Vax ONEPWR Glide Review

Tired of the multiple steps to keep your hard floors clean? Then the Vax ONEPWR Glide could well be the answer. It vacuums and cleans at the same time – including wet spills – removing both dirt and germs from the floor to leave them sparkling. As the ultimate in convenience, it’s a great appliance for those who have a number of hard floors to keep clean.

The problem with most hard floor cleaners is that they first require you to vacuum before you can wet-clean. The Vax ONEPWR Glide is different, as this model is both a vacuum and a hard floor cleaner in one, tackling both jobs at the same time.

As well as saving you time, the Glide allows you to tackle a greater variety of jobs that wouldn’t be possible with a regular cleaner, such as cleaning up kitchen food spills, for example.

Vax ONEPR Glide – What you need to know

• Hard floor test – A single pass through our spilt rice test picked up every grain, but this cleaner doesn’t include accessories to get into hard-to-reach areas
• Mud test – Required the use of both normal and high power modes but this cleaner removed all traces of dirt from the floor, sucking up the mess to leave the floor almost dry.

Related: Best cordless vacuum cleaner

Vax ONEPWR Glide design and features – Looks and operates like a vacuum cleaner

The Vax ONEPWR Glide looks and feels very much like an upright vacuum cleaner. The difference is that it can suck up both dirt and water into its bin.

There are some tell-tale signs that this isn’t a regular vacuum cleaner. There’s no hose to remove for use with attachments, and the soft roller at the front can’t be replaced with a brush for use on carpets. Instead, this is a machine that’s built specifically for cleaning hard floors with minimum fuss.

Vax has built a hard floor cleaner that’s super-easy to use. First, fill up the water tank and add the cleaning solution. There are indicators on the tank’s side that show how much water to add and then the amount of solution to top it up. I like that Vax has decided to opt for labels that are easy to understand, using simply “small area” and “large area”.

The detergent tank makes it easy to get the correct mix of cleaning fluid and water

The only other thing that’s required of you is to charge the removable battery and insert it into the cleaner’s body. With the version of the Glide that ships with a battery and charger, you get a 4.0Ah battery. This should provide enough power for up 30 minutes of cleaning on Eco mode; the High mode will see that figure drop.

Swappable batteries provide flexibility and the option to extend run-time by buying new cells

Batteries take three hours to top up, so if you have a larger area to clean then you may want to invest in a spare battery (£79.99 for the 4.0Ah model) to ensure you can complete a job in a single instance. The Glide uses the same range of batteries as the other ONEPWR models, so you can share cells between products. Just be aware that you’ll get less run-time if you use the smaller 3.0Ah or 2.0Ah battery.

To turn the cleaner on, you grab the handle and pull it downwards. Pressing the power button turns on the vacuum and starts to spin the soft brush at the front of the unit. This doesn’t automatically get you water; you’ll have to press the trigger to start coating the roller.

It can take some time to figure out how long you should have your finger on the trigger to get the right amount of water, but it’s easy enough to learn as you go. Even so, it’s relatively easy to empty the detergent tank quickly, so you may need a refill or two to cover an area.

The controls couldn’t be easier to use

At 4.9kg, the Vax ONEPWR Glide isn’t too heavy – although weight isn’t a huge concern as it will be used entirely on the floor, only shifted from room to room. With a 29cm-wide cleaning head, the Vax ONEPWR Glide is easy enough to manoeuvre around most furniture, and I found it easy enough to push around.

Since there’s only a 0.28l dirty water tank, and you can fill up to 0.63l of detergent, a larger clean will require you to empty the bin at least twice; potentially more time, if you’re also cleaning up a wet spill. Once full, the water intake valve shuts off automatically to prevent the vacuum cleaner from overfilling.

Emptying the bin is easy: simply pull it out, empty its contents into a sink or toilet, then rinse out the inside to get going again.

Once full, the dirty water tank needs to be emptied

At the end of the clean, the ONEPWR Glide can be a little dirty, particularly around the roller. Clean-up is straightforward, and it can be tackled in a few ways. You can engage the self-cleaning function. To do this, drop the vacuum into the plastic stand, and turn the vacuum on with your finger on the trigger.

You can clean the rollers inside the provided tray

For a deeper clean, you can remove the plastic cover over the roller and run this under a tap to get rid of any dirt. The roller then pops out for a wash in the sink, and there’s a handy drying rack on the stand. If you buy the cleaner from Vax direct, you even get a spare roller.

Vax ONEPWR Glide performance – Picks up stains and dirt alike

To test how good the Vax ONEPWR Glide is, we put it through a series of tests. First, we assessed pure vacuuming performance with our standard hard floor test, sprinkling a teaspoon of rice onto the floor. Running the ONEPWR Glide through the mess on a single pass on Eco mode was all that was required to pick up every grain. Impressive.

Hard floor test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

The Vax ONEPWR Glide doesn’t come with any accessories, and therefore can’t reach into every area. As a result, you may need to use a regular vacuum cleaner to clean a mess right into the edges and behind any furniture.

Next, we ran the cleaner over our kitchen floor, which had picked up plenty of mess as a result of four cats constantly coming in and out. Generally, the Vax ONEPWR Glide did well running on Eco mode – although it took a few sweeps to get everything, and we needed to switch to High mode to get at the tougher stains.

Once complete, the floor was clean and almost dry, too, with the dirty water all sucked up into the tank. The advantage of this system is that you only ever use clean water so bacteria is removed from the floor rather than simply being spread around.

Muddy floor test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

Finally, we tested how well the Vax ONEPWR Glide coped with a spill, pouring a glass of water onto the hard floor. A quick swipe through the mess on Eco mode was all that was needed to get rid of the water, leaving the floor pretty much dry.

Water spill test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

Run-time is quoted at up to 30 minutes. I found that the Vax ONEPWR Glide worked well on Eco mode for most spills, but since I had to switch to the High power mode to clean up bigger messes, the total run-time was closer to 25 minutes. For me, this was sufficient to cover the downstairs of my home, which is all hard floors. Your mileage may vary, depending on the number of hard floors in your home. To cover the other two floors, I either had to wait three hours for the battery to charge, or use a spare to get working immediately.

Cleaning the kitchen used up most of a detergent tank; a second fill was enough to cover the rest of the ground floor.

The Vax ONEPWR Glide is quite noisy. I measured it at 86.5dB on High mode, and still 83.6dB in Eco. These figures place this model as louder than many other hard floor cleaners, although since this model also vacuums, that’s to be expected.

Should you buy the Vax ONEPWR Glide?

The main competition to the Vax ONEPWR Glide is the Karcher FC 5 Hard Floor Cleaner, which is a plug-in model. There are key differences, beyond power source, in how they work. With the FC 5, you get more power: with the machine pulling you along, it’s quicker to shift stains. It also has a dirty water tank, physically removing dirt from the floor. I prefer the auto-dosing water output on this model.

As good as the FC 5 is, it offers only limited vacuuming for the odd bit of dirt or fluff – and it isn’t good at dealing with larger spills. The Vax ONEPWR Glide doesn’t need you to vacuum first, so even though a bit more graft is required to clean up tough stains, the overall clean time is reduced. You can also use the Vax ONEPWR Glide in the vacuum-only mode for picking up dirt or liquid spills, which potentially makes it more flexible.

Once you buy one ONEPWR product, the advantage is that you can share the batteries between all of your products, or even buy barebones models without a battery to save money on future purchases. With that in mind, the ONEPWR Glide is a useful tool for anyone with hard floors who wants to limit the time they spend cleaning.