Polti Vaporetto Handy 25 Plus review – a reasonable all-rounder

The Polti Vaporetto Handy 25 Plus definitely lives up its name. Nice and compact with plenty of attachments, it certainly looks a handy addition to your other cleaning devices. Of course, looks aren’t everything with a steam cleaner and the cleaning will need to be top notch, especially considering the £70 price.

Design

The Handy 25 Plus certainly looks the part, with a slim profile despite the relatively hefty 4.6Kg weight before you pour water into the 0.7-litre tank. The included shoulder strap helps with transport, letting you walk about and clean, you can unclip it if you find it just gets in the way.

There are plenty of accessories included, with 4 different brushes, a scraping tool and a window squeegee handily stored in a plastic compartment under the cleaner itself. Unfortunately, the plastic attachments come across as quite cheap and poorly made and I imagine they wouldn’t last particularly long under stressful conditions.

The extension tubes, for instance, don’t click into each other particularly tightly, so when you’re cleaning, there’s a bit of wobble. Unfortunately, the hose is a little unruly and particularly stiff too, which meant I often found myself in a wrestling match in an effort to get it into the position I wanted it in.

The Handy is intended to be wheeled around during use, with a relatively lengthy 4m power cable to allow for this. Little wheels at the bottom provide a decent amount of movement but it doesn’t follow you about as smoothly as the best cylinder vacuums.

Cleaning performance

The Handy 25’s main forte is floor cleaning with the hose and steam mop attachment, yet it also cleans walls and other surfaces too. When cleaning tricky breakfast spills on our kitchen floor, I found it wasn’t exactly easy to lift up the stains. The floor-cleaning cloth isn’t held on particularly well, almost like it’s too big for the mop head itself. Obviously, this affected cleaning performance, as it tended to move about rather than deliverthe full force of my efforts to the floor.

On a couple of occasions, I found myself just taking the mop cloth off and using the brush instead, which produced better results. The floor was quite clean in the end, yet it took a considerable amount of time to get there. You’ll definitely be using up the majority of the, albeit quite impressive, 19 minute steaming time.

Surface and wall cleaning was better, though, yet I couldn’t shake the fact that there are better multi-purpose steam cleaners out there, for less as well. The Karcher SC1 for instance, has the same size floor mop attachment and cleans surfaces much easier and quicker.

Conclusion

The Polti Vaporetto Handy 25 Plus is a clever design, with its accessory storage and shoulder strap. It sits neatly between handheld cleaners and steam mops, able to take on both surface and floor cleaning. However, it’s trumped in terms of performance; while its surface and wall cleaning are pretty good, it doesn’t clean hard floors particularly well, largely due to the poorly fitting mop cloth and slightly wobbly extension tubes.

At £70, you can get a better steam cleaner, for less. The Karcher SC1 is a great alternative, with a lower price and plenty of attachments. However, you’ll have to heft the Karcher about while cleaning floors, as it doesn’t have wheels or a shoulder strap. That leaves you to choose between convenience and cleaning power. For more options see our Best Steam Cleaners Guide. Buy Now from Amazon