Henry Quick review: More than just a friendly face

The Henry Quick is the latest in a long line of Henry vacuuming products, which have become household names thanks to their affordable quality and quirky styling. The standard Henry vacuum cleaner is a British manufacturing success story: a simple, easy to use product, made from easily repairable parts, with a smiley-faced design that looks like a squashed post box in a bowler hat.

However, while the standard Henry and its various multicoloured spin-offs still sell well, manufacturer Numatic must have been casting furtive sideways glances at the growth of the cordless stick vacuum market. The Henry Quick is the result of this flirtation.

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Henry Quick review: What do you get for the money?

Open the box and you’re faced with a set of parts that will be familiar to anyone who’s previously owned a cordless stick vacuum. The vacuum motor and collection bin are contained in a single unit, which also contains the handle and the operating controls. This part can be used as a standalone handheld vacuum weighing 1.88kg or attached to an extension wand and motorised floor head for cleaning the floor. The total weight is 3.2kg and the overall dimensions are 240 x 270 x 1,220mm (WDH).

It comes with two accessories: a crevice tool and a combination tool, the latter comprising an upholstery nozzle and a retractable dusting brush. There’s a removable battery and charging cable, which can be used to charge the battery, whether or not it’s attached to the vacuum. There’s also a simple wall bracket for screwing into a wall and hanging the Henry Quick out of the way, although you still have to plug in the power cable manually when you want to charge it.

The Henry Quick also comes with a handle extension, which also slightly shifts the angle you hold the vacuum at, although I have to admit that this had me flummoxed. I’m over 6ft tall and didn’t need it to comfortably operate the vacuum in floor mode. I also tested it on my daughter, who is significantly shorter than me and she preferred it without as well.

It does add a little more reach when vacuuming under things and, in handheld mode, adds a few centimetres to the length to the reach for cleaning high up places. However, with its awkward clasp fitting, you’ll probably find it easier to locate a step to stand on rather than dig out this accessory each time you want to dust a ceiling-mounted lamp shade or the top of a cupboard.

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There’s one way in which the Henry Quick is significantly different to most cordless stick vacuums and that’s the requirement to use disposable bags to collect all the dirt. Where most cordless sticks are bagless, here they’re neatly contained in the bag.

Henry’s bags have a capacity of only 1 litre, which is significantly smaller than the 1.6 litres you can squeeze into the bag of a Halo Capsule, the only other similar cordless stick we’ve reviewed. There are 26 bags included in the box, which Numatic suggests is a year’s supply, although that will clearly depend on how large and dirty your house is.

Bags come with pros and cons. On the one hand you’ve got consumable items that are thrown away with your rubbish and are arguably not environmentally friendly. Numatic says its bags are made from 65% recycled material and that it’s carbon offsetting their manufacture and use but you can’t get away from the fact that they’re partly plastic and will ultimately end up in landfill. By way of contrast, the Halo Capsule’s bags are made from paper and cardboard and claim to be fully compostable.

On the plus side, when emptying the vacuum, the bags keep the contents on the inside and you don’t get the plume of dust in your face that often accompanies the opening of a bagless system. The bag is also the first line of filtering, keeping the first layer of trapped particles inside and not on a filter that you have to wash later. Every time you put in a new bag it’s like putting a brand new filter in a bag-free vacuum.

Henry’s bags cost £13 for a pack of 10 (£1.30 each) from the My Henry website. This is comparable to buying Halo Capsule bags in small quantities, with the smallest Capsule pack costing £8 for six bags (£1.33 each). Buy in bulk, however, and you can get Capsule bags down to 58p each, with 52 available for £30.

As you might expect from a Henry, the Henry Quick I reviewed came in bright red, although the familiar smiley face is small and less central to the core design. If you want something more subdued, there’s a grey version that ditches the logo completely. It’s also available in “Hetty Pink”, with the smiley face gaining extra eyelashes.

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Henry Quick review: What’s it like to use?

The Henry Quick is simple and easy to use. The core controls are all on the top of the device, so are accessed using whichever hand isn’t holding the handle. There are three buttons: one to switch the device on and off; one to toggle Boost mode; and a third to switch off the brush bar and use suction only.

A bank of four LEDs around the top of the buttons lets you see how much battery power is left, and also lights up during charging so you can see how that’s progressing. There’s also a blockage light, which lights up when the bag needs to be changed.

