Best cordless vacuum cleaner 2023: Powerful portable cleaning

The Dyson V15 Detect is about more than raw power, although it has this in spades: it’s about making vacuuming easier and more efficient. With its excellent range of tools, laser dust highlighter, brilliant battery life and top-notch cleaning, this is the overall best cordless vacuum cleaner, and one that’s capable of replacing a plug-in model.

Let’s talk about that laser first. Available on the hard-floor head only, it shines a green laser to highlight dirt on the floor. In our review we found that this worked brilliantly, highlighting dirt on floors that looked clean to the naked eye, and directing us to clean more thoroughly.

It’s a shame that there’s not something similar for the carpet head. We were pleased to see that Dyson has finally added anti-tangle tech to this head: we’ve not had it clog with hair since starting to use it. In the box, you get a great selection of tools, including a mini tool (anti hair wrap), which is great for sofas and stairs, a brilliant dusting brush that we use in preference to a dusting cloth, and a crevice tool for detail work. There’s a clip on the cleaner’s wand for one accessory, and the charging dock will hold two more.

Using technology from its fan purifiers, the V15 detect shows you on its LCD the level of dirt it’s collecting, and it uses that information to adjust motor power on the fly. We found that it worked brilliantly, upping power for very dusty areas and dropping down for cleaner parts of the floor.

Power fluctuating all of the time makes battery testing hard, but we think you’ll get up to 40 minutes of usable battery life, which we found was enough to clean our entire home.

In terms of power, we measured the mid-power mode at 99AW, which is at the top of what we’d expect from a cordless model. Turbo mode came in at 281AW: that’s true plug-in power, although you’ll only get around 10-minutes of battery life, so use this mode sparingly.

Fortunately, the LCD shows battery life in minutes on the back, which made us more confident in using this cleaner, as we could see exactly how long it would run for.

Weighing just 3.08kg, this is actually one of the lightest cordless vacuum cleaners, so easy to use even for long periods.

If you want to replace plug-in with cordless, then the Dyson V15 Detect is the pinnacle of cordless technology.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Read the full review: Dyson V15 Detect review

If there’s one thing that Dyson knows, it’s how to make hugely powerful motors for cordless vacuum cleaners. The Dyson Gen5detect is the most powerful cordless vacuum cleaner that it has made yet. Putting this cleaner through our tests, we measured it at a massive 369AW on maximum power – the highest, by far, that we’ve ever seen from a cordless cleaner.

Otherwise, it runs at 30AW on its gentle power mode (good for dusting) and 75AW on medium. Well, kind of. As with previous Dyson vacuums, the Gen5detect has a piezo sensor for detecting dust, adjusting its power automatically based on how much dirt it has encountered. In automatic mode, the vacuum ups and downs its power on the fly, so that you get the best clean without having to worry about which power mode you’re in.

Cleverly, the LCD on the back shows the amount of dust being picked up, as well as the battery life remaining in minutes and seconds.

For hard floors, there’s an additional tool, the Fluffy Optic head, which uses a green laser to highlight dust. It works brilliantly, making it easy to see where you have and haven’t cleaned.

On maximum power, we found that this cleaner could collect grains of rice from more than 3cm away. If you’ve got the hand tools attached, this means you can quickly collect dust or suck it out of hard-to-reach areas.

Moving on to our regular tests, we found that this cleaner picked up 98.25% of dust on carpet, which is the best result that we’ve ever seen from a cordless cleaner. Edge performance was the same: 95.3% of dust collected. Hard floor collection was at 100%.

Moving to the anti-tangle tests with human hair, the Dyson Gen5detect refused to get any hair caught up in its brushes.

The only slight issue we encountered was when using the vacuum cleaner on a rubber-backed mat. Here, the Dyson Gen5detect produces too much power and suctions itself to the ground, stopping the brush bar from moving. We had to manually dial down the power. Still, it demonstrates just how powerful this cordless cleaner is.

Measuring battery life in auto mode, we found that the cleaner lasted 26m 13s. Given that you can clean thoroughly with a single pass, that’s more than enough time to tackle an entire home in one go.

