Verdict

With its simple controls and powerful suction, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless is a great way to keep your hard floors clean and cleaning up wet spills. It can even cope with rugs, although we didn't find that cleaning performance was quite as good here. With 25-minutes of runtime, this model is good for large areas, but if your home is predominantly hard floor then you may want a plug-in model or one with replaceable batteries.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Tackles hard floors and carpet
• Great suction power

Cons

• Integrated battery

Designed for convenience, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless is an all-in-one vacuum cleaner and hard floor cleaner, so you can suck up mess while you clean. This isn’t the first product to do both of these jobs, but this is the first hard floor cleaner that I’ve reviewed that can tackle rugs, too.

Simple controls, great performance and a neat charging station makes this a great all-in-one tool, but if you’ve got lots of hard floors to clean in one go, the fixed battery may be a limiting factor.

Bissell CrossWave Cordless – What you need to know

Rug test – Remove most of the mud ground into the carpet, but a dedicated carpet cleaner will do a better job for tougher stains.
Mud test – Sucks up water, dirt and spills, and does a good job cleaning up hard floors with the minimum of effort.
Hard floor test – Picked up spilt rice grains, only dropping a couple back onto the floor; a few sweeps is generally enough to sort out any leftover debris.

Related: Best hard floor cleaner

Bissell CrossWave Cordless Design and Features – Simple to use and easy to clean

Externally, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless looks much like a regular upright vacuum cleaner. In many ways, that’s because this mode is exactly that. As you look closer, the differences become clear. For starters, there’s no hose to unplug and use for accessories, such as a crevice tool. As such, you’ll still want a regular vacuum cleaner for getting around the edges of rooms and into tighter gaps.

There’s a single 0.62-litre bin at the front, as on a regular vacuum cleaner, although this one is designed to capture water as well as dirt. Pull it out, and remove the filter on the top and you can empty out the dirt and water. Be careful, as there’s a grey plastic filter inside that slides out and it’s not immediately obvious which way it goes back in (with the leg pointing upwards). Everything in this container is washable, so you can keep the CrossWave Cordless in its best operating condition.

Inside the system is a float: when the tank is full of water, it the float rises and shuts the cleaner from sucking up any more water. It’s a neat system that prevents overflowing and damage to the vacuum.

At the back is the water reservoir for the cleaning detergent. There are two simple marks on the bottle showing you fill levels for small or large areas. Bissell sells its own multi-surface liquid and you get 1-litre in the box; you can use your own floor cleaner, mixed to the right ratio, if you prefer.

As the water tank can hold 0.82-litres of liquid, you may need to empty the bin a couple of times when cleaning. You’ll need to empty more if you’re using the vacuum to suck up a wet spill, too.

Bissell has put very simple controls on the front and there are dedicated buttons for hard floor and area rug cleaning modes; these adjust how much cleaning solution is released, with more for the area rug setting. Bissell includes a multipurpose roller in the box, which has soft fibres and some harder bristles. You can buy dedicated rollers for hard floors and rugs, too.

With the power on, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless operates in vacuum only mode. This is handy, as it means that you can use it to pick up wet spills, say when you make a mess cooking.

If you want to clean, you have to press and hold the blue button on the handle, which pumps water out of the detergent tank and over the rollers. Dirty water from the rollers is then sucked up off the floor and into the bin. In this way, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless doesn’t just clean, it removes dirt and germs from your floors.

Manoeuvrability is pretty good, too, with the flexible joint to the floor head making it easy to corner and move around furniture.

Once you’ve finished a clean, you can drop the Bissell CrossWave Cordless onto its charging dock, which also acts as a floor protector. Using the provided measuring jug, you can add water to this base station and then use the self-cleaning mode to clean the roller, which can then be removed and stood up to dry.

Bissell CrossWave Cordless Peformance – Deals with most stains well but did better on hard floors than rugs

To test how good the Bissell CrossWave Cordless is, I put it through a series of tests on different floors. First, as this is a vacuum cleaner, I used the standard hard floor test, sprinkling a teaspoon of rice on the floor and then giving the vacuum cleaner a single pass through it. After one sweep, there was a clean sweep through the rice, but stopping the vacuum cleaner let a couple of grains drop out onto the floor; it was nothing that a couple more sweeps through didn’t fix, but a higher power mode would have been nice.

Hard floor vacuum test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

Next, I tried a wet spill pick up, placing a cup’s worth of water on the floor. Again, a single sweep through easily picked up the spill. Looking at the floor at the end, I could see a strange red mark in the middle of the water: it appeared to be down to the harder red bristles on the floor head. Another sweep through removed this mess with no problem.

Water test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

I next tackled my light kitchen floor, which gets pretty dirty thanks to my four cats wandering in and out of the garden. Slow and more gentle strokes back and forward picked up the mess, leaving me with gleaming floors. And, as this is a proper vacuum, any surface dirt is removed at the same time.

Hard floor test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

For a more difficult challenge, I used the Bissell CrossWave Cordless on my outside patio. This was pretty filthy, but the vacuum managed to pick up dry soil and polish up the tiles. At the end, there were some marks left that only a pressure washer would deal with but the CrossWave Cordless is still a quick a useful tool for dealing with some outdoor areas, too.

Outdoor hard floor test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

At the end of cleaning, the floor was just a little damp to the touch but it soon dried and there was far less water than when using a mop.

As a final test, I tackled a rug with some mud ground into it. This time it took a few sweeps to really get most of the stain out but there was still a bit of a mark at the end. For day-to-day cleaning of rugs the Bissell CrossWave Cordless can do a good job, but for a deeper clean a proper carpet cleaner will do a better job of it.

Rug test: Dirty rug (left) vs Clean rug (right) – move slider to compare

One word of warning: you can only clean rugs marked with a W or WS cleaning symbol on it; if your rugs don’t have this, avoid using this product as you may cause damage.

I measured the Bissell CrossWave Cordless at 78.7dB, which is around the same volume as I’d expect from a regular cordless vacuum cleaner.

The internal battery lasts around 25 minutes of use, after which you have to wait four hours for it to recharge. With that amount of time, I found there was enough battery life to cover my downstairs, but I’d have to recharge to tackle the other floors. If you’ve got a lot of hard floors that you want to clean in one go, a plug-in hard floor cleaner or one that takes swappable batteries will be a better bet.

Should I buy the Bissell CrossWave Cordless?

Able to vacuum and clean at the same time, the Bissell CrossWave Cordless is a versatile and quick tool for dealing with hard floors. And, if you have the occasional rug to keep in shape, this is a tool that can deal with that surface too.

Whether or not this is the right product for you will partly come down to what you need to clean. If you’ve got large areas of hard floor, then the 25-minute battery life may be a restriction too far, and a plug-in cleaner, such as the Karcher FC5, or a cleaner with swappable batteries, such as the Vax OnePwr Glide, could be a better bet.

That said, if you’ve only got one or two hard floors to deal with, the simple, powerful and neat Bissell CrossWave Cordless is an excellent and efficient way to keep your floors shining.

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