Hoover Upright Vacuum Cleaner, Red - Upright 300

Product Information

If yours is a home with lots of carpet or has a 50/50 type of split between that and hard flooring, and you share your space with small or large pets, it’s a yes. This is a solidly built and good looking upright that’s thoughtfully designed for ease of use and convenience. Both I and the cats would have preferred a little less noise in action ideally, but it’s a value for money choice for all fans of upright vacuums and those looking for the best vacuum cleaner for pet hair. About this review, and our reviewer 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. 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. First, I started with the carpet test, sprinkling a teaspoon of flour onto the floor. Giving the H-Upright 300 a single sweep through the mess, with the head set to carpet mode, I found that it left a trace of the mess behind. 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.

I was particularly fond of the collection bin on this model. It releases easily and emptying it is a simple job: a latch opens the door at the bottom and most dirt and dust simply drops out.Where it can’t compete is against the battery power of the Shark cordless upright. This has much stronger suction in its most powerful setting. The design is eye-catching, thanks mainly to some blue anodised surfaces on the tubing and a blend of blue and grey plastic on the main body. Build quality is also very respectable too, with chunky plastic used on most of the heavy duty components. The hoses look to be respectable too, although how they’ll fare over time is always hard to predict when you’ve only been using a machine for a few weeks. The Hoover is reasonably light for a corded model, weighing just 4.94kg. This is lighter than its similarly priced competitors, with the Shark DuoClean with Lift-Away NV702UK weighing 5.25kg and the Dyson Small Ball Allergy a hefty 6.9kg. It’s easier to carry around but isn’t small, standing at over a metre tall (1,147 x 300 x 320mm). The mains cord is 8.1m long and there’s a built-in hose for connecting the attachments to, which stretches to 2m. In front of the power button there’s another that lets you engage or disengage the brush in the cleaning head. This can be used in conjunction with the white slider switch on the top of the cleaning head, which is marked as Carpet one way and Hard Floor the other. Simply slide it across to change the cleaning mode, and disengage the spinning brushes if you’re cleaning something like a laminate floor. Initially I’d tend to forget to do this, but practice makes perfect. I also struggled with moving the vacuum from hard floor onto rugs or door mats. The front of the device is quite low to the ground and it struggled with even small changes in elevation, crumpling and pushing away the rug rather than climbing up the edge.

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. READ NEXT: These are the best robot vacuum cleaners to buy today Hoover H-Upright 300 review: Should I buy it?However, in our other tests it performed exceptionally well, proving itself exemplary at carpet cleaning and gathering smaller particles from hard floor. Hoover could have been slightly more generous with the attachments, and more easily accessible controls would be high on my wishlist of improvements. However, it’s good value for money for what you get. 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. 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. 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.