Verdict

With a super lightweight body and decent 20l bin, the Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner gets off to a good start. It's also exceptionally powerful, making short work of dry spills. Wet spills are a different story, however, with the vacuum cleaner tending to push liquids around rather than neatly sucking them up. A short power cable makes the vacuum less flexible than we'd want, too.

Pros

• Good vacuum on dry floors
• Great edge cleaning
• Very light and manoeuvrable
• Simple to clean out
• Funky design

Cons

• Liquid pick up very poor
• Woefully short cable
• Noisy
• Relatively expensive bags
• Not great value

What is the Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner?

The Draper 13785 is a super lightweight wet and dry vacuum with a 1.5m flexible hose, three extension tubes and a crevice nozzle for tricky to reach spots. Although rather basic in terms of features and accessories, its powerful 1250W motor promises heavyweight cleaning despite the lightweight design.

It looks great and whizzes over a mixture of hard floors and carpets, sucking up crumbs and animal hair alike. The 13785 manages dry vacuuming exceptionally well right up to the edge, but wet pick-up is disappointing; it pushes spills around rather than clearing them up. It’s light and easy to use, but poor wet results and a super-short 3.5m power cable aren’t ideal for a machine costing nearly £100.

Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner – What you need to know

• Cleaning on dry floor: A mix of carpeted areas, rugs, tiles and laminates were an easy cleaning ride for the high-power Draper 13785.
• Wet cleaning power: Liquid pick-up is well below par and spills tend to get pushed around the floor rather than sucked up.
• Edge cleaning test: Near enough perfect edge cleaning around the home and it does well at pulling dust from cracks and grooves in the floor.
• Workshop test: The Draper’s strong suction and large-capacity handle heavyweight debris assuming you can reach it with the short cable.

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Serious suction power makes the Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner a cleaning whizz, but the below-par water pick-up is a slight annoyance

Rocking the appearance of a funky beer keg, the metal-bodied Draper is a simple to use wet and dry vacuum with a huge on/off switch. You certainly won’t be struggling to find the switch, although the 20-litre bin is so shiny, we struggled not to take selfies in the mirror-finish.

The headline here is the 1250W motor, packing over 50% more power than any dry-only vacuum cleaner. It delivers suction and noise in equally prodigious quantities.

Accessories are a bit thin on the ground, and the wheels don’t feel overly robust: their fitting to the body is best described as “challenging”, as we had to use a ridiculous amount of force to get the wheels to attach. They certainly weren’t coming off any time soon, so don’t expect to be able to re-use the box for storage.

Included with the Draper 13785 are three very short plastic extension tubes, a flexible 1.5m hose, double-functioning floor brush and crevice attachment. The floor brush can be used on different floorings and for wet or drying cleaning, thanks to a clip-in brush/blade holder.

This had a rubber blade one side and a row of stepped bristles on the other; it can be used with either to the fore. You could potentially use the floor-head without the holder, but it sticks down like a limpet and dragging it acts more like a rake than a vacuum.

Switching between wet and dry cleaning is fairly stress-free, if not as slick as some of the universal filter-type machines we’ve tested. For vacuuming dry areas, the cloth filter is attached to the motor and the paper dust bag attaches to the inner side of the hose connector. For wet spillages, you remove both and pop on the anti-foam filter over the motor.

Transporting the Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner is super-easy thanks to its lightweight body

Weighing in at just 3.8kg, the Draper is as super lightweight as wet and dry cleaners get. It’s ridiculously easy to carry around with its contoured top handle and rolls well on the wheels once fitted.

Its footprint isn’t the widest we’ve tested, so there’s some danger of tipping it over with a firm tug, but most of the time it followed along with a gentle tug of the hose. Just not very far. Its cleaning reach is limited by the mind-boggling short 3.5m cable. Around our house that meant there were plenty of areas it just wouldn’t reach without having to use an extension lead.

It isn’t a machine for stealth cleaning either, with the sound output averaging 86dB. That’s main road at rush hour loud, and if you were asked to use this cleaner as part of your job, your employer would be legally obliged to provide ear defenders! Thankfully, all that noise does translate into plenty of suction too.

A 20l tank volume is amazingly capacious considering the Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner’s ridiculously low weight. Emptying liquid means unclipping the head and pouring the contents away. Equally as simple, emptying the dust bag requires pulling it from the hose mount and dropping it into a bin.

You get one voluminous dust bag included and these can be purchased online for about £6 for a pack of three. This isn’t overly great value compared to some big-brand wet and dry cleaner bags.

Despite that growing list of niggles, the Draper 13785 delivers a solid dry vacuuming performance across carpets and hard floors, and its edge cleaning was near-perfect. It even did a good job pulling up embedded dog’s hair from the carpet fibres. There’s nothing too clever at work here in terms of floor-head design, it’s just sheer high-power suction.

That makes cleaning carpets quite a handful as the floor-head wants to stick-down hard. No such trouble in the concrete floor garage where the Draper delivered impressive cleaning, sucking up everything from dust to pea gravel.

Water suction was a disappointment, however, and we were left with a slightly soggy floor, even after going over the test area a few times. For draining duties there was plenty of pull and it drained a bucket of water with ease, but the floor-head just didn’t seem as happy with basic wet spills.

Being such a lightweight machine, we were expecting an easy to carry machine that might not have had the suck of its competitors. Yet Draper’s little beer keg showed outstanding suction power, albeit not backed up by the sort of design touches required to make the most of it. It sticks down hard on carpets and the floor-head wasn’t the best with wet spills.

Given it isn’t available at an inconsiderable price, the ludicrously short 3.5m power cable and average build quality are a disappointment; and the bags (at £2 each) are more expensive than bags for premium brand wet and dry models. The Draper 13785 Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner is certainly light and powerful, but poor spill cleaning and a host of minor issues mean it isn’t great value overall.

Should I buy the Draper 13785 Wet and Dry Vacuum?

Powerful and effective dry vacuuming in a lightweight design makes the Draper a contender, but poor wet-spill cleaning, quirky tool design and a miserably short cable let it down. If you need to keep the cleaner weight to a minimum and are looking to clean mostly hard floors, the 13785 is interesting, but the Karcher WD 4 is a better cleaner overall.