Verdict

The Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is an interesting rival to the more well-known brands of vacuum cleaners, offering powerful suction and a mop at a relatively low price. It performs well on hard floors, with the mop doing a decent job of cleaning smaller areas of dirt – but on carpet it was disappointing. At this price, there are better alternatives.

Pros

• Well priced
• Lots of accessories
• Mops and vacuums

Cons

• Fiddly to empty
• Didn't pick up well on carpet

Promising killer suction to rival the most expensive cordless cleaners, the Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner costs a fraction of the price. This cordless stick model is lightweight, easy to use and even has an automatic mode to help extend battery life. To top of that list, it will even mop your floors.

It’s a decent performer on hard floors, but it struggled to pick up dirt from carpets – and it didn’t do so well with pet hair, either. At this price, there are better alternatives.

Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner – What you need to know

• General vacuuming – Lightweight and simple to clip together, this cleaner is easy to move around, and the option to lightly mop at the same time can be convenient.
• Carpet test – Left a lot of our test dirt on the carpet, even when we upped the power to maximum and swept over the area several times.
• Hard floor test – Did a decent job of clearing spilt rice, although some grains fell back out at the end.
• Pet hair pick-up – Picked up the looser bits of hair from the carpet, but the vacuum cleaner couldn’t deal with hair trapped in the pile.

Related: Best cordless vacuum cleaner

Proscenic P11 Cordless design and features – Lightweight and easy to use, but emptying the bin is mork work than it should be

The Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is a textbook cordless stick vacuum cleaner. It comprises the main vacuum unit, which has a trigger to operate the cleaner, with the wand and accessories clipping into this. The main body feels a little cheap and plasticky, which is to be expected at this price.

There is a trigger, but it doesn’t operate as you might expect. Instead of having to hold this in to operate the cleaner, one squeeze turns the vacuum on, and one turns it off. When you first turn on the vacuum, it enters Auto mode, where vacuum pressure is monitored automatically, upping power for carpets and dropping it for hard floors. It’s designed to extend battery life.

You can take over and put the vacuum into its minimum or maximum modes by tapping the button on the LCD screen at its rear.

There’s a slight delay between pressing the trigger and the vacuum cleaner turning on, and a slight delay between leaning the vacuum cleaner back and the floor head’s motorised brush springing to life.

You can magnetically attach the mopping unit to the back of the floor head, in much the same way as on the Roidmi X20. You fill the small water tank with water, whereupon it drip-feeds through to wet the microfibre cloth for cleaning.

A decent selection of accessories are supplied in the box, including a dusting brush, crevice tool, mini motorised tool (designed for pet hair, and it works well on stairs), and the main motorised floor brush. You also get a tool for cleaning the vacuum and cutting away hair that might have become caught in the brush.

The vacuum cleaner has no storage on its body for any of these tools. Nor does the magnetic charging wall dock. I do like the dock, otherwise: just lean the vacuum cleaner against it and it will begin to charge automatically.

It’s also possible to charge directly by plugging the power adapter into the battery back, either while it’s inserted into the vacuum or when it’s unclipped and removed.

There’s a 0.65-litre bin, which has to be unclipped and removed from the vacuum for emptying. It’s easy enough to get out, but a bit of a squeeze to get back into place. To empty it, you manually have to open the flap at the front, which is near-impossible without spilling the dirt out everywhere. And, with the bin in your hand, dirt also tends to fall out of the cutout at the back, where the bin meets the main vacuum.

A washable filter at the rear, with a cotton loop design, is easy to pull out for washing. Just make sure that you tuck this loop away carefully, so that it doesn’t get caught between the bin and main vacuum unit.

The vacuum cleaner weighs just 2.8kg with the motorised floor head in place, which means it’s easy to move around. Tackling bigger cleaning jobs, I certainly didn’t feel tired pushing this vacuum around. Plus, it’s nimble enough to move around chair legs and other bits of furniture. There are three LEDs on the front of the main motorised brush, to light up the area you’re cleaning.

The Proscenic’s low weight also makes cleaning up high a breeze, so cobwebs or dust in the crevices of the ceiling will prove no trouble at all. Note that this vacuum cleaner won’t stand up on its own, and it isn’t particularly stable when leant up against a wall. As such, we recommend laying it flat when you’re not using it.

Proscenic P11 Cordless performance – Does well on hard floors, but no so much on carpets

One of the key selling points of the Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is its super-high suction power. To test this out, I ran the vacuum cleaner through our suction and air flow tests, so I could work out its power in air watts. On minimum power, the vacuum cleaner produced 37.26AW, and on maximum the figure was a huge 182.12AW.

It’s important to consider that air-watt figures alone don’t tell the whole story about real-life performance; they’re merely an indication of the power that’s there. How a vacuum cleaner agitates dirt and pulls it up is often more important, as demonstrated by my real-world tests.

I started by sprinkling a teaspoon of flour on to the carpet, next to the skirting board. Running the vacuum cleaner parallel to the skirting board on Auto power, I was somewhat disappointed by the Proscenic P11’s results. Although the surface dirt was removed, the floor brush actually pushed the flour further into the carpet.

Upping the power manually to the maximum setting, the cleaner still couldn’t get rid of everything. I had to switch to a different vacuum cleaner to clear the flour from the carpet.

Next, I tested pet hair removal from carpet. Again, surface hairs were removed but the P11 wasn’t able to touch the hairs that were trapped deeper in the carpet pile.

Next, I through a teaspoon of rice on to the hard floor. The P11 did better here, sucking up the mess with ease – although a few grains of rice did fall back out at the end of cleaning.

I also tested the mop by spreading some wet soil onto the hard floor. Since the mop uses gravity to feed water on the microfibre mop, the spread of moisture isn’t that even. The result was that the dirt was better but there was still a patch left behind that needed tackling with a proper hard floor cleaner.

The Proscenic P11’s mop is okay for general cleaning and lighter stains, but you’ll need a better cleaner to clear more stubborn dirt.

Dusting using the brush was easy enough, with the P11 picking up the flour that I spread onto the top of the skirting board without issue.

Run-time from a single charge is 53 minutes on the lowest power setting, reducing to 12 minutes on maximum. Reality is somewhere between the two – and I found that cleaning coverage wasn’t great, as I had to cover an area multiple times in some cases to successfully pick up all of the mess.

Noise was measured at 70.7dB on the lowest power setting, which is really very quiet; and 83.3dB on the maximum setting, which is really very loud.

Should you buy the Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner?

The sheer power and low price of the Proscenic P11 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner makes it appear a great choice – but, unfortunately, that power didn’t translate into decent performance in our tests. The Proscenic was fine with lighter spills, but the fact that I had to resort to using a different vacuum cleaner to clear the flour on our carpet was particularly disappointing.

At this price, the Vax ONEPWR Blade 4 is a superior choice, offering better cleaning performance and coming with a wider range of accessories.

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