Eureka Mighty Mite Review

The Mighty Mite by Eureka is far from 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 to use, but we did find that it falters with carpets and heavy-duty messes.

Performance Comparison

Carpet Cleaning

We began our testing process by comparing how well the Mighty Mite and the rest of the vacuums cleaned up different types of messes from both flat (low-pile) and fluffy (medium-pile) carpets. We used rice, oats, cereal (Cheerios), and flour for this set of tests as our sample messes. The Mighty Mite delivered some fairly average results, earning it a score right in the middle of the group.

The Mighty Mite got off to a bit of a lackluster start when it came to collecting rice. It got most of the grains in just a few passes but took several more to fully clean up all the fragments and dust. It did just a bit better on fluffy carpet — we found that it had a tendency to plow the rice grains around on a flat carpet rather than picking them up.

The Mighty Mite performed a bit below average when cleaning fine messes from both types of carpet. It did well at removing flour off the surface but struggled with extracting particles trapped in the carpet's fibers. Performance was similar with oats, even after multiple cleaning passes. The Mighty Mite doesn't have a powered brush roll, making this a much more difficult task. It did much 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 just 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, switch between types of flooring, and each vacuum's noise level. The Mighty Mite did quite well, earning a score just above average.

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

The 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; just over 18 feet of that is from the cord, with the rest being from the hose.

Finally, this vacuum is about average when it comes to noise levels, registering just over 74 dBa on our sound meter when held an arm's length away.

Handling

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

The Mighty Mite made cleaning stairs an easy cleaning task. The hose is long enough to reach nine stairs without having to move the main canister from the bottom. On top of that, this vacuum weighs only 10.3 pounds, so it's very easy to carry up or down the stairs if you need to reach farther. This low 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

We resumed our cleaning power assessments for this next metric, rating and ranking the Mighty Mite on how well it handled flour, rice, Cheerios, and oats on a section of laminate floor. This time it did a bit better compared to the rest of the group than on carpet, earning it a score just above average.

Starting with a mess of fine particles (flour), we found that the Mighty Mite did decently well — on the surface. It could usually clean the surface of the boards without much issue, only requiring a pass or two to clean the area effectively. Unfortunately, it wasn't very effective at removing flour from between the boards, and the flour stubbornly remained in the cracks, even with many cleaning passes.

The Mighty Mite did much better with rice. It would occasionally push the rice together into a pile but still got the job done after a few passes. Unfortunately, it did worse with oats, as they got stuck on the bristles and caused stripes of uncleaned areas to appear with each swipe. The vacuum eventually got the area sufficiently clean, just with more passes than the others. Performance with larger items like Cheerios was a bit better, though the Mighty Mite lacks the ground clearance to remove them when pushing forwards. We had to angle up slightly and pull toward ourselves to remedy this.

Pet Hair

Our last metric — and one of the most difficult — scored each vacuum on its cleaning skills when removing pet hair from carpet. We used hair from a local groomer, pressed into a section of medium-pile carpet for this assessment. Unfortunately, the Mighty Mite delivered a far from mighty performance, earning a very subpar score.

The lack of a rotating brush head severely hurt the Mighty Mite in this test, as it struggled to loosen the pet hair from the carpet fibers. This vacuum collected less than 20% of the pet hair that we spread out, paling in comparison to the top-tier products that cleaned well over 99%.

Value

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.

Conclusion