Verdict

Pros

• Great carpet cleaning results
• Excellent edge cleaning
• Outstanding dust filtration
• Handy mini-turbo tool
• Easy-to-move floor head
• Spectacularly good value

Cons

• Not great on hard floors
• Short hose and cable
• Woefully bad crevice tool
• Very noisy

What is the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic?

Ever heard of VonHaus? No, neither had we. Yet this brand is a large multinational company supplying budget DIY tools, vacuum cleaners, garden machinery and even home furniture. It sells its products in the UK through the likes of Amazon and Tesco, so we thought we better give the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic cylinder cleaner a whirl.

This brightly coloured bagless cleaner packs in a 1200W motor with variable power, HEPA-class filtration and even a mini-turbo-brush tool. It’s a star performer on carpets, although hard-floor cleaning lets it down. If you have a fully carpeted home, though, then this VonHaus is a budget bagless bargain.

Related: Best Cordless Vacuum Cleaners

VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic – Accessories

With an RRP under £70 – and regularly available through the aforementioned retailers for far less – the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic looks spectacularly good value. It’s a compact, bagless cleaner boasting some impressive ratings on the energy label, including an A for energy efficiency and B for exhaust dust emissions.

Its 1200W motor has a rotary power level control, a large capacity dust bin that’s very easy to remove and empty, and the cleaner is a reasonable weight: just 3.9kg for the body only and another 1.3kg for the hose, tubes and main floor head.

The tubes are metal, chrome-plated and telescopic, and come with a decent selection of attachments. These include a standard carpet floor head with drop-down bristles and rubber blade for use on hard floors, and a combined miniature crevice tool/dusting brush.

The latter is the standard, off-the-shelf budget tool found accompanying many cheap vacuum cleaner brands – and we’re not fans. It’s too short and fat to get into your crevices and has a dusting brush that’s only marginally larger than a toothbrush.

Unusually, the tools are actually stored aboard the cleaner. However, since you have to remove the bin and cyclone assembly to access it, we’re none too sure how practical that will be in real-world cleaning situations. Although I guess there’s no chance of it becoming lost.

The specifications and accessories list alone would look great value at the asking price, but VonHaus goes a step further by including a mini-turbo tool as well. Okay, it’s a simple, fixed-neck device, but it offers an air-powered rotating brush bar and a simple collar lock that allows the unit to split in two for easy cleaning.

Where most budget cleaners fall down hard is when it comes to filtration. Not so this VonHaus. The 1200Watt Cyclonic boasts HEPA-class dust capture and uses no less than five layers of filtration.

The first four combine a fine mesh over the cyclone cage, a finer-still mesh gauze cup, a layer of foam and then a fine-cloth filter. All four are easily removed and washable. A fifth post-motor filter is cleverly hidden inside one of the wheels and is easily accessed by twisting off the hubcap. It, too, is washable. The result is a B rating for dust filtration – which is several grades higher than most budget cylinder cleaners.

So the cable is a fairly short at 4.8m, meaning the reach isn’t great, and the build quality feels rather plastic. But as far as features and accessories are concerned, those are our only quibbles at the price.

VonHaus 1200W Cyclonic – How does it clean carpets and hard floors?

That 1200W motor packs a solid punch and the variable power control is very handy for reducing suction when using the detail tool on or near fabrics. At full power the Cyclonic kicked out a few more decibels of noise than the energy label would have us believe at 82dB, but dropped back to 80dB on the lowest power. That isn’t quiet.

Moreover, as we lifted the head from the floor it emitted a high-pitched squeal that could clean wax out of your ears. We had anticipated this would disappear after a little, but even after a few days of testing you could still hear it scream – especially when the filters were clean and the airflow is at its greatest.

Stick on the turbo-brush tool and the noise skyrockets further into the high-80dB, which is old-school vacuum loud. Still, for the special offer price of £50 that we paid for this cleaner, you can’t have everything.

The main cleaner follows you around well on its large side wheels and central jockey wheel, even if the hose itself is a little shorter and stiffer than ideal. The decent floor-head design means there isn’t too much suck-down on carpet thanks to side channels in the head that effectively release some of the suction pressure. The result is a pretty nippy and easy-to-use cleaner on carpeted floors.

