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- Clever lift out canister
- Powerful suction
- Excellent anti-hair wrap head
- Cumbersome in upright mode
- Edge coverage is lacking on larger motorised head
Corded upright vacuum cleaners aren’t always as popular as their cordless counterparts, but if you’ve got a big house or enough pets and children to generate a fair amount of mess, they’re often the superior option. The best upright vacuum cleaners offer plenty of suction and vacuuming prowess, while also offering additional attachments allowing you to use them in more awkward spaces.
There are six models in Vac’s LiftOut range, with this being the most expensive. It comes packed with plenty of features, but how does it fare when lined up against other options? I tested it to find out.
VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design Corded Upright Vacuum Cleaner: What do you get for the money?
As I mentioned above, the Multi Pet-Design Corded Upright Vacuum Cleaner is the most expensive vacuum in VAX’s LiftOut range. At £270, it’s £50 more expensive than the range’s entry-level model. Yet even so, it’s almost half the price of one of its big-name rivals, the Dyson Ball Animal Complete, which will set you back a cool £430. It’s also cheaper than the brand’s cordless HomePro Detect Pet-Design (£370): a vacuum I reviewed recently.
In any case, there’s a good chance you might find it discounted on VAX’s online store during peak deals periods: at the time of writing, some of the cheaper models are already on offer.
VAX vacuum cleaners come with a fair amount of accessories and the LiftOut is no exception. In the box you’ll get the main vacuum cleaner with an all-surfaces motorised head. There’s also a turbine pet tool, pet hair remover tool, stair tool and a crevice tool attachment. This is an awful lot of accessories to contend with, but you can attach the crevice tool and another tool of your choosing to the main body of the vacuum when you’re not using them, which makes it far easier to have what you need with you as you move about the house. Most importantly for me, as someone with long hair and a couple of foster cats in the house, the heads have an anti-hair wrap design.
At the time of testing, there was also a free home and car kit included (normally worth £40), with this containing a fine dusting brush, deep debris tool, flexible crevice tool, a spare filter and an accessory bag.
What’s it like to use?
First things first, this is a bit of a beast of a vacuum, weighing in at 6.63kg (the lightest model in the range, the basic LiftOut, is 6.11kg). Still, this is lighter than the aforementioned Dyson Ball Animal (7.3kg) and comparable to the cordless Shark ICZ300UKT (6.2kg). However, this is where its versatile “Lift Out” design comes in handy: you’re able to remove the body of the canister from its floor head base for ease of manoeuvrability in more awkward areas.
This can stand upright on the floor or be carried about and it’s easy to lift up the stairs. You’ve also got a variety of options here as you can attach any of the heads directly to the handle and hose, or you can add in the pole to extend its reach to 14.5m, which is ideal for vacuuming on top of bookcases and other tall objects.
VAX has done a good job of catering to a variety of cleaning situations here. My only slight bugbear was that the placement of the cord and its impressive length (11.5m) means that, if you’re not careful, it can be easy to run it over while you’re vacuuming.
It’s all very simple to put together. The machine comes with a motorised head attached and you simply clip the hose to the back of the vacuum before attaching it to the handle and long pole. While you’re using the vacuum in upright mode, the pole slots into the back of the main body and the hose clips to it. It sounds fiddly but it’s really not, and I found everything slotted into place neatly.
The vacuum turns on/off via a button located on the top of the main body, while a separate button activates the brush roller (this also has an automatic shutoff if the vacuum is left in one place for an extended period of time, or lifted off the floor). There’s also a simple slider on the handle that increases or decreases suction.
When in upright mode, you’ll notice that you have to push the VAX a little harder compared to some lighter rivals. But once it’s on the move, the head moves easily over both carpet and hard floor, and the LEDs on the front of the floor head make it easy to see dust and debris – they’re not quite as far reaching as the lights you’ll get on the top of the range Dyson V16, for example, but I found them more than adequate.
With a 2l capacity, the bin of the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design should impress, and makes it a good option for larger homes. This is separated into two sections and, once removed from the body of the vacuum, is very easy to empty. The filters were also easy to clean and replace.
How well does it clean?
To ensure fair results, we conduct the same tests for all our vacuum cleaner reviews, determining how well the vac picks up various substances. I tested the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design with Cheerios, flour and pet hair on both hardwood and carpet, measuring how much the vacuum collected from a single pass.
Results were impressive with the Cheerios, which can often be an issue for a motorised head not designed to pick up large particles. The LiftOut Multi Pet-Design picked up 24g out of 26g on carpet and 25g on hard flooring. Pickup in our flour test was also impressive, with the vacuum collecting 48g out of 50g on both surfaces. Pet hair wasn’t quite as easy: the vacuum picked up 3g out of 5g on both hard floor and carpet. However, this was quite curly hair and, by lifting the vacuum up ever so slightly, it was able to collect the full 5g by sheer suction strength alone. I should also point out that all these tests were conducted with the standard motorised head. When it came to pet hair, the vacuum’s Turbine Pet Tool proved more capable – though there is smaller than the standard motorised head, so you’re sacrificing some coverage.
Speaking of suction, the VAX’s suction test gave a result of 25kPa, matching the Dyson V8 Cyclone. This might be a bit of a lowball result too: because of the design of the vacuum, it wasn’t possible to get a 100% tight seal with the suction gauge.
In real-world cleaning the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design was impressive too. The motorised head was a joy to use when dealing with both human and cat hair alike. The brushes are quite short, but I really didn’t find this an issue as the anti-hair wrap is excellent and the suction power does a great job of extracting debris from carpets and hard flooring alike. There is one small drawback here though: I found the vacuum a little lacking in side suction, and the larger motorised head can’t get as close to the edges of rooms as some rivals, such as the Dyson PencilVac. You’re going to want to dig out the excellent crevice tool for these jobs, which has a nice rubber and optional bristles.
Both the turbine pet tool and pet hair remover tool worked very well on pet hair, and both come into their own particularly well on upholstery. The pet hair remover tool is the same one that comes with the VAX HomePro Detect Pet-Design Cordless vacuum cleaner that I previously tested and I enjoyed using it just as much this time round. The standard kit also includes a stair tool. It does a decent job, but I have to admit that I generally just use the standard motorised head on my stairs, along with the crevice tool to get into any corners.
Should you buy the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design Corded Upright vacuum cleaner?
As someone who has traditionally veered towards cylinder and, in more recent years, cordless vacuum cleaners, I wasn’t sure if I’d find the VAX LiftOut Multi Pet-Design just too off-putting due to its sheer size. And yes, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a big machine but, in use, it glides around well and the lift out section makes it versatile and easy to manoeuvre.
I was particularly impressed with the real world results on both pet and human hair thanks to the excellent anti-hair wrap head and I thought the whole vacuum cleaner was well designed and neatly thought out. It’s not the cheapest option on the market but, if you don’t need all the features of this top of the range model, there are cheaper options available, and you might also be able to pick one up at a discount depending on when you buy.
