Verdict

Pros

• Excellent build quality
• High power, high suction
• Variable power
• Easy to manoeuvre cleaner
• On board tool storage
• Bag full indicator
• Quiet

Cons

• Head sucks down to carpets
• Debris pushed away on hard floors
• Not great for pet hair cleaning
• Odd static collection of dust on main head

What is the Miele Complete C3 Powerline?

If you are more concerned with effectively cleaning the house rather than saving a few watts of energy, Miele’s C3 Powerline comes to the test bench with a potent 1200Watt motor and sizeable 4.5-litre dust bags. While its energy efficiency class D may not look so great on paper, the extra power should lift the deepest dirt from carpets and gaps in hard floors.

Solidly built throughout, the C3 Powerlines gets Miele’s robust telescopic metal tubes, tough yet flexible hose and the multipurpose Allteq floor head. With six power settings, including one designed to be extra quite for late night cleaning, the C3 Powerline promises to offer gentle cleaning as well as brute force.

Miele Complete C3 Powerline – Design and Features

Straight out of the box and the C3 Powerline feels like a cleaner that is ready for use and abuse. It’s solid, fairly weighty at over 7kg with hose and head, and the metal tubes look set for the business of serious cleaning. The tubes are telescopic with a firm feeling clip and notched ratchet system, offering a wide range of heights for user-comfort at floor level or extended reach for ceilings. The hose is long and flexible with a curved handle and suction release slider.

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The main floor head is Miele’s all-purpose Allteq model, featuring pivot and tilt neck, large rear roller to make it more manoeuvrable and a foot switch that drops down bristles for hard floors. The neck design has a clip that slots into either side of the main cleaner so that the whole head, tube and hose can be parked upright. Lifting the concealing top flap reveals the C3 powerline’s trio of tools: a crevice tool, dusting brush and upholstery head. All three are solidly build and a good size too.

The 4.5litre HyClean GN bags are a Miele standard and favourite of the TrustedReviews testing department. They offer excellent filtration as well as great capacity – although only one is supplied with the cleaner. To stop dust getting back into your room there are two replaceable filters, pre motor and after the bag. These are supplied with new packs of Miele HyClean bags, so can be swapped out as and when you start a new set of bags.

Miele Complete C3 Powerline – Cleaning

The C3 Powerline’s relatively small trio of wheels on the underside move very well on smooth hard floors but struggle a little on carpets or floors with nooks, crannies, lumps and bumps. The cleaner follows you around on carpets regardless as the flat base tends to slide fairly easily over pile anyway. The bumper strip around the main body ensures that even adventurous high-speed cornering manoeuvres should keep your furniture undamaged.

Before

After

On carpeted floors, Miele’s Allteq floor head once again proves itself to be one of the best non-turbo brush floor heads available for pulling up the dirt. The machine’s super high suction power on the highest setting does tend to make the head stick down but the large rear roller goes some way to keep things moving. Cleaning performance is suitably impressive on the highest power setting and good floor head design produced excellent edge cleaning results.

Unusually, however, we had an ongoing ‘static’ problem with the C3 Powerline and Allteq head combination, resulting in a lot of dust and debris that should be cleaned up sticking all over the shell of the floor head. Even after a week or so of use and testing, the floor head shell was still attracting a fair bit of dust, so this may be an ongoing problem depending on your floor type. On our nylon heavy test carpet, it was certainly a problem.

Before

After

No such problems were encountered on hard floors although actual cleaning results were a little mixed. While the excellent suction power ensured any particles under the floor head were sucked up, the forward row of nylon bristles simply pushed a lot of debris out in front. Ironically the tilting neck on the floor head meant you can’t easily lift the front edge of the head to run over these particles. The result can be seen on the test pictures as the bristles drag some particles back after one sweep.

On full power the C3 Powerline was surprisingly quiet at just 74dB, exactly as stated on the EU energy label. This drops measurably on lower power modes, making this a potentially very quiet vacuum cleaner for homes, or neighbours, sensitive to noise.