There was no such issue with the dedicated parquet floor-head, which is a stroke of genius. It’s super-soft, so there’s little danger of it damaging your floor, and the brush/wheel combination makes it supremely light and easy to navigate around the room. The lack of tilt movement in the neck means either the front or rear bristles frequently raise a few millimetres from the ground, which aids sweeping in the dirt.

Before

While parquet is this tool’s forte, we successfully used this head on tiles, laminate and even short-pile carpets with great success. Arguably, it’s better than the main turbo brush on some carpets, since it was much easier to move and the bristles did a fairly good job of lifting tough debris such as pet hair.

After

In many ways, the parquet tool was better on carpet than even the combined carpet and hard-floor tool. The latter looked like it had real potential, yet its light weight and neck design means that its rear end – wheels and all – lift clean off the carpet on the back stroke.

While this means it’s very easy to move, it also results in you wasting half of your cleaning strokes. We looked at ways that we could change how we cleaned or possible modifications to the head, but it’s simply poor design.

Thankfully, this tool redeemed itself over hard floors, where it did a superb job on our test patch of mixed oats. It swept clean in a single pass and managed to avoid dropping any debris on the back stroke – thanks, ironically, to the rear lifting slightly and scooping in loose debris.

The only issue is that we couldn’t think of many occasions where the parquet tool wouldn’t be a better choice for hard floors.

Polti Forzaspira MC330 Turbo – How easy is it to use on stairs?

We saved the Polti’s tools and small turbo-brush for use on stairs. The 5m cable is certainly nothing to get too excited about and is pretty much the minimum we require for a full stair clean at Chez Stevenson. It does, however, retract nicely into the body of the vacuum when you’re finished.

With such a short cable we had to tackle the stairs from the top and the bottom, and the Polti’s hose and tubes weren’t quite long enough to meet in the middle without having to pick up the cleaner.

As noted, this is no lightweight unit, and there’s no way to stand it on its end. Your options are to either hold it with one hand and vacuum the other – a health and safety hazard waiting to happen – or to place it down on each step and pick it up again afterwards.

When you first attach the small turbo-brush and switch it on, nothing happens. In fact, the small brush spins only when it’s in contact with the floor surface; otherwise, the air simply rushes around it. Place it on the carpet and it quickly picks up speed, although not instantaneously. Lift it on to the next step and it stops in between, taking a few moments to get going again when you place it down. It’s quite an odd sensation, and rather reinforces our preference for electrically powered brushes.

Moreover, cleaning performance is poor. Where the brush itself touches the carpet, cleaning is fine, but the large blanks at either end of the brush mean it’s only cleaning an area a few inches wide at a time.

There’s also no danger of getting anywhere close to the edges of each step. For this you have to remove the head switch to one of the detailed tools and clean the last inch. Not ideal.

While you could use any of the three main floor-heads attached directly to the handle, none would make for easy manoeuvring or efficient step cleaning – particularly on corner stairs.

Polti Forzaspira MC330 Turbo – How does it cope with pet hair?

With two turbo brushes on offer, the MC330 turbo looked set for a Crufts champion-level performance with pet hair cleaning. It didn’t happen. The main turbo brush seemed to generally skim over the top of pet hairs in the carpet rather than pick them up, and the “lifting off” on the backstroke didn’t improve matters either.

On our test patch of mixed Collie and Labrador hair spread over a 30cm circle, it took the MC330 Turbo and this head around 18 seconds to clean up the hair completely. That is well outside what we’d qualify as a successful pet hair-specific cleaner.

Results were rather mixed for pet hairs over hard floors, too. The parquet floor tool was perhaps the best on offer, although its low bristles did mean larger tumbleweed fur balls tended to get swept away rather than sucked into the cleaner.

The combined floor-head set to hard floors didn’t suffer such a fate and was quite good at picking up loose pet hairs. However, at the end of the test, we realised that pet hairs had become comprehensively entwined around the smaller wheels (pictured), requiring a few minutes’ surgery to clean it up before putting it away.

Despite promising much for our furry friends then, the Polti’s pet performance remains in the dog house.

Should I buy the Polti Forzaspira MC330 Turbo?

The Forzaspira MC300 Turbo brought Italian flair and great performance promise to the test bench. Yet it isn’t without its foibles and quirks. The bin size, remote control, suction power and ergonomics are all great, but the vacuum cleaner is let down a little by rather dodgy tool design and a short cable.

Verdict

Overall, the Polti Forzaspira MC330 Turbo offers a good mix of performance and options, but it’s more Alfa Romeo than Maserati.

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