Miele Blizzard CX1 Cat and Dog, Black, Bagless Cylinder Vacuum Cleaner, Corded, 11696410, Obsidian Black

Product Information

A lot of people who are replacing their Miele vacuums are usually disappointed to have to downgrade from a 1200w motor to a 900w motor. Won’t the suction be so much worse? So all vacuum cleaner makers had to comply, but it made them work harder on efficiency because they didn’t want to lose suction.

The CX1’s curved handle allows the hose to exit underneath and rotate. Both features are designed to reduce wrist strain. It’s fitted with a good-sized, pull-down dusting brush. It’s a neat design, but the integration into the handle does mean the brush can’t be used with the tubes for long-distance dusting. For that you’ll need to use either the crevice tool or the small upholstery brush, both of which are stored on the rear end of the cleaner’s body.

At full power over carpet, we recorded just over 70dB noise output, some 6dB less than the energy label suggests. The noise increases over hard floors, but this is still one supremely quiet vacuuming cleaner. Once again, the long tubes and lengthy handle come to the rescue. You can reach a fair way up a flight of stairs with the cleaner itself safely at the bottom. The 6.5m cable was just long enough to get the cleaner to the base of our stairs, but another metre or two here would have added greater overall range and allowed us to heft the CX1 up the stairs, cleaning as we went. Miele mainly makes bagged vacuums which is always a pain because it means you have to buy bags when you empty it. I would have to say yes, they’ve been tested for a 20-year lifespan and although they only have a 2-year guarantee you can’t argue with that testing.

It’s also almost 9kg which is heavy for a cylinder vacuum cleaner so lifting it upstairs could be more difficult, if you’re fit and healthy you’ll be fine, however. Concentrating the suction on full power proved very effective at drawing particles out of deep grooves in our very old parquet, even if it didn’t cover the ground with the alacrity of the Twister XL head. I can see the idea of a robot vacuum cleaner being a good one, but your money is better spent on a better quality vacuum cleaner in my opinion. This means you’ll find that new Miele vacuums are more powerful in terms of suction than older models despite the lower power with the vortex suction system.When approaching stairs, the Blizzard CX1 Cat & Dog PowerLine has the same issue as its siblings – it’s weighty to carry and too large to sit comfortably on average UK household steps. It has the ability to stand upright on its rear, but even this presents a pretty large footprint that’s likely to hang over the step edge. If you’re looking for a product that completely removes your involvement in the daily clean up after your dog, iRobot’s Roomba s9+ is certainly a time-efficient option. The curved handle offers about 90 degrees of rotation around the hose connection, which helps to stop the handle twisting when the hose is stretched. The wireless remote control in the handle runs off a small and commonly available CR2032 button battery and will last for some time. Being wireless, it will also work if completely detached from the hose and cleaner, offering great potential for YouTube comedy gold with unsuspecting family members or pets.

The filter canister pulls out of the cleaner and the filter pulls out of the bin so you can empty the contents; we found this didn’t need doing very often either. We got in the habit of giving the Comfort Clean feature a whirl every couple of cleaning sessions to keep the filter in tip-top performance. Miele vacuums are built to last, so long after a shark burns out a Miele will still keep going strong making them better value for money. Brilliantly designed, powerful, controllable, flexible, and with great touches such as the self-clean filter – Miele’s first bagless cleaner is a real winner. The brush arm is 25% more powerful than previous models and is now much more effective on low pile carpets, which combine with a 2 hour run time and it will easily get around your house. Our carpet and hard-floor test results with this head were a replica of those achieved with the same head on the CX1 Excellence model. Simply put: superb cleaning right up to the skirting edge, with only a few heavier grains of test powder showing on the carpet after a single pass. Pictures of that test can be found here.These tools make the hard-floor abilities of the EcoTeq head a little redundant – although it, too, was no slouch on our floor tile test. It’s nicely low for getting under obstacles and has a complete perimeter of castle-stepped brushes. Spreading your vacuuming power over such a big cleaning area suggests Miele is very confident in the suction power of the CX1.

On an inexpensive rug in the lounge, our two canine assistants did a fine job of scruffling a solid layer of hair into the pile. The mix of short, chunky Labrador hairs and longer, finer Collie hairs create a good test – but proved no match for the CX1 Cat & Dog. Enter the Blizzard CX1 Cat & Dog. Based on the manual power controlled Excellence model, this bagless cylinder cleaner adds Miele’s Cat & Dog floorhead to the tool roster. We’ve been impressed by this tool on some of Miele’s other pet-centric cleaners. Its air-powered rotating brush bar with twin rows of stiff nylon bristles are very effective for all-round carpet cleaning duties. The CX1 Cat & Dog certainly lives up to its name and is a superb performer for pet-centric homes. Perhaps in an ideal world we’d have liked a second, smaller air-powered turbo brush tool for pet beds and the sofa – Miele’s own Turbo mini tool, for example – but that’s a minor omission against otherwise excellent cleaning results for homes with pets.

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That all translated into an excellent carpet clean test too. Using a mix of talc, baking powder and carpet freshener on red nylon carpet, the combination of the CX1 Comfort and EcoTeq head produced a clean sweep, quite literally. The CX1 Comfort PowerLine received a solid “paws up” from the canine contingent here, too, thanks to its very low noise. We managed to clean right up to our Collie without disturbing her from a daytime snooze… It comes in 3 models, the basic, cat and dog, and excellence, all of which are great choices but the I like the basic model, more than enough cleaning power for most homes. Miele put the work into the durability of their vacuum cleaners and it pays off in a vacuum that’s built to last. The Comfort PowerLine is supplied with outstanding tools for hard floors in particular, and is very easy to empty and keep clean. It’s rather heavy for stair climbing and it struggled with pet hairs on carpets, but Miele does offer a dedicated Cat & Dog pet-centric version of the CX1 too.