REVIEW | A cordless Vacuum Cleaner With an Unlimited Run Time

One of the first things we did when we moved into our current house was to rush out and buy a vacuum cleaner.

One of the NEXT things we did when we moved into our current house was to sell that vacuum cleaner on Gumtree, and rush out and buy a cordless one, instead.

See, we hadn’t really needed a vacuum cleaner in our previous home. It was a tiny little two-bedroom, with laminate floors throughout, and it only took a few minutes to whizz around it with a dustpan and brush and sweep the floors: job done.

Then we moved to a four-bed with a mixture of wood floors and carpets. It was pretty obvious that the good ol’ dustpan and brush combo just wasn’t going to cut it any more, so we bought a vacuum cleaner instead. (And a carpet cleaner, to allow us to wash the inevitable spillages out of the cream carpets. Let’s just say that was a pretty sound investment…)

What we hadn’t considered, though, was the fact that our new house had three floors – and we’d have to lug that heavy vacuum cleaner up two flights of stairs, AND constantly keep bending down to plug it into one socket, then change it to another one, and rinse and repeat. Yeah, that got pretty old, pretty quick.

So, as I said, we got rid of that vacuum and bought ourselves a shiny new cordless one, which totally changed my life. No more plugging and unplugging as I went around the house! No more heavy lifting! It seemed perfect!

It, er, wasn’t.

Well, I mean, it WAS, really. I have no bad things to say about that vacuum (Mostly because I’m worried it’ll hear me, and its feelings will be hurt…), and it’s served us well in the time we’ve owned it. There was one problem, though: it has a really short battery life. Like many others of its ilk, our vacuum is lightweight and cordless purely because it has a battery which only allows us to run it for about 10-15 minutes at a time, after which it just lies down on the job, basically, and has to go back to its base to, quite literally, recharge its batteries. Which takes, oooh, FOREVER, basically.

OK, I think it’s about 30 minutes. That feels like forever when you’re in the middle of a big clean-up, though, and are being forced to clean your floors in 10 minute bursts, with 30 minute rest breaks in between. Luckily we also have a robot vacuum cleaner which cleans the first floor of the house for us: I’ve gotten pretty lazy about lugging it upstairs every time I want to clean the next two floors, though, so I normally just use the cordless one upstairs. On a normal day, it’s just about do-able to clean the entire house in 10 minutes. Over the last year or so, though, we’ve done a ton of DIY – from replacing our entire kitchen and downstairs flooring, to decorating the nursery, changing the floor in the bedroom and now, at the time of writing, working on a garden project which has seriously got me wondering if I am, in fact, The Time Traveller’s Wife, because I’ll regularly walk into the livingroom, and find all of Terry’s clothes in a heap on the floor:

Er, I should stress here that Terry doesn’t garden naked or anything like that: he just changes into his “work clothes” in the living room, and then back out of them again in the same place – depositing droplets of mud, paint, and God knows what else, as he goes. So, I use the vacuum cleaner A LOT, is what I’m trying to say – and I normally need to use it for more than 10 minutes at a time. So when the people at Bosch got in touch to say they’d just launched a new cordless vacuum cleaner which had an unlimited run-time, and did I want to try it… well, you can see from the photos what my response was to THAT.

The vacuum cleaner in question is the Bosch Unlimited, and I sense your scepticism about the whole “unlimited run time” thing. Don’t worry, I felt exactly the same, but here’s how it works:

The cleaner comes with two batteries.

Each battery lasts for around 60 minutes – which is, in itself, pretty impressive for a cordless vac, really. Here’s the best bit, though:

Each of those batteries only takes 40 minutes to charge.

So, you use one battery while you’re charging the other, basically, and by the time the first battery runs out, the second one will already be charged… so you just swap them around, and off you go again. In this manner, you could literally clean FOREVER. And some days? Some days I feel like I literally DO, folks, not even joking.

The battery life alone would’ve sold this to me, but this has a few other cool features, namely:

01. It looks a bit like a Storm Trooper, in vacuum cleaner form. (Or mine does, anyway: it also comes in black (The DARTH VADER of vacuums) and silver (Er, totally run out of Star Wars references, here, sorry.).

02.  It’s really quiet – much more so than our existing vacuum – which means I can use it when Max is sleeping, without worrying that I’m going to wake him.

03. It has a turbo mode, for more intense cleaning, which I find really useful for the thick rugs we have upstairs.

04. When you pull the trigger to switch it on, it just stays on, without you having to hold the trigger down all the time. This sounds like – and, indeed, IS – such a little thing, but sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference, isn’t it?

05. It’s slim enough to easily get underneath the furniture:

06. It has a brush attachment, which is useful for cleaning things like blinds, etc:

07. And a little something I think of as ‘The Long, Bendy One’ which you can use to get into awkward spots, like down the back of the couch, for instance:

Taking all of this into account, I knew I was going to love it – Bosh say their products offer uncompromising quality and technical perfection, and, having tried this one, I’d have to agree. What I didn’t anticipate, however, was Terry’s excitement when he opened up the box and realised the battery for this also works with a range of Bosch power tools.

“Er, do you HAVE any Bosch power tools?” I asked confused.

“Not YET,” came the answer. “But, you know, it would be a shame not to use this battery pack on other things, too, wouldn’t it?”

Guys, I have a feeling there’s some more DIY in my near future. HOLD ME.

(You can buy the new Bosch Unlimited Vacuum at http://www.bosch-home.co.uk/unlimited-vacuum, with prices from £389.99.)

[This post is sponsored by Bosch]