A New Little Helper

Little Bird had a friend coming for a sleepover last night, and as a consequence, I needed to get the house into some sort of order, and more especially Little Bird's room.  So, yesterday afternoon was spent cleaning and hoovering, etc.  I did have a bit of assistance on this occasion, from the new 'man' in my life.

Before you get completely the wrong idea, the man I'm referring to is my new vacuum cleaner.  Yes, I have finally been treated to a new vacuum, after several years of complaining to OH about our current one and how difficult it is to handle.  OH (who had chosen said vacuum) had been promising me for a while that I could buy another one, one that I find easier to use, so a few weeks ago I kept him to his word and we bought one.

I wasn't sure at first what to get.  I eyed up the Dysons and other makes in John Lewis and was tempted by the cord-free rechargeables, until that is, I found out that they could only be used for 30-40 minutes at a time, before needing recharging.  This was no good for me, when I use a vacuum cleaner, it tends to take me a lot longer, as I'm usually blitzing the whole house.  In addition, I didn't think that the heads would fit under our sofas, which also helped to rule them out.  I looked at other vacuums too, but after reading the reviews online, I kept coming back to Numatic's Henry.  It may not be of a latest new fangled designs, but they have made some interesting technological innovations lately.

By way of a coincidence, my brother in law, over from Australia this summer, had ordered a new model to take back with him.  The wattage has apparently been halved in the new models to 580 watts, making it more energy efficient, but without losing any of it's suction power.  It worked out significantly cheaper for them to buy a new one here and pay over £60 to ship it out to Australia, than wait for the new model to come out there so they could buy it.  I figured that it must be a pretty good vacuum for them to go to the trouble, made a mental note, but kept looking, despite having already noted that online reviews were virtually 100% positive.

A second coincidence occurred when we were away in Norfolk, the hoover in house we stayed in was, you guessed, a Henry.  I had to try it out of course and found it to have very good suction and was pretty easy to handle, with the added extra of sturdy parts, which was a bonus after my experience with our current one.

By the time I'd got back to London I had virtually made up my mind - a Henry hoover it was going to be, but at the last minute my head was turned.  John Lewis, in celebration of their 150th year of trading, were selling limited edition Henrys, this year.  There's one called John (he's green) and one called Lewis (he's purple).  Call me a sucker, but yes, it was Lewis I bought, seduced by the colour purple, and very nice he is too.  I got to know him quite well yesterday, and we got along just fine.  His suction is great and he's quite a quiet unassuming chap, far less noisy and challenging than his predecessor.  I think we'll rub along very well indeed.

Here he is, isn't he cute? 

 

A couple other positives were that he was manufactured in Britain and didn't come with a massive excess of packaging.  Both pretty rare occurrences these days in my experience and both helped to reassure me that I had made the right choice.

Please note that this is NOT a sponsored post.  I am purely giving my honest opinion about a product I have researched, purchased and like very much.