Arguably, most people will find that the cheaper Dyson V15 Detect will suit their needs, but if you have the cash and want the absolute best, there’s no other cordless vacuum cleaner that comes close to this one for power.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Read the full review: Dyson Gen5detect review

As good as cordless stick vacuum cleaners are, they all take a bit more effort to hold and use than a regular upright cleaner, as they put all of their weight in your hand. Not so with the Shark ICZ300UKT, which packs all of its power into a traditional upright form factor. With the performance to match plug-in models, this is our top choice for anyone that wants the convenience of a cordless cleaner with the ease of use of a plug-in model.

Coming in at 6.2kg, the ICZ300UKT is a little heavier than most cordless vacuum cleaners, although that shouldn’t matter too much, as we rarely had to lift it. As this is an upright, we just hit the power button, tilted the handle back and pushed the vacuum cleaner around. In that regard, this vacuum is lighter and easier to use than plug-in upright cleaners. Don’t forget the other advantage that this style of vacuum has: it stands upright by itself.

We love the position of the controls, too. For this model, they’ve been relocated from the cleaner’s body to the handle, just where our thumb goes. Toggling power and changing mode has never been so easy.

We found the ICZ300UKT easy to push around, and it’s far more nimble than you may think. That large 0.6-litre bin sticks out the front, which we found got in the way of the vacuum cleaner getting under dining chairs. Fortunately, this cleaner has Shark’s Lift-Away trick.

Hit the button on the side, and the cylinder lifts out, so you can use the long hose and floor head (or attachments) to get under furniture, tackle stairs, or get into tighter areas. We thought that this made the ICZ300UKT one of the most flexible cordless vacuum cleaners that we’ve tested.

From Shark’s plug-in range, the ICZ300UKT inherits the DuoClean floor head. This has both a soft roller and a brush, so it works just as well on hard floors as carpets, and you don’t have to switch heads as you do with a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It also has Shark’s Anti Hair wrap technology: try as we did, we never found any hair wrapped around the brush, even in a house with several people with long hair.

On the most useful middle level of power, we measured the cleaner at 57AW, which is towards the lower end of what we’d expect; on its high mode, power jumps to a more respectable 185AW: that’s plug-in levels of power for tough mess.

Fortunately, the medium power level combined with the efficient floor head proved good enough for most jobs. On carpet, a single sweep picked up dirt and pet hair, and only edge performance could be better (we had to get the last bits with the crevice tool. Hard floor performance was flawless.

Battery life is around 30 minutes on medium power, which should see you get through most of a house clean, given the power on offer. There’s a removable battery, so technically you could buy a second one if you wanted to extend run time.

Our minor complaint about this model is that while it has a lot of tools, there’s no onboard storage, so you need to find room to keep them all.

There are more powerful cleaners in this round-up, but if you want an upright cleaner but without the hassle of plugs, this is a great choice.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Full Review: Shark Anti Hair Wrap Cordless Upright Vacuum Cleaner with PowerFins, Powered Lift-Away & TruePet ICZ300UKT Review

For those smaller jobs where you need a grab-and-go cleaner, the Shark Premium Handheld Vacuum WV270UK is a great choice at a superb price. Delivering more power (we measured it at 75AW max, which is the same power as a regular cordless on its standard mode) via two selectable modes, and a decent 15-minute runtime, this is a compact vacuum cleaner with the power to compete with a full-sized model.

Although the vacuum can be used without attachments, Shark provides two additional tools in the box: a crevice tool with a flip-down brush for dusting, and an upholstery tool for cleaning soft furnishings. There’s no motorised pet tool, however. The small 0.1-litre bin doesn’t sound particularly big, but it’s actually roomy enough for the types of jobs for which the WV270UK is built.

Its power makes the WV270UK a super-capable cleaner. It’s useful for small jobs, such as picking up spilt food. The WV251UK picked up every grain of rice from a worktop, with the boost mode making the job even faster. It also performed admirably in our carpet tests, while the upholstery brush

Battery life on standard power was just over 15 minutes in my tests, while it lasts for 10mins 38secs on the highest power setting. That’s almost double the standard battery life of the original, which is impressive.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Full Review: Shark Premium Handheld Vacuum WV270UK review

If you want a quick grab-and-go handheld vacuum cleaner that won’t break the bank, the Beldray Airlite Cordless Graphite BEL01096 is for you.

