It’s convenient to pigeonhole products, but sometimes something like the Lupe Pure Cordless comes along and defies categorisation. Ostensibly, it’s a cordless vacuum cleaner so, at first glance, it looks like it sits alongside high-end cordless sticks such as the Dyson V15 Detect.
However, it also has a larger bin capacity than most cordless sticks and it can stand upright without any folding, which makes it a bit more like an upright.
Whatever category you choose to put in, however, its ability to extract dust and dirt from your hard floors and carpets doesn’t disappoint. Although it comes in at a premium price, it's equally matched by its cleaning prowess.
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Lupe Pure Cordless review: What do you get for the money?
The Lupe sits at the pricey end of the cordless vacuum cleaner scale, with a list price of £699, making it £100 more expensive than Dyson’s top-of-the-range V15 Detect Absolute (£599). Even at the current discount price of £499 it’s a significant investment.
Its design is intriguing, taking cues from both svelte cordless sticks and standard uprights. Instead of the motor and dust collection bin being attached at the top of an extension wand right next to the handle, the Lupe’s 1l collection bin, battery and vacuum motor are contained in the bottom half of the device, directly above the floor head. This means the whole thing can stand upright and support itself, unlike Shark’s Flexology models which need to be folded over before being stowed away.
This setup is put to good use. For example, you can release the floor head from the main unit and unclip the connection tube, and it lifts away to become a portable handheld device, with more than enough capacity to deal with filthy stairs or a grubby car boot.
The flexible, extendable connection tube can accept either of the two accessories (more on which below), and you can also clip in the extension wand to help you clean in hard to reach places. The range of versatility on offer is second to none.
Speaking of accessories, there are two in the box: a crevice tool with a sliding dusting brush that can be pushed away when not needed; and an upholstery tool that employs a similar arrangement with a short stiff brush and a retracting, softer brush for more delicate work. Both attachments can be clipped to the extension wand for storage.
There are two rollers in the head, one is a standard brush for carpet and the other is a soft roller for hard floor. This means you use the same floor head no matter which surface you’re cleaning. The soft roller is a bit different to the fluffy rollers you’ll find on Dyson and Shark vacuums though, as it’s made from a spongy material sheathed in a tightly-fitted plastic coating.
With the floor head and the wand attached, the vacuum’s dimensions are 175 x 260 x 1,145mm (WDH), which is quite large. Remove the wand, however, and it packs down to 660mm high, so it’s more easily put away in a small cupboard. It’s heavy, too, at 4.6kg but much of this is in the floor head. Remove the main body and detach the connection tube, and the main motor unit only weighs 0.5kg for carrying around.
Lupe Pure Cordless review: What is it like to use?
One of the benefits of cordless stick vacuums is that they’re light and manoeuvrable. By adopting a more upright vacuum approach, this is one of the things the Lupe misses out on.
In its standard vacuum mode with the floor head and the extension wand attached, it’s heavy and stiff to move around. There is a bit of forward pull from the roller, which helps a bit, particularly on hard floor. However, as soon as the suction is switched on, it becomes more difficult to move around, as the device is sucked towards the floor.
It’s also not as convenient to operate as many cordless sticks because all the controls are on the main unit. This means you have to reach down to switch it on, make changes to the power levels or enable/disable the motorised rollers. Unlike most cordless models, there are no triggers or thumb buttons on the handle.
Other negative things include a brush that doesn’t have any anti-tangle technology and, as a result, I found my review unit collecting hair shed from the longer-haired members of my family very quickly. There are grooves in the brush bar, though, which make it relatively easy (if still a little unpleasant) to get scissors in to cut it out.
I also found converting the Lupe from one configuration to another to be a little fiddly. For example, removing the floor head requires you to both free up the tube that connects it to the main body and press the release catch to separate it. The connection between the tube and the floor head is a bit cumbersome because the tube comes in from the side at a slightly awkward angle.
The same applies to most of the various buttons and catches. To empty the bin, for example, you press a release catch down on the opposite side and pull the bin out horizontally, which isn’t quite intuitive. There’s a button on the base of the collection bin you can press to open the trap door and release the contents but I found that it didn’t then flip open on its own and I needed to use my free hand to help it along. I can’t help but feel that, for the high price, the device’s design ought to be a step closer to perfection.
Lupe Pure Cordless review: How well does it clean?
The Lupe Pure Cordless proved to be an exceptional cleaner in our tests. Its best performance was clearing Cheerios off our short pile carpet. Here, the soft roller gently captured every single Cheerio in a 26g spill in a single pass.
It wasn’t quite so adept at gathering the cereal from a hard floor. The problem here was that some of the Cheerios were chewed up more violently than on carpet, and scattered from the edges of the floor head. It only lost 2g of Cheerios this way and they were easily recaptured on subsequent passes but it’s not quite the perfection it achieved on carpet. It’s also not quite as good on this surface as the fluffy roller you’ll find on Dyson and Shark vacuums but it remains an excellent result.
In our flour test, we drop 50g of flour on hard floor and carpet. On hard floor, the Lupe collected 49g on a single pass. The remaining 1g got caught somewhere between the floor and collection bin, as it only reappeared when we picked up the vacuum cleaner to move it - there was no visible residue left on the floor, even in cracks between tiles. Subsequent passes finished the job without a problem.
On carpet, the Lupe collected 46g of flour on a single pass, leaving a light dusting in places. Subsequent passes from another angle collected the residue satisfactorily.
Some of this is clearly down to the Lupe’s suction. It isn’t the most powerful vacuum we’ve ever seen, but it comes close. I measured suction of 11.4kPa on its standard mode, which can be cranked up to 21.4kPa in boost mode. However, such strong suction adds to the feeling of weight, particularly on carpet, as the suction pulls the vacuum down into the floor. The only vacuums we’ve tested recently with more powerful suction than this are the Dyson V15 Detect and the V11 Outsize.
I also like the way the filter and the bin are organised. They sit together in a single unit, but the filter is at the top and the huge collection area sits below it. This means that the collected fluff and dirt the vacuum picks up is immediately dropped into the storage space below, instead of being blown around the filter, as is often the case with stick vacuums that have smaller collection bins.
The battery life is also good. At its standard power setting, the Lupe lasted 29mins 3secs in our rundown test, which is conducted on short pile carpet with the motorised floor head engaged. This fell to 12mins 53secs on full power but can be extended to 41mins 55secs in its lowest power setting.
When it’s run down you can either charge the battery in situ, by connecting the charging cable to the vacuum, or you can remove the battery and charge that directly.
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Lupe Pure Cordless review: Should I buy it?
With a price this high, the Lupe can only really be compared to the best Dyson cordless stick vacuum cleaners. In terms of raw cleaning power, it isn’t as strong as the Dyson V15 Detect, which is a tiny step closer to perfection than the Lupe.
However, the Lupe Pure Cordless still has a lot going for it. I love that it can support itself like an upright, so you don’t have to find somewhere to lean it when you stop cleaning. It also has a huge collection bin, and the flexible extension tube gives it more versatility than you get with Dyson’s sticks.
Lastly, if you buy a Dyson and have both hard floor and carpet, you’ll be swapping floor heads all the time as you switch surfaces. The Lupe has the right floor head for both surfaces in a single unit. However, it’s fiddly to remove the floor head to convert it into its handheld mode, and it’s stiffer and less easy to manoeuvre on both carpet and hard floor, probably because of that dual-function floor head. If you want the dual surface floor head in a cheaper vacuum, Shark has a range of models that cost less than £250 in both stick, upright and hybrid formats.
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Lupe Pure Cordless review: A cordless vacuum with the power of an upright - Expert Reviews
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