Our Henry. Review on Henry Vacuum Cleaner

About four months ago I bought a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner with the thought that I would no longer have to bend down to do the weekly chore. Sadly I was mistaken in that it didn’t clean right up to the edge of the room and I had still had to get down to do the nooks and crannies, which left my back complaining bitterly about the treatment that it was receiving. And it was unbelievably noisy and quite heavy to push around and take upstairs, so all in all it was a huge mistake.

Fortunately last week, my son and his wife’s archaic machine gave a cough and a groan and with a puff of blue smoke died before their very eyes. This was a heaven sent opportunity and a good excuse for me to buy myself another machine so I gave them my brute to leave me vacuumless. Once again Comet laid out the red carpet and bowed and scraped as I swished through the door and then I woke up ate breakfast, had a wash and all that stuff and set of at my regulation speed of 32 mph through town. Yes, I know I like to live dangerously. The staff ignored me and I was free to ponder over which machine would find a home with me.

Actually it was no contest as Henry caught my eye. With that smiling face and laughing eyes, how could anyone resist? On the face of it, £94.35 may seem to be a bit extravagant but I like bread and dripping with a sprinkling of salt.

For those readers who do not know what a Henry vacuum cleaner is, it is like a short Dusty Bin with a powerful suction. It’s a short, fat, upright, red cylinder with a black top that glides around on wheels following the master or mistress as s/he go about their daily chores. The suction hose is attached to the side of the machine and if you paint a smiling mouth underneath and two happy eyes above as the manufacturer, Numatic International Ltd. does, it looks like a little short, fat man with a bowler hat on and you take his hat off to change the dust bag. In fact the motor fits inside his hat, as does the power lead. The instructions are pictorial and just about good enough for anyone to be able to assemble the supplied tools in the right manner. You get a long black flexible hose, which attaches to Henry’s nose and to the other end you can attach whichever of the other tools that you like. There is a long bit and another long bit and another long bit that is bent and they all fit into each other and with the bent bit at the top into the flexible bit. On the other end you can fit the carpet brush thing, which at the click of a foot converts into a hard floor cleaner. In the bent bit there is a device which when turned to expose an oblong hole, reduces the suction to 70% of its former power.

Additional tools come in the form of a longish pointy thing for very narrow spaces, a short tube the use for which I haven’t found yet, a round brush thing for things like curtains and the like and a wideish thing onto which you can slide the supplied brush. That’s for getting into not so narrow spaces. Apologies for the technical terminology but there just isn’t any other way of describing some of the attachments. Filters? I just knew someone would ask about them. Well there aren’t any on my model unless you count the canvas bag that holds the paper bag that holds the muck all in Henry’s belly, although I vaguely remember a filter of some sort in the bottom. Dust filters do not concern me personally as I’m only allergic to politicians both national and local, incompetence (I suffer fools badly), cheats and liars, motorists who approach a mini roundabout with the intention of turning left and don’t signal until they have stopped leaving me also stopped because I thought that they might be turning right across my path and a local tom cat who keeps coming round and upsetting my little pussy. Actually Spike is nearly twice as big as this tom and he beats the crap out of him every time that they meet. But that leads me nicely into another use for the round attachment. It is very good for vacuuming the cat once you get him down from the top of the wardrobe. The motor is no louder than the fan on my computer and after use a handle in Henry’s bowler hat is used to coil the power lead back inside his head. Now this machine I can live with because the tubular attachments are long enough to keep my back straight, and narrow enough for me to get into the smallest corners and suck out all the dead spiders and the like.

There are machines that look very much like my Henry and they are wet and dry machines and built as such. Henry is a landlubber and doesn’t like water at all. All the tubes and things fit into each other perfectly so that no vacuum is lost by dodgy joints and that leaves the suction powerful enough to lift a carpet just off the deck. And this means that it could easily suck up a pet mouse or hamster or even a budgie. You have been warned.