It certainly doesn’t skimp on features with a charging dock on offer (as opposed to a plug-in power adapter, which we were expecting to see), as well as a handy 2-in-1 tool for cleaning that works as both a dusting brush and crevice tool. Moreover, at just 580g, it’s also an especially lightweight option and one that made cleaning a pleasure. Getting started with the Airlite is as easy as ever, with a single power button that controls cleaning modes – press once to turn the vacuum on, press twice for high-speed mode, and pressing it a third time will turn the cleaner off.

There isn’t a battery indicator here to portray how much charge is left, which at this price, is a minor issue. A 0.1 litre bin is fine considering this cleaner is designed for smaller jobs, but the emptying process is a little fiddly given the mess it may create if not done properly.

High power suction of 19AW is comparatively low when pitted up against other cleaners, although don’t let that discourage you from considering this vacuum. In our real world testing, the Airlite offered decent performance for flour and rice, picking it up in smaller lots at a measured pace. It didn’t deal all too well with pet hair given the lower suction. A noise level of 74dB on average makes this a noisy vacuum, but that level isn’t too out of the ordinary for handheld options, while the 20-25 minutes of battery life is decent for tackling a good quantity of smaller jobs.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Beldray Airlite Cordless Graphite

We were big fans of the Samsung Bespoke Jet vacuum cleaner and the model, the Samsung Bespoke Jet AI, is even better. The ‘AI’ part of the name is because the vacuum cleaner uses artificial intelligence to detect the type of floor that it’s running on, adjusting suction and brush speed on the fly to deliver the best performance.

It works brilliantly, as well. Moving from carpet to hard floor and then back to carpet, we could hear the vacuum cleaner adjust itself automatically. If we’re being critical, we’d say that the Bespoke Jet AI doesn’t respond quite as quickly as vacuum cleaners with dust sensors, such as the Dyson Gen5detect or Shark Stratos IZ420UKT.

That doesn’t mean that the Samsung Bespoke Jet AI doesn’t clean brilliantly. We measured it at a maximum of 300 air watts (AW), which is plug-in levels of performance, settling for a decent 70AW of power on medium power and 38AW on its lowest setting (good for dusting).

On maximum power, it could pick up grains of rice from 3cm away, which means that it’s quick to suck up dust using the detail tools.

Moving to the regular tests, we found that the vacuum cleaner collected an excellent 95.65% of dust in our carpet test; it picked up all of our cat hair, and managed our human hair, with only one strand caught around the brush roll.

On our tough edge test, the cleaner picked up an excellent 96.5% of our dust and collected 100% of our rice spill on hard floor.

In the box are two batteries: one large and one small. Two identical batteries may have been better, but the smaller battery at least means you’ve got an option to reduce the weight of the cleaner for handheld jobs. Battery life is very good: in AI mode, we managed 27m 52s on the larger battery, with the smaller battery adding around 15m extra – that’s enough to clean an entire house.

There are the tools to do that, too, with two floor rollers, a pet tool, dusting brush, crevice tool and angle tool; all fit on the handy caddy that you can carry around.

Once finished, drop the Jet Bot AI back into its dock, and all of the dust is sucked out cleanly into a bag, making this a great choice for anyone that has dust allergies.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Read our full review: Samsung Bespoke Jet AI review

The Dyson V12 Detect Slim Absolute is a smaller and lighter version of the top-end V15 model. It packs in all of the technology that makes the high-end model so good, including the clever dust sensor. Not only does this show you how much dirt is being sucked up, via the fancy LCD screen on the rear, but it allows the vacuum cleaner to adjust power on the fly.

Stick this vacuum cleaner into automatic mode and you can whip around your house and let the V12 decide how much power is required. It’s a system that works brilliantly and takes the guesswork out of trying to work out which power mode is best. You can still choose a power mode manually if you prefer.

This vacuum cleaner also comes with the clever laser-powered hard floor head. This shines a green laser on the floor to highlight dirt. It’s a bit icky the first time you use it, but it’s an exceptional bit of kit, highlighting exactly where you need to clean.

There’s no laser on the standard carpet floor head, but it does at least have Dyson’s anti-tangle technology, so it will not get clogged with hair. Similar tech is included on the small motorised tool.

At 2.4kg, this vacuum cleaner is super light. Unlike its big brother, there’s no trigger here, just a single power button to turn the vacuum cleaner on and off. If you struggle with holding a trigger down, then this vacuum cleaner is for you.

