Hoover Upright Vacuum Cleaner, Red - Upright 300

Product Information

One other thing to note is that the turbine-drive doesn’t have the same anti-tangle system as the floor head. As a result, I found it started collecting hair almost immediately. And it’s a bit fiddly to clean out, too, because removing the brush bar involves freeing it from its belt drive. READ NEXT: These are the best robot vacuum cleaners to buy today Hoover H-Upright 300 review: Should I buy it? Approaching the mess from different angles and giving the H-Upright 300 a few more sweeps soon collected most of the mess, with just the crevice tool needed for the tiny particles remaining right at the edge. This means you can use the handle and hose for handheld jobs, add the wand if you need a little extra reach, and detach the vacuum unit from the floor head to more easily carry it around when cleaning the stairs. Hoover HL5 review: What’s it like to use?

There’s a power button on top of the dust bin, plus a button next to it that disables the motorised brush bar. That’s good to see, since cleaning hard floors and deep-pile carpet can be difficult with the brush spinning. Second, the labelling on the device is a bit unclear. In the grand scheme of things it probably doesn’t really matter if you open or close the top vent when you’re cleaning short pile carpet and you can adjust as you see fit, but having a carpet setting that isn’t for all types of carpet is confusing. Actually, it sounds more complicated than it is. Nevertheless, the power and performance is great, with the attachments well designed for getting into awkward places where pet and human hair tends to get. More straightforward carpet and hard floor vacuuming duties are a cinch though, with the lightweight and agile design making the Hoover H-Upright 300 Pets a joy to use. The wheels are great too and, thankfully, don't mark if you’ve got a prized wood floor.It converts into its various functions easily and feels very well built. The main unit is easy to lift away from the floor head with the help of your foot, and the 2m extension hose isn’t as tight and cumbersome as I’ve found on some other rivals, particularly the Dyson Ball Animal. The vacuum can operate in a number of modes. There’s the basic upright mode, with the floor head, vacuum unit, wand and handle all connected together. Alternatively, each element can be detached and used interchangeably. The floor head has anti-tangle tech, which stops the brush roller getting clogged up with long hair. During testing I found no hair tangles on the floor head, even after cleaning around the vanity stations of long-haired family members. There’s a tendency for vacuum cleaner manufacturers to make ever more expensive and complicated cleaners. The Hoover H-Upright 300 offers a tonic to that formula: it’s a cheaper, lighter upright cleaner that gets all of the basics right.

If you’re looking for a workhorse of a vacuum cleaner then a corded upright like the Hoover HL5 ought to be an attractive option, as long as it can perform the cleaning jobs it’s supposed to. To find out, I put it through our usual suite of tests. It’s a reasonably solid job for the price but the slightly more expensive Dyson Small Ball Allergy did a better job. Although it suffered the same ploughing problems with larger particles on hard floor, it was near perfect when it came to carpet, and was better with flour on all surfaces. If you have a lot of hard floor, the Shark DuoClean with Lift-Away NV702UK has both a brush and a soft roller in its floor head, so can capture anything from hard floor, even Cheerios. In general use I found the Hoover manoeuvrable and able to reach reasonably far under low furniture, and front-mounted LED lighting helps you see where problem areas lurk, even if they’re well shaded. The only complaint I have is the control buttons are down on the main unit, which left me having to reach down awkwardly to switch between carpet and hard floor modes and to turn the vacuum on or off.My only minor gripe thus far is with the anodised finished on the aluminium tube, which forms the upright that joins the handle to the machine. It’s been so designed to let you use the attachments for specific cleaning duties but suffers as a result. This has already got some scratches on it, just from daily use, so how this will look in time might take the otherwise solid shine off this vacuum. That’s a minor cosmetic point though. To use the hose and attachments, you have to disconnect the hose from the floor head. This is easily unclipped and then also needs to be freed from a retaining clip. Attachments connect on to the end of the hose or, if you want extra reach, you can release the handle from the main body and use it as an extension. It isn’t a particularly long wand, although I still had just enough reach to get to the top of the rafters in my test lab.

On the brush bar is a manual slider: keep it closed for more suction on hard floors; or open to make the cleaner easier to push on carpet. The collection bin can hold 1.4L of dust and debris. That’s slightly less than the 1.8L of the Dyson Ball Animal but still beats the capacity of most cordless models, including the Shark ICZ300UKT cordless upright, which only holds 0.6 litres. The collection bin has a generous 1.5-litre capacity and is easily released from the chassis for emptying. It also contains the filters, which are washable in water and rated to the HEPA H13 standard.While the Hoover H-Upright 300 Pets might appear to be just another vacuum cleaner with a power cable I think Hoover has done a great job with this model. It takes mere seconds to pull out of the box, something helped by its weight of just 5.2kg. Most of it has been put together for you, so after scrutinizing the manual for a couple more seconds the design is suitably simple that you can be powering up in about, well, two minutes.