Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum review: “Is it all style and no substance?”

While vacuuming is nobody’s favourite job, a good quality vacuum cleaner will make the whole process of keeping your home clean and tidy that bit more enjoyable. With so many vacuum cleaners out there, it’s hard to know which one is worth investing in. That's why we’ve tested the Hoover HF9 to help you decide whether it’s the right one for your needs.

There no denying this cordless vacuum cleaner is a stylish bit of kit, with its sleek blue and grey colourway and digital display, but is it all style and no substance? Senior Home & Pets Product Writer, Rosie Floyd puts it to the test for Yours.co.uk to find out more.

How we tested the Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum

To thoroughly put the Hoover HF9 through its paces, it was tested in a number of different ways. The first of which was a group test with other popular vacuum brands where we scattered the same quantities of lentils and sugar on the floor and vacuumed backwards and forwards over the mess five times to compare how they performed.

I then took this vacuum back to my childhood home to put it to the test in a busy home, which always has people coming and going as well as three dogs so there’s always dust, debris and fluff to clean up. My childhood home also has a variety of flooring types, so I was able to test it on hard floors and carpets as well as rugs of varying thickness.

As well as testing out this vacuum myself, I also got my mum, Rachel, to give it a try so we could compare notes on how well it performed throughout her house and to gain perspective from someone from a different age range who may have other considerations for a vacuum cleaner to me.

I also vacuumed my whole downstairs of my house on standard mode, switching only between the hard floor and the carpet to see whether the run time is the same as the brand claims.

Testing the Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum on hard floors

For the first test, the Hoover HF9 vacuum was used as part of a Yours.co.uk group vacuum test. We scattered half a cup of lentils on the floor and turned the vacuum on turbo power to see how many of them it gathered after vacuuming over it five times. The general consensus from the team is that the vacuum struggled with picking it all up and it was almost as if the brush head was bottom heavy because as we vacuumed back towards us, it seemed to scoop all the lentils together rather than sucking them all up. We then threw a quarter of a cup of sugar on the floor to see how it would cope with finer messes. It definitively performed better with the sugar, picking up a good quantity of it with five strokes back and forth, but again, it gathered a little pile of sugar together as we ran it back. Although the suction power wasn’t as good compared to the likes of the Dyson and VAX vacuum we tested at the same time, the Yours testing team appreciated how easy it was to move and it glided around seamlessly.

Taking it away from the testing environment, both my mum and I tried it out on wooden flooring at home, this time mainly trying it out on the standard cleaning mode. I found it pretty easy to move around and found the brush head was able to manoeuvre in and around tighter spaces, like in between the wall and the sofa and in between TV units and coffee table with ease. It also was able to pick up lighter messes like crumbs and soil brought in from outside by the dogs (cheers dogs!) with ease but struggled more with bits of chewed-up bark and leaves (again, thanks to the dogs for those!). When my mum tested it, her first thoughts were that it felt very top heavy so even though the brush head easily glided about the wooden floors, it did put extra strain on her arms after a while. For someone in their 50s, I would consider my mum to be pretty fit but for someone with limited strength in their arms, we both agreed that this would leave them very achy and would probably struggle to hold it for a long period of time. She did like that it had lights on the brush head so she could easily see the dirt that needed to be picked up.

Testing the Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum on carpets

To test the Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum on carpets, we used the vacuum on a combination of the standard setting and the turbo mode and pushed the button to the carpet setting. The rugs in my childhood home are frequently laid upon by the three dogs, with one of those dogs being a big moulting black Labrador Retriever cross so he’s constantly shedding hair everywhere that then gets matted into rugs and carpets. With this in mind, I was keen to see whether this is a good vacuum cleaner for pet hair. Firstly, I went in on it with the standard mode, where it did get up a little bit of Barney’s fluff but you could still see the remnants of it left behind.

After switching to the turbo mode, I could immediately see the difference as it managed to get so much more of the fluff up. However, just like when we performed the vacuum group test, it didn’t manage to get every last bit up and left behind those more stubborn bits of fur. When my mum used it, she was comparing the performance against an older corded Shark upright vacuum and her immediate thoughts were that it didn’t manage to get up nearly as much as her Shark, and she felt the suction wasn’t as powerful. However, after looking at the fluff collected in the bin afterwards, she took that back as the evidence was clear to see. She was impressed with how simple the bin was to empty as all it took was the push of one button and the dust, dirt and fluff fell directly into the bin.

After testing it on a high-traffic rug, I then used it on other rugs and carpets throughout the house. Just like when used on the hard floors, it did feel very easy to manoeuvre but the brush head didn’t glide as effortlessly as it did on the wooden floors. I also found that it struggled with thicker rugs and at one point, the digital display showed an error message from where the thicker pile had managed to get stuck around the brush head.

Hoover HF9 cordless vacuum review: final verdict

Overall, I found the Hoover HF9 vacuum to be fairly easy to handle and very manoeuvrable. It easily managed to get into all the nooks and crannies, such as under the sofa and move around chests of drawers and coffee tables with ease. It also comes with an impressive number of attachments that enable you to get cobwebs up high from corners and down low to suck up dust from skirting boards. My mum and I found this vacuum performed better on hard floors than carpets but that’s not to say that it didn’t do a good job on rugs and carpets. We found that it did manage to suck up the majority of Labrador Barney’s moulted fur but did leave behind some of the more stubborn, embedded tufts. I personally think if you’ve got carpets and rugs with a thicker pile than some of the ones we tested it on, you would struggle more with moving it around your home.

There’s no denying that this vacuum is a stylish bit of kit. I love the grey and blue colourway and the digital display that gives it that more modern feel. When turning on the vacuum, you can clearly see how long you’ve got left until the battery runs out and it adapts based on what mode you’re using it on. Hoover say you should get approximately 30 minutes of run time with this vacuum cleaner but when I turned it on, it said it had 35 minutes so that was a nice surprise. I did find the 35 minutes to be fairly accurate as I tested it from full charge to empty, keeping it on standard suction but switching between the carpet and hard floor mode as I made my way through the house.

The actual time I ended up getting from the vacuum is 33 minutes. While this probably wouldn’t be enough to do your whole house without stopping and recharging, you could easily clean your kitchen and living room on one charge (depending on the size of your home, of course) but bear in mind that you would probably need to stop and empty the bin as it has a 0.7 litre capacity, which is a bit on the smaller side.

If I was rating this vacuum on style alone, it would get five stars. I appreciate how sleek it is and the digital display certainly makes things easier to see what mode you're using the vacuum on as well as how much battery you have left. I also think that the brush head is great for manoeuvring around your hard floors and carpets but as previously mentioned, my mum found it a bit top heavy so you may struggle with prolonged periods of vacuuming if you've got weakness in your arms/hands.

Rosie Floyd is a Senior Home & Pets Product Writer for Yours, specialising in home appliances, décor and furnishings, as well as all things dogs. After completing her Journalism & Media degree from Coventry University back in 2015, she started her career writing about must-visit holiday destinations, moving on to creating content around outdoor living and garden buildings, before joining the team at Bauer.