Giving the HF500 a dusty test drive

This post contains items gifted by HooverDirect.co.uk for the purposes of this review.  All views and opinions are my own.

I’m very much a fan of household items that are functional, fulfil their purpose and which don’t dominate your living space.  So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that when I was offered a H-FREE 500 Twin Battery 3 in 1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner (this is the top of the range from this series) to review I was keen to see if a compact hoover could deliver great performance (spoiler – it can).  When it arrived, I was surprised at just how compact it was.

As you can see from the picture below, it’s not a usual sized vacuum cleaner box – it’s just a bit more than half way over the height of the radiator.  And in that box, there’s a lot of vacuum cleaner.

It’s also really well packaged.  The items are separated by cardboard with each piece in its place, getting so much into the space available is a pretty mean feat.  Add to that, that for my area, all bar two bits of the packaging are recyclable in our kerbside bin, and that’s also good news.

In the box, along with the unassembled cordless H-Free 500 is a crevice tool, pet brush, additional filter, two battery packs, a dusting and upholstery tool (which is stored on the handheld), a bag for the accessories and the quick start guide and manuals, as well as a wall mount and screws (not shown). 

The instruction manual shows clearly how to assemble the cleaner, but it’s really intuitive and so you’ll not be surprised that I went ahead without referring to the manual, looking at it to check that I was on track.  When it’s fully assembled (see the picture below) it’s a fully sized cordless vacuum cleaner, which I was keen to put to the test. 

I expected to need to charge it though before I could get started, so it was a pleasant surprise to discover it already had some power, but more on that in a moment.  First let me show you the cordless hoover in its compacted form – it was easy to switch into this mode – and you can see it’s clearly reduced in height, which will make it easy to store.  It’s also pretty sturdy standing alone in both set-ups, another plus in my view.

What’s equally impressive is the dual battery – that allows you to have the second battery charged and ready to go, I can see that being a real advantage.  On the Hoover Direct website, it says that ‘each battery pack gives up to 40 minutes of power in auto mode, 25 minutes in standard mode, or 8 minutes in turbo mode’.  The other thing to note about charging the HF500 is that it can be plugged in anywhere, so there’s none of this ‘returning to base’ for a charge which gives it even more flexibility which would have come in really useful for my MIL’s house move at the start of the year.

But back to giving it a test drive. 

As you know I’ve been working from home in my ‘top’ office for a while now, it’s a room that I’m using so much more than in all the time we’ve lived here.  That’s true for MOH and our spare room too though to be fair.  What we’re finding is that our house gets way more dusty than we noticed when we were out at the office each day (or maybe it doesn’t and we’re just noticing it more, who knows!)

My ‘top’ office also doubles as my yoga space, and recently it was when I was supposed to be emptying my mind that I noticed just how dusty part of the floor was.  Embarrassingly so, but in my defence it’s where our washing dries and at this time of year it’s put to good use  – yet another use for my ‘top’ office, which despite the picture I’m painting really is a nice spot to work in.  For a start it’s not the kitchen table and it gets the warmth of the sun from being at the front of the house – but back to the dust.

What the HF500 does really well is switch easily between carpet and non-carpet.  The LED lights really do help you find the hidden – or in my case, not so hidden – dust.  And reassuringly it’s definitely much cleaner now – my yoga sessions can go back to being much more relaxing.

I also want to share more about the dusting tool – and once again my home office set-up provided the perfect place to test the handheld mode.  Removing the pink tube – I forgot to mention how much that made me smile when I opened the box – and fixing the dusting tool in place, I was off – there was no stopping me – skirting boards, radiator pipes and my ‘borrowed from the office during lockdown’ footrest.  It’s amazing how much the HF500 picked up from these areas alone – and clearly I’m going to claim that it was my plan all along to have somewhere where the difference is obvious… ahem.  But I’ve also tested its pick-up power in much higher traffic areas – and therefore more often cleaned areas - of our home, and even there it’s making our space much cleaner, and that’s no bad thing, especially when it’s easy to achieve too.

So it’s a big thumbs up from me, and I know MOH is itching to get his hands on it too to give it his own test drive, and well, who am I to argue with that? 

View this product on Hoover Direct.

*  With thanks to Hoover Direct for providing the Hoover H-FREE 500 Twin Battery 3 in 1 Cordless Stick Vacuum Cleaner for the purposes of this review.