A smaller body means that there’s only a 0.35-litre bin, although that should last for a standard clean. We found that automatic mode gave us around 25-minutes of cleaning time. Given the high levels of suction available (it tops out at plug-in level of power at 204AW in our tests), and the quality of the floor heads, those 25-minutes are enough to clean a small house or average-sized flat in one go.

While this cleaner is cheaper than its big brother, it is still quite expensive, and you can get cleaners with more tools and longer battery life for less. However, if you can afford it, the quality of cleaning is exceptional.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Dyson V12 Detect Slim Absolute review

Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners have mostly been multi-purpose, but the Dyson Omni-glide is a smaller cleaner, targetted at hard floor use only. Short battery life means that this is the ideal backup cleaner or one for use in smaller flats.

This cleaner gets its name from its special floor head, which has two soft rollers that are designed to pick up dirt from hard floors before the vacuum sucks everything into the bin. Dyson has gone for the ultimate manoeuvrability here. This head can spin, glide and shift around furniture, and we found it the most flexible floor head that we have ever used.

Want to get under furniture? No problem, the cleaner goes pretty much flat to the floor, so you can right under cabinets and the like.

Dyson has redesigned the stick vacuum for the Omni-glide. Rather than a ‘gun’ where you squees the trigger, there’s a simple stick-like handle. As the cleaner weighs just 1.9kg, we found it so easy to move around; we could barely feel that we were carrying it.

We measured power on the low setting at just 24AW, which is a very basic amount of power; on High, the measured power of 85W is what we’d normally expect from a cordless cleaner on its middle setting. Yet, don’t panic: thanks to the clever floor head, the fluffy rollers pick up a lot of the dirt and the suction on offer is enough to clean well even on low power.

We found that hard floor performance was excellent, with all of our test mess gone on a single swipe. Now, this isn’t a vacuum cleaner designed for carpet, but we tested it anyway: the results are pretty poor. If you’ve got the odd short-pile rug or mat, you can tackle the mess with this vacuum cleaner, but if you’ve got carpets forget it.

We love the range of accessories: the mini tool (also anti-tangle) got our sofas back to looking fresh, the crevice tool/duster is great for detail work, and there’s a nifty desktop tool that helped us declutter a well-used and very dusty desk. Shame there’s no storage for this stuff.

Battery life is 18 minutes on the low setting, so this limits how far you can clean. We think that Omni-glide is best suited to small apartments or as a grab-and-go cleaner for smaller spills. The small 0.2-litre bin backs this opinion up.

It won’t suit everyone, but if you’ve got hard floors and want something light and easy to use on them, the Omni-glide is an impressive bit of kit.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Read the full review: Dyson Omni-glide review

The Halo Capsule is different to most of the competition, as it takes bags. As bags capture all of the dirt and make for easier emptying, the Capsule is our favourite bagged cordless vacuum cleaner, and ideally suited to allergy sufferers thanks to its clean emptying.

Of course, bags add to the running cost, but not too much in this case. Halo sells a pack of 26 1.6-litre bags for £25.99. That’s excellent value, and with the bags being the size they are, we think that a pack of bags should last more than a year. Given the price of some bags, we can honestly say that Halo isn’t overcharging.

The Halo Capsule also uses a different design to most other cordless vacuum cleaners. Rather than a ‘gun’ shape where you squeeze a trigger, the capsule is a lozenge that you hold at the end. It’s a large and very comfortable handle that gives you plenty of grip. Plus, at just 2.6kg, this is one of the lightest cordless vacuum cleaners, particularly when you factor in its large bin.

There’s no trigger to hold in, with a power button to turn the vacuum on and off, and a mode selector button (Eco, Performance and Boost). Plus, you can turn the motorised brush off, which helps on hard floors: with bigger debris, turning of the brush stopped dirt being flung around in our tests.

Aside from the floor brush, there’s a crevice tool and a brush in the box, both of which can be stored on the charging dock. The lack of a mini motorised tool is a bit of a shame, particularly for those of us with pets.

We measured the vacuum cleaner’s raw power. On Eco mode, it came in at 25AW, which is weak; 66AW in Performance mode is better, although towards the bottom end of the range that we’d expect; 185AW in Boost mode puts this cleaner towards the top end of the expected range.

