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- Powerful cleaning
- Beautifully designed with useful features
- Great manoeuvrability
- No anti-hair wrap technology
- Expensive for a corded vacuum
Cylinder vacuum cleaners are compact and easy to move around, and the Miele Guard L1 Cat & Dog Flex is no exception. It might be a corded vacuum, but it’s a joy to manoeuvre and extremely light and easy to carry from room to room.
That’s no surprise given the L1 Cat & Dog Flex’s pedigree, though: it sits at the top of the German company’s range of bagged cylinder vacuums and is priced at a steep £399. Let’s find out if it’s worth the price tag.
What do you get for the money?
At £399, the Miele L1 costs around the same as the Dyson V8 Cyclone and VAX HomePro Detect Pet-Design, which retail at £350 and £370 respectively. For a corded cylinder vacuum that’s a lot of money to pay, but the L1 provides plenty of reasons to justify its high price.
First up, the Miele is an elegant and beautifully designed machine. Clad in sleek, glossy black (it’s also available in a rainbow of other colours) with a small gold-trimmed control panel on its front, the Miele is compact and a wonderfully easy size to move around.
You can set suction levels using the foot buttons on the control panel – there are four of these, each indicated by its own LED symbol – and another foot-operated button to retract the long, integrated 8.5m mains cable.
Inside the box, you’ll find two main heads: a universal attachment that’s suitable for all surfaces, and the Miele “TurboTeQ” head that’s been specially designed for deep-cleaning carpets and pet hair. Note that, unlike many modern vacuums, this is not equipped with anti-hair wrap technology, so you’ll have to cut hair free from the rollers from time to time. There’s also a 2-in-1 upholstery and crevice tool that’s stored inside the main body of the vacuum, along with a dusting brush that’s cleverly built into the handle of the vacuum.
In addition, you get a hose, plus an adjustable telescopic wand and handle. The Miele uses the brand’s HyClean Pure bags, which cost £13.99 for four from the Miele website. Miele suggests each bag will last around three months each, although this will depend on the size of your house, how often you vacuum and how dirty your carpets get.
What is it like to use?
Weighing 6.6kg, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Miele is a bit of a chonk to haul around. But the beauty of a cylinder vacuum, as opposed to an upright, is that all the weight is in the unit, which you can simply pull around on its castors. And this Miele glides around beautifully, in all directions.
Setup is easy with the hose slotting into the back of the cylinder. You then attach the handle before adding the extension wand and chosen head. The filter and vacuum bag are already in place, although you’ll need to clean the filter periodically to keep things running smoothly.
Changing the vacuum bag is easy: simply lift up the cylinder lid and remove it from its slot then replace with a fresh one. The filter pulls out with a tab at its top and slots back in with a gentle push. The filter is designed to help neutralise odours with activated charcoal and, as you’re using bags, you’ll cut down hugely on any dust and debris flying about when you change a bag over.
In fact, Miele says that the filtration system achieves 99.99% dust retention, which is even better than HEPA standards. I certainly found that it did an efficient job of keeping dust contained, and it was as sparkling clean as when it first came out of its box after extensive vacuuming and testing.
The L1’s extension wand is, as the name suggests, extendable and can almost double in length, with 20 incremental clicks between the shortest and longest setting. This gives you plenty of reach for vacuuming into hard-to-reach places and the long 8.5m cable means you don’t have to keep plugging it in and unplugging it, either.
I also really liked the fact that you can slot the floorhead into the back of the cylinder and that the 2-in-1 tool is stored in the cylinder. This keeps the cleaning clutter to a minimum, and you have the added bonus of always having the right tool close at hand.
In fact, the only major negative here is the Guard L1’s lack of anti-hair wrap tech. This is becoming increasingly prevalent on other modern vacuums and means that you rarely, if ever, have to remove the brush bar for detangling. In fairness, you don’t have to do it that often with the L1, but it’s an unpleasant job that I’d rather not have to do at all.
How well does it clean?
We run the same tests on all the vacuum cleaners tested at Expert Reviews, so that we can build up an accurate picture of how different models perform in comparison with each other. And we always make sure that the tests are done straight out of the box before we use the vacuum around the house for more general cleaning.
The first thing we do is attach a vacuum meter and test out the suction power. In this test, the L1 maxed out at 24kPa, which pretty much matches the Dyson V8 Cyclone and VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design Corded Upright. This dropped to 18kPa, 13kPa and 8kPa as I lowered the power setting.
I was impressed by the Miele Guard L1’s performance when it came to picking up different substances. Cheerios are notoriously tricky for motorised heads to pick up as, even when lightly crushed, the particles are quite big. However, the Miele picked up an impressive 23g out of 26g on both carpet and hard flooring. It should be noted, though, that it did spit out a fair amount of debris from the side of the head on hard flooring.
It performed just as well with pet hair, collecting 4g out of 5g on both carpet and hard floor. And cleaning up flour also proved an easy cleaning task, the L1 collecting 49g out of 50g in a single pass. For the best performance, you do need to attach the TurboTeQ head, though; the universal head is best used only on delicate surfaces like my 100-year-old Persian rugs – it’s not quite as effective.
Elsewhere, the two-in-one upholstery and crevice tool made short work of pet hair on furniture and cushions. It is quite noisy, though.
Should you buy the Miele Guard L1 Cat & Dog Flex?
I’m pleased to say that my love of Miele vacuums remains unchanged after testing the Guard L1 Cat & Dog Flex. This is a super vacuum cleaner with plenty of oomph for cleaning even the trickiest debris. And if you’re a pet owner, you’ll love how easily and quickly it deals with hair on any surface. The only irritation is the lack of an anti-hair wrap head.
It is quite pricey for a corded cylinder vacuum, but remember with a Miele vacuum you’re not just paying for performance, you’re also paying for build quality and durability. Although the warranty is only two years, Miele says the L1 has been tested to last for at least 20 years (the Miele I inherited from my parents lasted a good 25 years), and if it lasts that long, it will have paid for itself many times over.
