One day, all cleaners will be like this (Electrolux Boss rechargeable upright Z570a)

Member Name: fjpickett

Product:	Electrolux Boss rechargeable upright Z570a
Date:	05/04/02 (2072 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cordless, cordless, cordless!

Disadvantages: Surprisingly few

I've always thought of myself as a cylinder man, me. When I was young (some time ago, although electricity was known about) we had a succession of upright Hoovers (was there any other sort?) that worked OK, but they made a racket and often smelled of burnt rubber when the drive band fried itself. What put me off, I think, was the promotional line about 'beating, sweeping and cleaning' which I translated as 'knocks the stuffing out of your carpet'. This is probably true of Kirby cleaners (see swinstan's review) but most modern machines are a bit gentler.

However, it seemed to me at the time that all you needed was lots of suck (I promise to try and avoid the more obvious double-entendres, but they may creep in) and the right sort of nozzle (fnaar, fnaar) and your carpet would be clean and still have some tuft left. Well, about 30 years and six or seven assorted cylinder and canister cleaners later, I have re-discovered the upright, and although there are still a few jobs that a cylinder cleaner does best (especially if you've got one that can blow), my floors are now cleaner than ever before.

To be fair, this would be the case whatever we had bought, as the last cylinder cleaner (a Sanyo SC-500) was a complete turkey, but I was thinking in terms of a Dyson or, to be a bit different, a Vax AVC1, which is a big beast that would probably suck up young children and pets if you weren't careful. Then I discovered that there were smaller and lighter machines that did much the same job (I know James Dyson will argue otherwise, but he's not in strong position at the moment, having just exported 800 jobs to Indonesia - will his prices come down? Don't hold your breath!) and I was on the point of buying an Electrolux Z410, which has a separate motor for the brush that overcomes my rubber-band phobia, and is light enough to carry upstairs without inducing a hernia in me or, more importantly, my girlfriend (I'm not a c
hauvinist - I just like to find her in one piece when I come home at night).

Then we found the Z570, which looks similar, but is cordless - i.e. it carries its power round with it, in the form of a rechargeable battery. Now this sounds laughable, especially to anyone who has used a Dustbuster, but the fact is that it works far better than anyone who wasn't an Electrolux salesman would imagine, and the freedom to carry the thing anywhere you want to use it and just switch it on has to be experienced to be appreciated. I know it sounds fearfully lazy to make a big fuss about plugging things in, but the hassle comes from trailing the wire behind you and trying not to wrap it round the furniture while you're scooping up the smaller bits of Lego and avoiding the cat, not to mention trying to clean the corner of the room that is just beyond your reach. Not having a cable is worth any amount of root cyclones and automatic brushbar adjustment, IMHO, but convincing people that it's possible is another matter.

This is the problem, of course. When cleaners have motors big enough to supplement your central heating and have nozzles that can cover your hearth-rug in one sweep, no-one's going to believe that something that runs from a 14V battery can do the same job. To be honest, I was doubtful myself, which is why we bought it from Argos, so at least we could get some idea of how it worked before committing it to some real dirt and rendering it unreturnable. In the event, we needn't have worried, and we got three binfuls of assorted cat hair, dust and fluff on the first day. The bin isn't very big, but even so...

So how does it do it? Careful design, mostly, and the slight reduction of scale that comes from using smaller motors. If you've got a recent cordless drill, you may be less surprised - I have an old Black and Decker mains drill (a big semi-industrial thing with a 550 Watt motor) and I have never used it since I boug
ht a £40 cordless hammer drill that can do everything it can, but with a lot more finesse.

Like the mains version, the cleaner has two motors, one for suction and one for the brush, which can be switched off for cleaning hard floors. The new Dyson uprights have this feature, but it's operated via a clutch mechanism that is a lot more complicated, as well as not being switchable from the handle.

The whole thing weighs about 3.5kg (8 lbs in old money) and is an absolute doddle to use. Time will tell how durable it is, and I suspect that the filter will need replacing once or twice a year to keep the performance up, but it gives very little away to the big, heavy cleaners in terms of cleaning ability, and is streets ahead of them in terms of convenience and ease of use.

If you buy one of these (and I recommend yoo doo) you might want to hang on to your old cleaner for odd jobs, as the cordless one is strictly for floors and doesn't have a hose. That's about the only limitation, though, and unless you live in a mansion (when you might need two) I can't imagine anyone wanting to use a cleaner with a cable again, unless they have to.

BTW, Dooyoo have got the wrong picture to illustrate this. Look in the Argos catalogue...

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