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Vax Air Cordless Lift Review: In Depth

The Good

  • Light
  • Easily manoeuvrable
  • Cable-free

The Bad

  • Not as powerful as some
4.5

We review the Vax Air Cordless Lift, a powerful cord-free vacuum cleaner that’s impressively versatile for cleaning every inch of your home, with zero stress.

The invention of the cable-free vacuum cleaner was, for anyone lumbered with doing the housework every week, a better invention than jet-powered rocket pants. Finally, we could hoover up our crud without tripping over wires and braining ourselves every few minutes.

Vax unleashed its cordless cleaner range last year and now a fresh set of vacuums have joined the family for 2015. One of the latest additions, the Air Cordless Lift, is a full-sized upright cleaner that’s surprisingly lightweight, but also powerful enough to clean the whole house no matter what kind of flooring you have.

The ‘cordless’ bit comes courtesy of two individual, detachable lithium batteries, which are reasonably chunky but clip with ease to the Vax’s frame. Each one powers the cleaner for around 25 minutes on a full charge,  and the fact that there’s two of the wee blighters means that even if you run out of charge mid-clean, you can just replace the dead battery with the other one and keep on going.

Thankfully there’s a power meter on both batteries, so you can check at a glance roughly how much time you have left. When the battery does finally die, you’ll need to pop it out and stick it on the bundled charger for around three hours to return it to full charge. The charger is a chunky, ugly thing, but it’s not an issue if you keep it tucked out of the way.

That lack of cables gives you the freedom to roam around even the roomiest of homes without constantly plugging the cleaner into different sockets. We loved how effortless the Air Lift was to steer around too, thanks to its responsive head – just twist the handle in a direction and the cleaner goes that way, making it easy to manoeuvre into tight gaps and around table legs. There’s even a bulb to light up those dark nooks, so you can tell if you’ve sucked up every last speck of ming.

Don’t worry if you’ve got loads of stairs either, as the Air Lift is light enough to lug around without breaking your back. However, it’s also possible to quickly detach the cylinder and carry it in your hand, using the separate hose to suck, which is ideal when doing the staircase and other tricky areas. You can even pull out the handle, which converts into a cleaning wand for getting into far-off corners and sucking crumbs out of your sofa.

The Air Lift handles carpet cleaning admirably, helped along by the spinning brushes which can be deactivated when you move onto tiled or wood flooring. We found that we occasionally had to double-sweep an area to get every last bit of crud, but there’s a boost mode to help when the cleaner struggles (which admittedly canes the battery a little harder).

As you’d expect, the Vax Air Cordless Lift is completely bagless and emptying it is pleasingly simple. Just push a button and the plastic container pops free, ready to be tapped out into your bin. There’s a filter to keep the innards from spurting back out, which seems to do the job nicely – and Vax recommends cleaning it at least once every week or two, to keep it working effectively.

The Vax Air Cordless Lift is a great all-round cleaner, as effortless to use as any tall-standing vacuum that we’ve handled. A satisfying combination of cable-free design, slick manoeuvrability and lightweight build means it’s a joy to handle around the whole house, taking the slog out of housework.

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