Boy did I get a shock when the Vax arrived! We bought this to save our carpets from the horror of having 2 small children wetting themselves on it, squishing blueberries into it and endlessly trampling their dirty shoes all over it. However the first thing I thought when I opened it was sadly not how great my carpets would look, but how blooming massive the thing was...

The Vax is designed to actually clean your carpets, not just suck up the dry dirt from the top of them. The idea is that it was also suck up liquids (even disgusting things like small boy pee) from your carpets. You fill it up with carpet cleaning solution that you can get easily from somweher like B&Q or Homebase for around £20, and then use it like a normal Hoover, while watching the water in the machine get darker and darker as it draws up all the collected filth which a normal Hoover leaves behind.

The Vax is definitely an investment buy, the machine itself is expensive and you do need to keep buying the carpet cleaning solution for it to work properly. However, if you are regularly paying someone to come to your house and clean your carpets or you are hiring one from Homebase etc yourself then in less than a year we did feel we were starting to save money.

The downside is that it is massive! We don't have much downstairs storage so it has to be kept in the garage. It is also a nightmare to drag up and down the stairs. It weighs over 10 kilos when empty, on top of which you are adding 4.5 kilos of cleaning solution. Luckily it comes with an 8 meter cable which means you can do the stairs (which the stair tools it comes with) without need to hold it half way up the stairs.

It also comes with an upholstery toll so if you have a fabric sofa you can also use it to keep it clean which is very useful.