Hizero F500 Review
Gentle but powerful hard floor cleaning
Verdict
Using Bionic cleaning rather than vacuum action, the Hizero F500 can suck up dirt and clean hard floors in a more gentle way than many of its rivals. I found it quiet, gentle and able to cope with tough stains, cleverly separating solids from liquids. It is very expensive, though.
Pros
- Delicate on floors
- Cleans well
- Excellent dirt filtration
Cons
- Expensive
- Small solids tray
Key Features
- TypeThis is a hard floor cleaner with no vacuum action.
Introduction
Most upright hard floor cleaners work using a vacuum action, sucking up mess and liquids into a dirty tank. The Hizero F500 is different. This ‘bionic’ cleaner has no suction, using a specially formulated roller to pick up dirt, separate larger chunks into a bin and take dirty water to a tank.
It’s easy to use, gentle on floors and has long battery life, but the F500 is very expensive.
Design and features
- Soft-touch roller needs to be soaked
- Separate detergent and dirty tanks
- Simple controls
Although externally, the Hizero F500 looks much like any other hard floor cleaner, when you get down it, the design is quite different, and that’s all because this model doesn’t use suction to pick up dirt.
Instead, there’s a polymer super absorbent roller, which “emulates the way animals lick up liquids and solids”. In other words, this squidgy-feeling roller is designed to grab liquids and solids, as it rolls over them.
To do this, it first needs to be charged with a 20-minute soak in the provided case. When done, I found the roller was well saturated and needed a squeeze to get excess water out of it before it could be installed in the floor head. Don’t be tempted to put the roller in when it’s dripping wet, otherwise the floor will end up saturated.
Picking dirt up is one thing, but once collected, it needs to be removed from the roller, so that the F500 can continue to clean.
To do this, Hizero has a wiper and brush roll in the floor head that are used to separate solids, which end up in the 200ml solid tray, and liquids, which end up in the 600ml dirty tank. As there’s no vacuum action, there’s no filter to clean.
Roller, brush and tray are easy to remove and can all be cleaned under a running tap to keep them in their best condition.
To aid with cleaning, the Hizero F500 uses a 500ml clean water tank, which should be mixed with a capful of the Hizero cleaning solution. This detergent mix is then auto-dosed onto the floor.
Using the Hizero F500 is easy. Just hit the power button and then select the mode: Mode 1 uses a tank of water in about 10 minutes; Mode 2 uses a tank in five minutes and is designed for heavier spills.
Once I was finished, the Hizero F500 was dropped into its floor dock, which prevents water from seeping onto the floor, and provides two holders for when the brush and roller need to be dried. Charging is via a power adaptor that has to be plugged into the port on the rear of the cleaner.
Performance
- Exceptional solid removal
- Cleans gently and efficiently
- Hair isn’t fun to remove
The Hizero F500 is very different to other hard floor cleaners that I’ve reviewed, such as the Vax ONEPWR Glide 2. For starters, it’s far gentler, with a smooth rolling action, rather than multiple rollers and brushes spinning at high speed. This is a cleaner that I’d be happy to use on more delicate floors.
Although relatively gentle, the Hizero F500 is a competent cleaner. Tackling my hard floor with a BBQ sauce stain on it, the spill was removed quickly and efficiently, with the floor barely wet at the end of it. Without more powerful suction, it took a little longer to remove the stain, where it seeped into the textured surface, but the cleaning action was impressive.
There’s a gap of a few millimetres on either side of the roller, so this cleaner can’t get as close to the edges of rooms, in my tests, as the Roborock Dyad Pro. The only hard floor cleaner I’ve seen that can truly get right into the edges of rooms and corners is the Shark Klik n’ Flip Automatic Steam Mop S6003UK, which has a cloth that folds over the front of the floor head.
As Hizero states that the F500 is able to collect large particles of dirt without the need for suction, I tested it with a 20g drop of rice grains. Here, I found that 100% of the grains were collected and none dropped back out onto the floor. In that regard, the Hizero F500 is better than some budget vacuum cleaners that I have tested.
Opening up the floor head, I found that all of the rice grains, alongside other bigger particles, had been deposited in the tray, neatly separated from the wastewater. I’ve not seen a hard floor cleaner that can separate dirt this cleanly before, so it’s impressive to see.
There is a caveat, though: the tray in the cleaner is much smaller than the bin in many vacuum cleaners at just 0.2 litres. As a result, I would still vacuum regularly to remove larger dust deposits, rather than relying on the relatively small tray here; that said, for smaller deposits and bits of dirt that will naturally get picked up, it’s good to have this separation as it makes the Hizero F500 very easy to empty and clean.
Hizero says that the F500 can also deal with hair, so I tested it with human hair. It’s true that the hair is removed from the floor, but it just gets tangled around the brush inside, where I had to cut it away. So, yes, the F500 can deal with hair, but I think it’s better to vacuum first with a model that has an anti-tangle brush.
I found this hard floor cleaner very quiet, coming in at just 66.2dB. With no vacuum motor, the only sound is that of the rollers and brush spinning away.
Battery life is rated at an hour and in real-world use, I’d say that’s fair. That’s enough power to get through an entire home, easily.
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Should you buy it?
You want long battery life and gentle cleaning: The bionic action is gentle on floors, tough on stains and means battery life is excellent.
You want more powerful cleaning action: A floor cleaner with a vacuum action and larger tank can cope with larger bits of debris more easily.
Final Thoughts
The dirt separation, cleaning power and gentle action make the Hizero F500 quite different to other hard floor cleaners that I’ve reviewed.
The closest is the Karcher EWM2, which also has no vacuum action. I found the EWM2 doesn’t separate dirt and can’t handle bigger bits of debris, but it’s a lot cheaper. Price, ultimately, is the big issue here, as the Hizero F500 is very expensive. If you’ve got delicate floors, then it’s money well spent, but you can get powerful cleaning for less with one of my best hard floor cleaners.
How we test
We test every hard floor cleaner we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main hard floor cleaner for the review period
Tested with real-world dirt in real-world situations for fair comparisons with other steam cleaners
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FAQs
It is designed for hard floor use only, and you should buy a carpet cleaner if this is what you need.
Very easy, you just need to remove the rollers and tray to clean them. There’s no filter to clean.
Full specs
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
