Flexology means your vacuum can be pivoted under furniture using an elbow hinge at the centre of the tube. It saves you from bending and reaching, but it's only available on cordless vacuums.

The slogan they use for this is makes me giggle, “bends so you don’t have to”, as I think really what they meant was “bends because you won’t be able to get up again if you get on your knees to hoover under the sofa” ;-).

Verdict

LiftAwayoffers a removable central canister that can be lifted around to clean stairs and upholstery. This makes is easier to access tough spots, even cars. Then they added anti-hair wrap so that you never have to get involved with digging the hair from the roller and now with this range they have added “powerfins” which provide an even greater level of cleaning performance than ever before (more on that later). Although it is a corded vac, the 9 metre-long cable will give you an adequate radius to work your way around the various floors in the home. Molly lives in a two-bedroom flat, and never found the cord to be an issue, with space to get to all of the rooms she needed to. With its 4.58kg weight, the Shark IZ320UKT sits about in the middle of the cordless pile, balancing weight against power. I found it very easy to move around, with the floor head dashing around carpets and hard floors, and the LED headlights helping in darker areas. You’ll often find when shopping for vacuum cleaners, that some are made for carpets while others are really made for hard surfaces. Not many of us are willing to buy one hoover for the wooden floors & tiling and another one for the carpet, we expect vacuum cleaners to be able to perform equally well on carpets and on hard floors, however, we can’t always expect that.

With cordless vacuum cleaners, in particular, the raw figures give an idea of performance, but it’s only by testing them for real that you can see how good suction really is, as it’s a combination of power and tool efficiency that’s important.However, while useful, most of them aren't unique. You'll find similar features across most other brands, just with more conventional names.

Shark models come with impressive-sounding features, including Flexology (a flexible cleaning tube), Lift-Away (a detachable handheld mode) and TruePet (an extra motorised brush for dealing with pet hair).On the plus side, Shark’s articulated “Flexology” elbow does make cleaning under low furniture very easy indeed, allowing you to stand up and swing the cleaning head underneath your cupboards and sofas from a standing position, without having to get down on your hands and knees. When using it to clean her car, Helen was very impressed with the overall performance, with the vac effectively removing dirt from her car. It did struggle a little more to collect hairs from the carpet, but overall the suction was strong.