Verdict

Pros

• Powerful suction
• Good carpet cleaning up to edges
• Compact and fairly lightweight
• Excellent hard floor tool

Cons

• Carpet head near immovable
• Multipurpose head poor on hard floors
• Ridiculously short cable
• Appalling dust emission rating
• Not great on pet hair

What is the Zanussi ZAN1930UEL?

Promising more suction power than an old-school 2,200W cleaner, the bagless Zanussi Cyclon Classic ZAN1930UEL features an energy-efficient 700W motor and a useful 1.25-litre bin.

With steel tubes and no less than five tools supplied, this machine aims to offer versatile cleaning across carpets and hard floors. With the mini turbo brush floor-head supplied, it’s set for tackling pet hairs too. It doesn’t aim to be the quietest cleaner or offer anti-allergen filtration, so can the ZAN1930UEL’s cleaning performance alone live up to its £100 price?

Zanussi ZAN1930UEL – Design and Accessories

Headlining this little Zanussi’s impressive accessories list, for a budget cleaner, is an air-flow powered mini turbo brush floor-head. Okay, it’s only half-size at approximately 150mm/6inches across, but it features a brush bar with rows of stiff nylon bristles and has a rotating neck for easy steering. There’s no up/down pivot movement on the neck, but a floating plate on the floor-head offers a few degrees of movement to keep the head flat to the floor through your vacuuming stroke.

The clam-shell housing splits and opens, but only enough to clean dust from the air-fan rather than access the brush itself. Hairs wrapped around this will still have to be cut off through the base in the usual way.

Related: Best Vacuum Cleaners

The turbo brush is joined by two full-sized floor-heads. The first is a traditional multi-purpose tool, combining a smooth-based carpet head with lever-operated drop-down with nylon bristles for use on hard floors. The second is a dedicated hard-floor head that also has stiff nylon bristles for use on, erm, hard floors.

Since the multi-purpose tool also has a pivoting and tilting neck for manoeuvrability, while the hard-floor head simply rotates, we were a bit of a loss to think why you’d need the dedicated hard-floor head at all.

The main floor heads are joined by two compact detailing tools. The combined crevice and brush tool is too short and too chunky to get into any domestic crevice and has a flip-over brush of micro proportions. Since this tool is identical to the combined tool found on the Daewoo RC-350BKN also recently tested, we suspect this is a cheap, off-the-shelf part. The upholstery tool is small, not unusable, and features a couple of cut-outs to help avoid the head sticking to furniture.

The hose is a stiff plastic and isn’t overly long at 1.4m. This is attached to a simple curved handle with a suction-release slide switch at one end, and a super-stiff plastic clip to attach it to the body. You’ll need some strength and decent grip if you intend to part the cleaner and hose for storage.

The two supplied tubes are pretty short, being just 85cm combined, and they simply push-fit together. They look the part, being chrome plated, and are made from strong steel. However, as above, they don’t pull apart easily for storage.

The Zanussi’s bin is a handy 1.25 litres and is filtered pre- and post-motor. The large and washable filters look the part but since this model scores a woeful G rating – the lowest possible – for dust emissions, they look better than they perform. The cable retracts into the body for storage but is just 4.3m long; this is the shortest mains lead we’ve come across on a cleaner we’ve tested.

Zanussi ZAN1930UEL – Cleaning

The ZAN1930EUL itself is nicely compact, smoothly rounded to skirt round household obstacles, and has floor-protecting rubber tyres on its two large wheels. It has a flip-up carry handle that’s well balanced and, on the floor, pulls around easily thanks to a central jockey wheel. It’s also relatively light: just 4kg, and about a kilo more with hose, tubes and one of the smaller floor-heads attached.

Controls are simply on/off and cable rewind, and there’s a large handle-like clip to release the bin. The clip not only looks like it’s a handle, but it’s positioned right where you’d expect to have a handle to lift the cleaner – I’ll leave you to guess the rest.

Before

The bin does pull out smoothly and the base unclips to empty. Hairy debris becomes caught around a central cyclone cone, which also has to be removed for a complete clean out. Expect dusty hands.

Fired into life, the Cyclon Classic’s 700W motor certainly sounds like it’s trying to deliver 2,200W of suction power. Our measured 83dB noise level confirmed the claim on the energy label: the ZAN1930UEL is fairly noisy, but not howlingly so. While the actual total noise level is up there with that of high-street traffic, the sound is actually a smooth whirr of motor and airflow, and therefore isn’t overly aggressive.

After

All that airflow packs mighty suction too. With an empty bin and pristine clean filters, the suction power and rate of airflow are very good for a budget model. The cleaning results are suitably impressive too – but not without some major caveats.