Testing with our real-world dirt tests, we found that the Halo Capsule picked up most dirt on carpet using Performance mode, although it left a small trail towards the sides of the floor head: the main suction power appears to be in the middle. Pet hair removal was no problem.

Edge performance in Performance mode left some diry behind, but the impressive Boost mode proved powerful enough to suck up everything. On our hard floor test, the Capsule picked up everything on Performance mode.

Battery life in the most useful Performance mode is around 25 minutes, dropping to under 10 minutes in Boost mode. Based on the quality of the cleaning, the Halo Capsule didn’t quite make it around our entire house on a charge, and we had to tackle cleaning on different floors on different days.

For smaller homes or those happy to spread out their cleaning, the Halo Capsule offers something a bit different to the main competition, with its easy-to-empty bags a winner for allergy sufferers.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Full Review: Halo Capsule Review

Brand-new technology makes the Shark Stratos Anti Hair Wrap Plus Pet Pro Cordless Vacuum IZ420UKT stand out from its predecessors. First, this cleaner now has an automatic power mode via CleanSense, which detects who dirty an area is and adjusts power on the fly.

There’s no more guessing which power mode is best. Vacuuming around our test lab, with a regular level of dirt, we found that the IZ420UKT would last around 27-minutes on a single battery. With two batteries in the box, both of which can be charged at the same time, that’s near-on an hour’s worth of vacuuming in one go. In other words, there’s more than enough power to tackle your entire home.

This vacuum cleaner has the new DuoClean floor head, with an improved anti-tangle design. In our testing, we didn’t see any hair wrapped around the floor head. It’s good to see the Anti-Odour pod, too, which releases a scent as you vacuum. It left our house smelling as good as it looked.

Performance is excellent. On Boost, we measured the vacuum at 219AW, making it one of the most powerful vacuum cleaners we’ve tested, and great for very tough spills; on regular automatic mode, suction will be around 118AW, which is a huge amount of power.

This vacuum cleaner did perfectly in all of our tests, including the tough edge and pet hair tests. There’s no job that this cleaner can’t tackle.

Flexology makes a return here, and the vacuum cleaner’s wand bends in half, so that you can clean under sofas without having to bend over. Plus, you can fold the cleaner over, and it stands up by itself, which is a neat trick.

A great price, long battery life and a decent range of accessories make this a great-value cordless stick. We would like to see some on-body storage for the tools, though.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Full Review: Shark IZ420UKT Review

The Hoover HF910P is the pet-edition of the company’s current cordless line-up. This version ships with a mini motorised pet tool, built to remove hair from sofas, pet beds and more; there is a standard version of the product, which doesn’t have this tool, but has otherwise the same performance.

Key to this model’s success is the new anti-tangle floor head (and pet tool). It’s the first time that we’ve seen this technology on Hoover’s products, and it works brilliantly. We tested using long human hair and cat hair, and neither strands got tangled around the heads.

Most cordless vacuum cleaners have multiple modes, but the Hoover HF910P has just two. The first is a standard power mode, which runs at 111AW. That’s a useful amount of power; most cordless cleaners have a lower ‘Eco’ power setting that increases battery life but isn’t much practical use. On maximum power, this cleaner runs at 203AW.

There’s enough power here to suck up grains of rice from 2.5cm away, when using the nozzle tool. This shows that large spills can be quickly sucked up without having to hover the vacuum over each bit of mess.

This cleaner did well in our regular tests, too: 95.5% of the mess on carpets and 100% of mess on hard floors is a good result: this cleaner did take a few more sweeps to clean compared to the more expensive competition, though. Our tough edge test saw 86.86% of the mess collected, which is a little lower than we’d hope for: the floor head couldn’t suck dirt up right at the edge, and we had to finish the clean with the crevice tool.

Battery life comes in at 34 minutes and 17 seconds on standard power, and 12 minutes and 48 seconds on Turbo. Using both power modes, we found that there was enough power to give a basic clean of our three-bedroom house; for deeper cleaning, we estimate that a couple of charges would be required.