Below this, there’s a sturdy red lever, which opens the door. Point the base of the unit down into your bin, slide the lever, and the bag simply slides out. A seal over the hole in the bag stops the contents falling out as it goes. It’s a cleaner emptying experience than on most cordless vacuums and its push-to-open mechanism is simpler to operate than the clip on the Halo Capsule.

One thing the Henry Quick doesn’t have is something to stop long hair from tangling the brush bar in the motor head and this proved a problem in my testing. Cleaning around the vanity stations of long-haired people in my house resulted in the near instantaneous winding of long hairs around the brush roller.

This isn’t a deal-breaker. The roller is easy to remove from the floor head for cleaning and it has ridges in the moulding that make it easy to get a pair of scissors between the roller and any trapped hair. However, it’s a regular maintenance job you don’t have to do with some Shark and Dyson vacuums.

You also don’t get any extra tools for cleaning hard floors. If your hard floor is delicate you can switch off the roller and just use the suction power of the vacuum but there’s no dedicated tool included.

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Henry Quick review: How well does it clean?

The Henry Quick’s suction power isn’t great. I measured it at only 11kPa on full power and 4kPa on low power, which is well behind rivals at a similar price from Halo, Dyson and Eufy, as you can see from the graph below.

Suction power normally indicates how good a vacuum is at cleaning, so I was worried about how it would perform in our cleaning tests. The Henry Quick, however, performed remarkably well.

The first cleaning test I performed was a spillage of Cheerios on short-pile carpet. In all honesty, I didn’t have high hopes for this test because I’d already examined the clearance at the front of the floor head and it didn’t appear to have enough space to let a Cheerio through. However, I performed this test twice, once on standard power and once with the suction boosted to max power.

At the standard suction setting the Henry Quick quickly mounted the first line of Cheerios, and proceeded to gobble a good amount: 22g of a 26g spill. Most of what wasn’t captured was mushed and spat out by the vigorous brush; nothing a few follow-up passes can’t handle. I repeated this test on maximum suction to see if it improved the scatter. It did, but only slightly, collecting 23g instead of 22g.

More disappointing was the performance on hard floor. Picking up Cheerios on such a surface is always a tricky test and the Henry Quick’s floor head just isn’t equipped for it, pushing the large cereal chunks ahead, only collecting 2g. There’s nothing wrong with the suction here, though. Swapping the floor head and extension wand for the combi tool, and getting down on my hands and knees, saw the cereal shoot into the vacuum.

When it comes to collecting spilled flour, the Henry Quick proved even more effective. On carpet, the spinning brush helped it gather a full 50g from a 50g spill on a single pass. That’s clearly a phenomenal performance. Repeating the test on hard floor was almost as impressive, gathering 49g of a 50g spill. I couldn’t see where the missing 1g went but it certainly didn’t appear to have stayed on the floor, which was largely spotless.

As you can see from the chart, the Henry Quick only falls behind the Dyson V8 thanks to its failure to clean the Cheerio spill on hard floor. Take that test out of the equation and it’s a Dyson-beater. It certainly outclassed the Halo Capsule and Eufy HomeVac S11 in these tests.

The Quick also has fantastic battery life, presumably due to its reduced reliance on raw suction power. During testing, the battery powered the vacuum for well over an hour on its standard setting, lasting nearly 69 minutes with the powered floor head engaged. It also has stamina with the power turned up to its highest setting, lasting 15mins 47secs.

Not only that, it’s quick to charge, taking around 2hrs 30mins to go from empty to full, where most cordless vacuums take three to four hours.

Henry Quick review: Should I buy it?

Numatic’s first foray into cordless stick vacuum cleaners is largely a success. Despite falling behind on suction, something in the balance of how the cleaner works makes it good at its job anyway, only falling down in testing when faced with our tricky Cheerio spillage on hard floor.

Its main selling point is the bag system, although this is a double-edged sword. While these make emptying a lot less messy than standard cordless models, they remain an ongoing cost to both you and the environment. I’d be more comfortable with the concept the bags contained zero plastic.

If you want the absolute best cleaning from your cordless, it’s hard to look beyond Dyson, with the Dyson V8 being the best option at around the price of the Henry Quick. The Dyson V12 Detect Slim and Dyson V15 Detect are even better options, but they are much more expensive.

For a cheaper alternative without the bag and more accessories included in the box, the Eufy HomeVac S11 Infinity is another effective alternative. It’s overflowing with optional extras, including a spare battery, and is cheaper than Henry Quick as well.

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