VacTidy Blitz V8 Pro cordless vacuum cleaner review

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

The Blitz V8 Pro is a phenomenally priced cordless vacuum with powerful suction. However, it is a budget model. You won’t be buying for life and you will notice some build issues like its swivel head hinge, which can get stuck at an angle.

Price When Reviewed

$199.99

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Retailer Price

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The VacTidy Blitz V8 Pro is a cordless stick vacuum cleaner designed for the budget end of the market, which means that if you buy, you’ll have to accept some compromises. The parts don’t have that reassuring robustness, and the bin empty movement isn’t very fluid. This is not a buy-it-for-life product.

That being said, it really does vacuum well and considering its very appealing price point, we’d rate it as a super buy if it weren’t for a little quirk of its design.

Let’s take a closer look.

Design & Build

For your money, you’ll get a telescopic wand, a vacuum head with a very fluffy spiral brush, the motor bin, the battery handle, the charger, a crevice tool and dust brush, a wall dock, and a spare filter, along with the manual and the warranty.

The metal telescopic wand is an electric Tyrian purple that expends from 41cm to 65cm, which makes the V8 far easier to store than most vacuum cleaners. The opaque black plastic vacuum head gives you a 20cm vacuuming aperture and features four LED lights on the front for illuminated vacuuming. The body contains both the motor and a 1.2 litre dustbin that features a spring latch lid that opens to allow you to empty out the dust.

The handle contains the 6-cell 2200mAH lithium battery and the control panel that features the power button, a button to switch between normal and maximum suction and the battery level indicator. As you’d expect for its price, there’s no fancy LCD information screen with the V8 Pro.

The crevice tool is a good 23cm long from socket to angled tip and the dusting tool adapts from a narrow oval aperture to a dust brush by means of a sprung purple button on the top. The charger features an integral cable to a barrel jack, and the dock, which needs to be screwed into the wall to be of use, holds both the vacuum stick and the two accessories.

You can tell from the off that the Blitz V8 is a budget model. It’s very lightweight, the smell is very plasticky when you unpack and first use it, and the build itself is quite basic.

Performance & Features

The V8 Pro is simple to set up. Charge the battery for 2.5 hours via a socket in the base of the handle, either attached to the vacuum or not – the telescopic wand means it’s easier to charge the whole vacuum in a location as it shrinks down to a smaller size than a conventional stick vacuum.

Then fit the wand into the swivel head, the wand into the bottom of the motor bin, and attach the battery handle to the motor bin. This last action needs a bit of attention; you need to fit an internal bar on the handle into a hook on the dust bin surface before you push the rest of the handle onto the motor, but when you’ve done it once, it’s very straightforward.

Then all that remains is to press the power button. This will start the suction on normal mode. You can press it again for maximum mode and then again to turn the V8 Pro off entirely.

VacTidy claims you will get 35 minutes of running time from a full battery, and we reckon this is about accurate – if not a little conservative.

And the suction is good. The V8 Pro has excellent parameter suction, which meant that it only needed to touch the end of a hair strand on a hard floor to whip it clean away. It also performs well on carpet, though you don’t get that deep filament brushing action that you find with a luxury appliance carpet attachment.

While the LED lights on the swivel head only illuminate about 4cm in front of the swivel head, the head itself has a 180-degree rotating joint, so manoeuvring the head from left to right is a doddle.

There is, in our view, only one thing that lets the V8 Pro down: the click plate that allows the wand to fix at 90 degrees to the head. Now on one hand, this is a clever feature because one of the most typical problems with a cordless stick vacuum is that, unless you hang it in a wall dock, you can’t stand it up anywhere. If you lean a conventional stick vacuum up against a wall, the head just skates along the floor and brings the wand, battery, bin and handle down with it.

The V8 Pro’s stand-up feature works by simply bringing the head at a 90 degree angle to a plate on the front of the wand where it clicks and stays in place. But if you vacuum regularly throughout the house, you may already be able to see the problem here.

Vacuuming a wide expanse of floor inevitably means a push and pull back motion, incorporating turns. This means that the wand can go from almost level with the suction head to being within, say, an 80-degree angle to the suction head. The issue with the V8 Pro is that if the wand comes within roughly 80 degrees of the head, it catches on the plate so when you next push ahead, the suction head is no longer running along the floor but stuck up at roughly a 20 degree angle.

The only way to solve this issue mid-vacuuming is to push the head back down with either your hand or your foot, which can become a tad annoying, particularly when you’re distracted and haven’t noticed immediately. If the wand is fully extended, the issue occurs more.

Alex Greenwood / Foundry

That said, this problem could be something that disappears in time – we were testing a brand-new model – but we can’t help feeling the suction head could do with being a touch heavier and the stand-up plate a touch higher on the wand.

The HEPA filter also seems pretty good and is said to catch 99.99% of dust particles. Emptying the bin is also easy. You just hold the bin over the rubbish and flick the lid release.

Another thing to mention about the V8 Pro is that the lightweight nature of the vacuum means it isn’t a strain on your hand or your forearm while vacuuming. There’s also no power trigger (you turn it on via a button on the battery handle), so you don’t get that tension between your forefinger, thumb and forearm, which can lead to soreness the following day.

Price and Availability

Its wallet-friendly price is one of the VacTidy Blitz V8 Pro’s key selling points. If you’re in the US, it has an MSRP of $199 and you can buy it at this price from VacTidy. But if you’re going to buy it, get it from Amazon where it’s currently available for $99.99.

In the UK, you can buy it from Amazon for just £79.20 at the time of writing. Considering its suction, this is a great price and we think the compromises will be worth it.

Should you buy the VacTidy Blitz V8 Pro?

The V8 Pro is a budget cordless stick vacuum cleaner that’s an excellent buy. It’s lightweight, it has great suction, and its telescopic wand makes it easy to store. But that’s apart from the stand-up quirk that causes the suction head to angle up at times. That’s the only thing standing between this vacuum and a four-star rating.

We like to recommend really robust vacuums that will last a long time, but if you need a vacuum and money is short, this is a good option.

Not the right vacuum for you? To see our top vacuum cleaner recommendations, have a look at our round-up of the best vacuums we’ve tested.