My 20 year old Hoover Spirit canister was getting tired and was ready for replacement. With the Spirit being such an excellent machine I thought the next choice of another Hoover was a no brainer. I am overall quite disappointed with this machine that we have had now for about 2 years.

Cleaning Power:
This is the one bright spot and really what a vacuum should do for you. This vacuum does a good job of cleaning on carpets. I found in this one area the WindTunnel did better then my old Spirit. With 12 amps of power it generates a good amount of suction. The dirt finder lights on the unit are very handy to let you know if you really got all the dirt. The light stays red while there is dirt and then turn green when it is clean. One annoyance is you can tell where the belt is in this machine because off center in the front inlet you will find a dirty path that you need to go over a second time with another section of the inlet.

Noise:
This has to be the loudest appliance I have ever heard for indoor use. There is no reason a vacuum has to be this loud to do it job. I am confident that if I am down on the ground getting corners and near this machine it is damaging my hearing. I tell other people that it is only slightly quieter then our lawn mower.

Operation:
This machine is easy to operate in wide open areas where there are little obstacles. My experiences then went down hill from there. Some of my annoyances come from the fact that this is an upright and I never had some of these problems with my canister.

My first annoyances is with our lighter weight carpet such as that on our 3 season porch this machine manages to pick up and eat the carpet with the front power rollers. This makes vacuuming this room almost impossible. My next annoyance is with any area rugs covering areas like hard wood floor this machines loves to eat the carpet especially on the edges and corners. Once again my Spirit would never do this.

On the stairs I use to just simply take the power attachment and just go over the stairs with the old Spirit. I can do that with this unit but I use to lift ~5 lbs now I have the whole weight of this heavy machine. The other choice is to use the hose which I simply find to be too short. There are connector hoses to extend the range but they are only held together with pressure and tend to separate on me with use.

The cord is a mixed bag. My old vacuum use to be self retracting cord and I never ran it over. With this vacuum you need to manually tie up the cord which means you need to keep a hand on it while you are operating the vacuum which is annoying since I have run it over once or twice by mistake and I see that the hungry power brushes took a bite out of the cord insulation. Hoover did come up with a good tab that you fold up to tie the power cord on the machine and then just twist down to pull off all the cord. There is a fair amount of cord included so I can cover a pretty good area before having to unplug and start up from the next spot.

Bag changing is not too bad. You just pull up a big door and pull out the bag. Inserting the new bag requires you to reach behind the bag and pull it over the air inlet (a little awkward to do), and then just close the door. Once again this was even easier on my old Spirit. The bags hold about as much as my old Spirit did. Considering we have a German Shepherd dog I think they last a fair amount of time between changes.

Build Quality:
Some things about this machine are built well but there are several things that I know are going to give trouble. For example the vacuum hose is very flimsy compared to that on my old Spirit unit. There is a cap covering the end of the handle and that annoyingly pops our during use. The attachments are made out of the thinnest grade plastic they could have found and I am not sure how long they are going to hold up for.

Mechanically the motor and the power rollers are still working as well as day 1 when we got this machine. Having a dog this machine gets a good amount of use keeping up with the fur. Every now and then I sit down and pull the strings from the carpets out of the power rollers that the machine ate.

Conclusion:
Given the chance to do this over again I would never select this machine. I find the operation of this machine annoying and the loud noise to be irritating. I am confident that for similar money we can find a better vacuum next time.


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 189