At a glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Simple controls
- Flexible to fit under furniture
- Anti-hair wrap
- Easy to maintain
Cons
- Heavy to use as a handheld
- Single battery
- Needs wall mounting for storage
Our Verdict
The Vax HomePro Pet-Design Vacuum Cleaner is a good all-rounder: there are multiple attachments for everything from upholstery to stairs, simple controls, an illuminated floorhead with bumpers to protect furniture and a bin that doesn’t require you to tease away messy pet hair clogs with your fingers. Yet as beautifully designed as it is, it’s quite heavy as a handheld. In addition, the turbo mode eats into runtime, suggesting that it might be worth investing in another battery if you prefer big cleans over little-and-often.
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Appliances that clean come with the unfortunate caveat that they themselves need cleaning to keep doing the job properly. Historically, even the best vacuum cleaners have been a chore to maintain, from bin clogs to floorhead brushes bound in hair.
Vax’s HomePro Pet-Design Vacuum Cleaner does almost everything possible to combat lots of maintenance, swapping traditional brushes for a chunky brush roll that resists hair wrap, and a bin with a lever that ejects the contents completely.
This, plus attachments for every area of your home, a flexible tube to dip low under furniture, and the ability to self-stand rather than topple when you let go, make it a versatile machine for the easy and awkward jobs alike.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Design and Build
- Bendable wand
- Simple controls
- Easy-empty bin
The Vax HomePro’s design makes it a problem-solver of a vacuum cleaner. For example, if your issue is cleaning underneath furniture, its main tube features a clever slide up/down section that allows it to flex so it can bend 90 degrees, before transforming back into a stick that’s stable enough to self-stand for short periods.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Similarly, if your problem is the ick resulting from having to poke your fingers into a clog of hair and debris in the vacuum’s bin, there’s no need for that here.
The Vax HomePro’s design makes it a problem-solver of a vacuum cleaner
One button depresses to empty the 700ml bin without having to detach it from the motor, while a sliding section removes lingering mess. The filter above pops out for washing, so the bin doesn’t have to be removed for access.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Its floorhead is similarly well-designed, with lights to help you to spot dirt, a brush roll with fins and fibres to prevent hair wrapping round, and a bumper on the outside to stop scratches along skirting and furniture legs.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
For those who dislike complicated controls, they’re minimal here: one button for on/off, one for turbo mode, and a bar that ticks down to show you how much battery is left. The 4.0Ah battery itself detaches for charging with a small charger that’s separate from the wall mount, meaning there’s no need to have a plug socket available nearby.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
But the vacuum does need to be wall mounted. While self-standing is a neat trick for pauses between cleaning, it can’t be stored that way. Overall, the HomePro weighs 3.5kg, with most of this concentrated at the top, so it’d be easy to knock it over while being stored. Fortunately, it doesn’t take up too much wall space, as it measures H116 x W22 x D25cm.
Performance and Features
- Comfortable to use
- Large floorhead
- Battery life could be better
Some of the easiest products to use are the ones where the experience has been carefully considered, and this is predominantly true for the HomePro Pet-Design. It’s packed with features to make vacuuming and maintaining it fuss-free. For instance, the control panel has big buttons and a clear guide to the power remaining: ideal for those with a visual impairment or anyone who struggles to read screens in bright light.
We also liked that you can flick it on and off with a thumb while holding the handle. Turbo requires more reach, meaning that you have to consciously choose the high power mode rather than catch it by accident. Plus, there’s no need to select a floor type.
Overall, it’s comfy to push around: there’s a generously sized handle, and even in turbo mode on carpet, not so much suction that the floorhead becomes stuck.
Each attachment is labelled – so you remember what it’s for when the instructions inevitably go missing – and it’s simple to click each one on and off. A bag for tool storage is included.
The main tube’s flexible wand is especially smart: while some rivals’ tubes are jointed to enable this, all the HomePro requires is the cover to slide up to release it and back down again to engage. We found it easy to steer around, although we noted that while it swivelled easily from side to side, too much of an angle will cause the floorhead to lift up slightly. The floorhead itself is also a little larger than some – while this makes short work of big areas of flooring, it’s trickier to manoeuvre around table and chair legs.
We tested the Vax HomePro Pet-Design Vacuum Cleaner on both hard and soft flooring, using flour to represent fine dust, and oats as larger debris. On the hard floor, both were sucked up easily on standard mode, with a few passes required for complete pick-up, but the majority was removed in one pass.
On mid-pile carpet, the standard mode was sufficient for flour pick-up but we needed turbo to completely vacuum up the oats as standard tended to drop them slightly on the back stroke. We noted some flour stuck to the brush fibres, but there was no hair wrapped around it from our pet-owning household, and all the fur was in the bin.
We also tried the pet hair tool and motorised pet hair tool on an upholstered sofa. We found the pet hair tool effective but it can be heavy on the suction and felt that this was better for tough jobs on firmer surfaces. The motorised pet tool produced better results, as not only did it swivel, it lifted pet hair well. That said, we found the HomePro quite weighty to use as a handheld for more than a few minutes.
Our main concern was battery life. While the HomePro’s makers state a runtime of 45 minutes, this is based on standard mode using a non-motorised tool. Realistically, if you’re making use of the floorhead and bursts of turbo power, you can trim that down to more like 25 minutes. The battery is removable, however, and you can buy a spare from Vax for £79.99. But this does bump up the vacuum’s price significantly.
One final aspect to note is how straightforward it is to keep the vacuum clean. The brush roll is released with a twist, making it easy to clear any mess inside, while the bin emptying ejected the contents efficiently.
Price and Availability
Vax’s HomePro Pet-Design is widely available in the UK. Although it has an RRP of £319, it’s available from a number of retailers for £199. See it at this price from Amazon, Currys and Vax. If you buy from Vax, it comes with an additional toolkit that Vax says is worth £50. Essentially, you’ll get more attachments than if you buy from Amazon.
At this price, it’s a really good value option, with a feature set you’d expect on a much pricier model. But if it’s not the right vacuum for you, have a look at our round-up of the best vacuum cleaners we’ve tested for our top recommendations.
Should you buy the Vax HomePro Pet-Design?
While it’s not a perfect package, the Vax HomePro Pet-Design gets a lot of things right: it’s easy to use, simple to maintain and as versatile as they come. At this price point, you’d be hard pushed to find a machine that offers a whole house clean, moving easily between floors, furniture, soft furnishings, stairs and pet beds.
The only real issue may be the battery. By not providing a second, cleaning horizons are slightly limited and you may have to use its turbo mode sparingly, or factor in recharging time. For weekend vacuumers, a spare may be a wise addition to this otherwise well-equipped machine.
