Verdict

Pros

• Powerful, light and manoeuvrable
• Good carpet cleaning
• Washable filters
• Retracting cable
• Spectacularly cheap

Cons

• Very limited cleaning reach
• Unusably small upholstery tool
• Poor filtration, low efficiency
• Limited suction power for 1500W
• Steep angle on floor head
• Poor pet hair cleaning

What is the Bissell Zing Compact 1427T?

When your floorcare budget is on the floor, Bissell has the answer with its incredibly affordable Zing Compact. With a recommended retail price around £60, and frequently available for much less, this small bagless cylinder cleaner offers bags of power and a good size 2litre dust bin.

While its energy label performance ratings are far from impressive, the Zing is light, manoeuvrable and comes with a good size floorhead and automatic cable rewind to keep things neat and tidy.

Bissell Zing Compact 1427T – Design and Accessories

Hauling the Zing from its colourful box it hides the mass of its 1500Watt motor well, being small and very light. Accessories are cheaply made, as befits the silly low asking price, with plastic tubes and short hose and cable. Controls on the main cleaner are simple power on/off and a button to retrace the cable. The only other control is a small suction release slider on the plastic handle, should the floorhead or other tools get stuck down.

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The flexible hose and glossy black plastic tubes attract static with A-rated efficiency and even placing them down on a pre-vacuumed carpet gave them a good coating of dust. Its not a major issue and this may well reduce over time as they get a little grubbier themselves and the static reduces. The floorhead is a basic design but features a pair of wheels at the rear and a full width vacuum slot that suggests edge cleaning should be pretty good. The head has a swivel neck but with no pivoting ability the cleaning angle is fixed,

For hard floors the floorhead’s footswitch is easy to operate, dropping down a couple of small rollers and a row of stiff bristles. The Zing also comes with Bissell’s combined crevice and upholstery tool, which is so small it looks like a comedy exercise in miniaturisation. There is no on-board storage for this tool, so expect to loose it within days of buying a Zing.

The dust bin is quite a whopper at 2litres capacity promising plenty of time between unloads. Due to the design of the bagless system, the real capacity is a fair bit less than this but it’s far from the smallest we have seen. The hose attaches directly to the bin, so emptying the bin means disconnecting the hose first, then removing the bin from the cleaner. That is a little more awkward than ideal but, at the price, we can forgive the Zing minor issues like this.

The filter is a fully washable 3-stage affair with a dirt cup, dirt cup screen and foam post motor filter, for which Bissell claims HEPA rated filtration efficiency. The Zing’s energy label score for dust re-emission is the lowest possible, a G rating, suggesting that Bissell’s marketing claims for the Zing’s filtration and the reality are two very different things.

Bissell Zing Compact 1427T – Cleaning

The 1500Watt motor fires into life with a noticeable howl, measuring some 84-85dB at ear height over carpet. That is fairly loud by current standards, well above the volume you would want to talk over, but is spot on what the energy label claims. Quieter cleaning is available, but not at this price. Moreover, there is no serious vacuum noise without power, and the Zing’s old-school 1500W motor gives plenty of suction and fairly high airflow.

Before

After

This translated into effective carpet cleaning using the main floor head. It cleared our test dust efficiently and pulled up the pile into neatly groomed lines. The suction power and wide vacuum channel that reaches to the very edges of the floorhead (other budget manufacturers please take note) did a pretty effective job at cleaning right up to the skirting edge too.

It’s not all good news for the Zing on carpet though, as its E rating for carpet cleaning efficiency on the energy label suggests. Not only is the floorhead at a fixed angle, so frequently tilted away from being flush to the floor, the air-flow and cyclone design is very basic. As such the Zing doesn’t produce anything like the cleaning power of premium machines with motors this powerful and the vacuum power doesn’t increase significantly if the nozzle or floorhead becomes restricted. On the plus side that means the floorhead doesn’t tend to stick down but it also dramatically reduces pure cleaning power, particularly over carpets that tend to produce a good seal on the floorhead. To further illustrate that point, the Zing also shows a noticeable reduction in air-flow as the bin gets more than half full – rather defeating one of the primary reasons for going bagless!

Before

After

Hard floor performance was, well, OK. The wheels and drop down bristles keep the head far enough from the floor to stop the air flow being restricted, so the suction power remains good. Plenty of our test debris was drawn into the cleaner. This also translates into a solid ability to pull dust and dirt from cracks and grooves, particularly handy if you have trendy buffed floorboards as naked floor covering. Yet the bristles along the front edge have very few cut-outs so a lot of large particles get swept in front of the head. Other particles get caught up in the bristles and are dropped on the back stroke (as you can see from the pictures). Several passes will eventually get everything, but that doesn’t make for the speediest of room cleans.