Well priced and able to pick dirt up well, the Hoover HF910P is a great mid-range choice, particularly for those with pets.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Hoover HF910P review

The best cordless vacuum cleaners cost a fortune, but if you’re mostly after a backup to a plug-in cleaner, the lightweight Hoover H-Free 300 is our top budget cordless cleaner. It lacks the full cleaning power of other models on this list, but for smaller daily jobs it’s a handy tool to have.

One of the main reasons that we like this cordless vacuum cleaner so much is that it’s super light at just 2.5kg. There are lighter vacuum cleaners on this list, but they have other compromises, such as small bins: here the 0.7-litre bin is good enough for a long cleaning session. We found that after using the cleaner for smaller jobs, we only needed to empty the bin once a week or so.

That lightweight has another advantage: the H-Free 300 can stand up by itself. It’s quite the trick and far more handy than you may think: in the middle of cleaning, we found being able to leave the vacuum cleaner by itself was really handy. There’s no more hearing a crash from a precariously balanced vacuum cleaner.

The cleaner we reviewed came with a motorised floor brush, a 2-in-1 crevice tool and brush, an upholstery brush and a mini-motorised pet tool that worked wonders on stairs and sofas; you can buy the none-pet version that doesn’t have this tool, although it’s a useful addition for upholstery. It’s a shame that there’s no storage for these tools.

Raw performance is more basic on this vacuum cleaner. The 29AW on Low power is a little too weak to do much; 69AW on Medium is better but towards the lower end of the scale; and 118AW on Turbo is a way off the pace and closer to most other cordless cleaners on their medium setting.

These results carried through to our real world test. A sweep on carpet on Medium left traces of dirt behind, and we had to tackle the mess multiple times; Turbo did better and proved itself for bigger spills. Edge performance was a little weak and we had to finish the job with the crevice tool.

Pet hair removal was good, with the motorised floor brush really helping, and hard floor work was completed without any dirt falling back down.

Battery life is 25 minutes on the medium mode, although the cleaning power means that you can’t tackle an entire home on this kind of charge. Don’t think of the Hoover H-Free 300 as a replacement for a plug-in cleaner, but more a convenient, light and well-priced complementary tool for smaller jobs.

Reviewer: David Ludlow
Full Review: Hoover H-Free 300 Review

Part of the ONEPWR family, the Vax ONEPWR Edge Dual Pet & Car uses the same batteries as other products in the line-up, such as the Vax ONEPWR Glide and Vax ONEPWR Cordless Hand Vac. That’s handy if you buy multiple tools, as you can swap batteries between them to give extended run-times.

Here, Vax provides two of its large 4Ah batteries. In our tests, the batteries lasted for 30m 18s each in standard mode, and just 11 minutes on boost. Still, that’s probably a good hour or so of cleaning, which is enough to tackle even a fairly large home.

This vacuum cleaner apes a standard upright cleaner. Just stick a battery in, turn it on and push it around to get cleaning. It’s very easy to push around, although the bulky dust bin means that you can’t get this model under sofas or some chairs, and there’s no flexible lift-away option on this model.

There’s a great range of tools that can attach to the wand and hose: an extendible crevice tool, motorised pet brush and dusting brush are standard. Buy direct from Vax and you’ll also get a angle tool (great for getting on top of cupboards), radiator tool, textile tool and a tech tool for cleaning keyboards and touchscreens. Sometimes, having a wider range of tools is better than raw power.

Not that this vacuum cleaner is weak: 42AW in our tests on standard power is enough for general cleaning, while the boost power of 148AW is enough to tackle bigger spills. Testing with real-world mess, we found that this cleaner does well on carpet and hard floors on standard power, although we did need short bursts of the boost power to suck up tougher mess.

There are more flexible cleaners and some with more power, but the Vax ONEPWR Edge Dual has lots of tools and cleans well for the price.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Vax ONEPWR Edge Dual Pet & Car

Although there has been a cordless version of the classic Henry, the Henry Quick is the first ‘proper’ cordless vacuum cleaner. A traditional stick cleaner, this model comes in red with Henry’s face on it. We quite like the personality that it gives.

What’s different about this model to most cordless ones is that the Henry Quick takes bags. These 1-litre pods (as they’re known), slide into the vacuum cleaner and eject safely, automatic sealing, when done. This is the cleanest cordless vacuum cleaner that we’ve emptied. There are 26 pods in the box, with replacements costing £12.99 per pack of 10. If you’re sensitive to dust, this is money well spent.

