the brush head. It's easy to turn, with a very small radius that makes it a breeze to clean in more cramped areas of your home.

Carpet Cleaning

Our final metric focused on cleaning carpets. We used the same five types of sample messes from before — rice, Cheerios, pet hair, flour, and oats — on a selection of flat and fluffy carpets. The Pet Pro rounded out an already impressive performance with another top-tier score, firmly cementing it as one of our all-time favorite stick vacuums.

The Pet Pro crushed it with the rice on both types of carpet, collecting the bulk of the mess with a single pass and completely eliminating the mess with just another light cleanup pass. It only missed a few broken grain fragments on a fluffier medium-pile carpet.

It also did very well with flour on the flat carpet — we omitted the fluffy carpet component of this test since that asks a lot of any stick vacuum. This vacuum easily eliminated the vast majority of the flour, particularly when using its Boost mode. However, a slight residue remained in some particularly troublesome spots where the flour had worked down into the piles.

The Pet Pro did an excellent job with both cereal and the oats once again, thoroughly cleaning up the entire mess with only two passes regardless of the type of carpet. We like how it didn't fling the oats to the side like other products and that it doesn't plow around Cheerios for too long before picking them up.

The Rocket Pet Pro concluded our carpet cleaning metric by crushing our pet hair pickup challenge. We again only tested on the flat carpet, but this vacuum got everything but a few stray hairs into its collection bin — even when we worked the hair deeper into the piles of the carpet.

Should You Buy the Shark Rocket Pet Pro?

Yes. If your budget allows, we think the Pet Pro is the one to choose. It is hard to do better than this impressive stick vacuum with a lower price than some of the other high-ranking competition and top marks in almost every test metric.

What Other Stick Vacuum Should You Consider?