Remove the long nozzle and you have a handheld you can still use with the brush-head for stairs, but which is also perfect for the van with its crevice and upholstery tools. How? Well, you hold the motor and dust chamber, but attach a long, lightweight nozzle that then takes the carpet brush-head. You’d then have just one efficient machine you could use for the house and for the van or car. However, we realised that it would make a lot of sense for someone planning to replace their home vac. It looked a beast out of the BIG box so we were prepared to think it was overkill for a campervan. It also has a detachable 40-minute battery and you can buy spare batteries should you need extra Perfect for home and the campervan or car. It has the longest run time and the most suction of any we tried. Our top choice overall is the Vax Blade 4, and you can definitely justify the price if you’re looking for a new home vac too. It’s now been replaced by the more versatile Hoover H-Free, which can also be used as an upright for home.

This is the older Hoover Freedom making light work of our tester’s crumb-strewn VW. And there are lots of those in campervans and caravans. A long extendable hose can be useful, but we found that suction was pretty poor with these.Ī crevice tool lets you get into…crevices.A carpet tool – possibly with a motorised head (though this shortens run-time considerably).Crevice tool for getting into narrow places.Cyclonic and bag-free just make suction better and life easier. Lithium-ion batteries mean you don’t have to run the battery down completely before recharging. In the listing below, we’ve given the manufacturer’s claimed run-time and an indication of what our testers actually found. Sadly, we can’t recommend any of the super-cheap, low-powered models because the few we tried were useless – no suction and batteries flat within a few minutes. A good handheld vac, though, soon becomes indispensable in the house too – more than justifying the extra cost. It’s tempting to go for the cheapest, thinking it’s just for the van or the car.

Gtech my checklist