There’s a standard floor head with brush for agitating dirt, but it’s not an anti-tangle head, so it will need some maintenance. Otherwise, in the box, you get a crevice tool and a brush, but no mini motorised tool. Those with pets may be better looking elsewhere.

Performance is excellent. We measured the Henry Quick at a maximum of 192AW, which puts it close to much more expensive competitors. On regular mode, its 62AW power is more than sufficient for removing everyday messes, as our real world tests showed: it got everything on carpet and hard floors, although we did need to use Boost mode to complete the tough edge test.

There’s a scent disc that plugs into the filter, letting the Henry Quick blow out fragranced air as you clean. We found it refreshing, and it’s good to have a house that looks and smells clean.

Real-world battery life, assuming changes between modes, should mean that this vacuum cleaner will last an impressive 45-minutes on a charge, which should be enough to clean most homes.

If you want a bagged vacuum cleaner, this one is a great choice, but those who want a few more accessories in the box, particularly pet owners, may want to look elsewhere.

Full review: Henry Quick review

Reviewer: David Ludlow

If it’s an especially flexible cordless vacuum you’re after, the Miele Triflex HX2 Pro should do the trick.

As well as working as a standard cordless upright cleaner, it can also work as a stick vacuum in Reach mode with the wand attached to the end of the handheld unit, and also as a handheld cleaner in the imaginatively titled Handheld Mode. Switching between the three modes requires a fair bit of plugging and unplugging, and it’s worth putting the cleaner in whichever mode you’ll be using the most to save faff.

We used Comfort mode for a lot of the time, with it arguably being the most useful one of the lot. The 0.5 litre bin on offer is enough to handle an entire house clean, and with it comes a dial at the top which aids in releasing dust from the filter to keep it in good condition. While you only get a single floor head, it’s one that comes with three rollers for dealing with carpets and hard floors in one; to go with this, Miele provides a great range of accessories for upholstery, dusting and crevices.

This may not be the most powerful vacuum we’ve tested, with a max power figure of 145AW, but it’s still a respectable result for the Triflex HX2 Pro that puts it well in the mix with some of the top performers. In addition, in day to day cleaning, it dealt with the likes of pet hair and hair impressively, and a noise level of 70.2dB from the main cleaner isn’t bad at all.

Miele quotes the battery life of the Triflex HX2 Pro to be up to 120 minutes, although that is a best case scenario figure with two batteries in use on the lowest power mode. Regular mode should provide around 40 minutes of cleaning time, given the 19 minutes we got using Eco, which should be enough time for most homes to be cleaned.

Reviewer: David Ludlow

Full review: Miele Triflex HX2 Pro

We’ve long been fans of the Blade range of cordless vacuum cleaners, and the ONEPWR Blade 5 is the best yet. Rather than a simple tweak, as with other models, this version has an all-new floor head and a few neat features that make it stand out from the competition.

First, there’s that new floor head, which has both a soft roller for hard floors and a traditional carpet brush, so you can tackle all floors without having to change heads. In our tests, it certainly improved the cleaning performance across both surfaces.

Although the floor head doesn’t have an anti-hair-wrap design, the bristles on the brush have an anti-microbial coating, helping prevent odours and anything unpleasant from growing in the tool. That coating is also on the mini-motorised pet tool. In the box, there’s also a dusting tool, crevice tool and an extension hose that makes it easier to get into tight gaps.

As this is a ONEPWR product, it uses the same batteries as the rest of the line-up, so you can swap between other tools. Here, Vax provides two of its large 4Ah batteries. In our tests, each battery lasted 27 minutes on standard power with the floor head spinning and 11 minutes on boost. Overall, expect just under an hour of cleaning from both batteries, which should prove enough to tackle most houses.

Suction power is good. We measured the cleaner at between 24AW and 122AW, with the maximum a little under the power of the Blade 4; here, the quality of the floor head means that less suction power is required.

Cleaning is good on all surfaces, and we found that the Blade 5 picked up all of our mess on carpet and hard floors. Edge performance could be a little better, though, and we had to finish off at the skirting board with the crevice tool.

If you want a well-priced vacuum cleaner with long battery life and swappable batteries, then the Vax ONEPWR Blade 5 Dual Pet & Car is a great choice, particularly if you have pets.