Lifted lead, two tiles and a zig-zag fence

I hope you’ve not suffered too much damage from the recent storms, here Storm Eunice - with a red weather warning - was here on Friday, and she definitely left her mark. My home office is in the top of our house and I could definitely hear the wind. My working day involved several more looks out the window to see what was going on, at both the front and back of the house. MOH’s home office is on the floor below and he had a birds eye view of our neighbour’s fence, which was definitely blowing in the wind and looking more zig-zagged than straight.

Just down the road the O2 was also suffering and I’m sure you’ve seen its news that part of the roof blew off. For us, it was thankfully less dramatic, though there’s some more repair work needed so I’m hoping as I’m writing this that Storm Franklin isn’t as bad.

Next door’s zig-zag fence

It doesn’t look any better at ground level. They’re not having a good time of it at the moment as they’ve also had a bathroom leak into the basement flat.

There’s lots of twigs down in our garden, and while we haven’t checked all of the garden carefully it’s easy to see from the house that one of our sycamore has a broken branch. It’s still up there, and lodged in the other branches, and I’m hoping it manages to stay there. Ironically these trees were supposed to have been pollarded, but the tree man has done missing. We’ve three trees that need work and our neighbours have two further trees, and so it’s not a small project between us, so it’s strange for there to be lots of interest and then nothing. Neither our neighbour our MOH can make contact, so it’s probably time to start looking for someone else.

A broken branch, lodged among other branches - let’s hope it stays there!

Our roof at the front of the house wasn’t quite so fortunate. We saw on Saturday morning that the lead had lifted and two tiles had gone. We weren’t sure where, but were grateful that it wasn’t onto any of the parked cars in the drive. We hoped that they had simply dropped down into the gutter which goes around the house - and we were half right, that’s exactly where one of the tiles had gone. MOH was able to reach that earlier today by leaning out of the window.

The other tile was found by our neighbour, on the roof. And bless him, he was up on our roof on Saturday afternoon (when the weather still wasn’t that great) retrieving it for us. Before covid he added a roof terrace giving his flat some outside space - as part of that it’s relatively easy for him to get onto his roof, and therefore our roof. He’s always very generously said that if we needed to access our roof then we are welcome to do this via his roof space.

What he also did while he was retrieving the tile was push the lead back down, and so giving our roof more protection from the rain we’ve had since then, and more which is forecast too. What a superstar neighbour - we’re incredibly grateful for this interim fix.

You really can’t beat good neighbours can you?

A waiting game

I’m not known for my patience, but here I’ve excelled myself. I’ve long been a fan of the blue rimmed white enamelware, and over the years I’ve acquired pie dishes, pie plates and tumblers, and it’s always something I look out for in markets and charity shops. Last summer I branched out colour-wise when I fell in love with the mustard yellow jug.

In the first lockdown of 2020 the ads in my browser started to show enamelware and eventually I cracked and headed over to see what was there. I quickly became very taken with Falcon’s Enamelware 5 piece bake set - the added attraction was being able to use on our induction hob, a bonus over our current pans. But it was out of stock. And it stayed out of stock for quite a while.

Briefly it came back into stock and I thought to myself - great, I’ll sort that out.

And then by the time I did people had got there before I had. So I was waiting again.

Occasionally I’d find myself on the site, but there was still no stock. I was almost resigned to the fact that it wasn’t meant to be.

Then, guess what? A week or so ago when I checked again, there was stock. There it was the blue rimmed white enamel bakeware set. I wasn’t going to miss out this time, so it was in my basket and checked out before you could say, well pie dish.

And then it was here, and just as beautiful as I thought it would be. I also bought a small tray and took full advantage of the first purchase discount.

MOH predictably asked if with new tins coming in, this meant some old tins would be going out. And it may, but not just yet. We’ve already made good use of the small tray and a couple of the tins, I think even MOH is surprised.

And I now have a new Falcon Enamelware item to stalk. The small tray is so useful, and just the right size to hold my olive oil bottle which sits behind the hob, but as our worktop is black granite the white one isn’t quite right, so now I’m stalking the black version - which yes, you’ve guessed it, is out of stock.

It seems my life isn’t complete without playing the waiting game with Falcon Enamelware. Luckily, I’m ready to play the long game - let’s hope it doesn’t test my patience (or lack of) too much.