Better still, the cleaning results are very good. Our test mix of freshening powder and baking soda was cleared effectively in a single pass, and the edge cleaning results were outstanding. The latter is once again thanks to the air channels cut into the side of the floor head – simple but effective.

Unfortunately, the head didn’t fare so well on hard floors. The front row of bristles, dropped down by the floor switch, simply pushed most of our spilled oats in front of the floor head and dropped them in the path on the backstroke. Cleaning up the entire spill meant chasing particles around the room. On finer particles such as dust and loose pet hair, the high suction power and high airflow did a much better job of cleaning in a single pass.

The mini-turbo tool spins up to incredible speed when the cleaner is on full power, probably too fast to be overly effective. Best used on a mid-power setting, the brush does then slow enough to be effective over carpet. It adds a small amount of carpet agitation to help clear more stubborn debris such as grit and pet hair.

It’s rather awkward to use, however. The tool’s fixed neck means you have to be at a precise angle to keep the business end flat to the floor. That means holding the handle fairly low if the tool is on the end of the chrome tubes, or engaging some serious elbow dexterity if it’s attached directly to the handle.

The combined crevice tool and dusting brush is the vacuuming equivalent of a chocolate teapot. It isn’t made much better by VonHaus innovatively storing it inside the cleaner body. The tool is really too fat and too short to go into crevices or behind radiators, and the brush is only a good size for dusting a doll’s house. Thankfully, the 1200Watt Cyclonic’s handle is a standard diameter, so a crevice tool from an old cleaner may will fit.

Having used the 1200Watt Cyclonic for a week or two, particularly cleaning up dust and fine test powder, we found the filtration system was blocking up quite comprehensively. Obviously, the downside of extremely good filtration is that it collects an awful lot of particles that would otherwise be floating around the air for you to breath in. So do remember the filters will need washing and drying fairly regularly.

VonHaus 1200W Cyclonic: How does it cope with pet hair?

That 1200Watt motor delivers plenty of suction power to pull up surface hairs from the carpet. The main head’s ease of movement further means you can run over the same area several times with ease. While still not as effective as a proper rotating brush-bar floor head, the results aren’t too bad. It cleared our patch of mixed Collie and Labrador hair in around 20 seconds.

Switching to the mini-turbo tool certainly helps pull some of the more ingrained and entwined hairs out of the carpet. Conversely, its small size and fast spinning brush don’t deliver the pet-hair cleaning of a full-sized upright cleaner or floor head with a full-sized rotating brush bar, for example. Again, let’s look back to that asking price, though. For not much more than the cost of a bulk bag of premium dog food, it certainly delivers pet-friendly results.

VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic: How easy is it to use on the stairs?

Okay, the short 4.8m cable and equally compact hose aren’t going to get you very far up or down a flight of stairs. In our house that combination means we can’t actually reach the middle three steps at all thanks to awkwardly placed plug sockets. Out with the extension lead then…

The main floor head easily attaches directly to the curved handle, and on our carpeted stairs proved easy to use thanks to the low stick-down effect. Oddly, though, this floor head’s tilting neck is spring-loaded and so requires a little more effort to keep the head flat to the floor at all times.

Carpet cleaning results were very good indeed; edge cleaning results were terrific and even the transition line between the steps and the uprights received a good clean.

Switching to the mini-turbo tool for stairs had its pros and cons. The lack of any articulation in this tool’s neck make it quite a feat of wrist and elbow dexterity to keep it flat to the carpet you’re trying to clean. On the plus side, it’s small and light, and doesn’t stick down. Also, by spinning it around on the curved handle you can very effectively vacuum the carpet on the vertical uprights between steps.

If it wasn’t for the short cable and rather short, stiff hose, this VonHaus cleaner would be quite a star performer for stair cleaning.

Should I buy the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic?

With all these features at such a ridiculously low asking price, why wouldn’t you buy the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic? Even as just as a spare vacuum cleaner!

This budget brand’s cylinder cleaner really impressed us with its carpet cleaning performance, decent selection of tools and excellent features such as the variable power and superb dust filtration. Okay, it isn’t at its best on hard floors, it’s noisy and has limited reach – but for the ridiculously low asking price, it’s a cracking cleaner for carpeted homes.

Verdict

Superb carpet cleaning performance and great features make the VonHaus 1200Watt Cyclonic a budget bargain.

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