Hoover Freedom 2in1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner, FD22L, Handheld, Above Floor Cleaning, Lightweight - Blue

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Although this happened less frequently with the Hoover than on the Vax, it was often enough to suggest that this cleaner is far from pet-friendly. The low suction power and lethargic brush bar didn’t really stand much of a chance with pet hair embedded into a nylon test carpet. The results were very poor.

See also: Best Halogen Oven 2018: The 6 BEST Halogen Cookers. Hoover FD22L Freedom Lite review: Design and attachments I’m not sure the cleaning results are worth the pain, either. Suction appears to be a little better than the SlimVac, but when spread across the larger floor-head it’s still rather asthmatic. This isn’t so much of an issue when you’re using the tube and floor-head to support the cleaner. Lifting it up to clean anything above the floor, or even moving from room to room, does require quite a feat of wrist strength. Getting those high cobwebs with the extension tube and tool attached is definitely a two-handed operation. The pistol grip at the rear of the cleaner with motor, battery and bin in front give the Freedom a very front-heavy design. The day was saved to an extent by the crevice tool and a good dual-purpose upholstery and cleaning brush. Both are a decent size, and with the airflow condensed into a smaller area, both provide reasonable suction.This is a good few minutes shy of the similar Vax SlimVac or, indeed, Hoover’s own claimed run-time. However, there’s certainly a little more suction power on offer than the Vax – and a more efficient floor-head – so we’re happy to lose that 4 minutes. With the floor-head attached directly to the body, it is possible to leap up the stairs gazelle-like without fear of coming a cropper on a trailing cable. The FD22L comes with only two attachments. The standard vacuum brush head and an accompanying tool. There are no specials tools for pet hair, upholstery cleaning or large/small dusters. It took about a nano-second after getting the Hoover Freedom out of the box to realise that the main cleaner is all but identical to arch-rival Vax’s SlimVac Total Home. A couple of different mouldings and slightly different colour, but essentially the same item straight out of the same Far East factory.

Unfortunately, the combination of limited cleaning ability and our coarse stair carpet with embedded pet hair was a challenge too far for the Freedom, and its struggled to clean efficiently. The tool complement is complete with an extension tube and a basic, but again very serviceable, crevice tool. It’s fairly long, suitably narrow and quite robust. That said, the tool clips are positioned on the cleaner body rather than on the tools, which makes dismantling awkward.On the plus side, the floor-head, and particularly the detail tools, are better designed. The floor-head has more bite and pulls dust and debris from the carpet better, although our carpet test still showed it wasn’t great. Using the upholstery tools on the stairs produced a much better result, albeit taking a while longer than with the larger floor-head. The action of agitating the tool against the carpet shifts a fair bit of debris – but again, you need some arm strength to do it. In either hand, the one thing we can guarantee after 20+ minutes of cleaning is wrist-ache and a few areas of soreness where plastic has been digging into your hand.