Audew Cordless Vacuum Cleaner review

REVIEW – My wife worked for a home cleaning company for a while.  When it came time to buy a new vacuum cleaner for our house, she knew from experience exactly which model to buy, one that was both powerful and long-lasting.  Not every job around the house, however, is a good match for a full-size vacuum.  Sometimes it’s a pain to get the vacuum where it’s needed, such as the stairs or the car; other times the mess is too small to be worth the effort of hauling out the big vacuum.  For jobs like these, a small cordless vacuum cleaner, like this one from Audew, is the perfect tool for the job.

What is it?

The Audew Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is a handheld, rechargeable vacuum cleaner designed to handle small messes in awkward places.

What’s in the box?

• The vacuum
• A removable battery and a small power adapter
• Two attachments, one with a brush and one with a long nozzle
• A brush for cleaning the filter
• A multilingual manual with 4 pages of instructions in English.

Hardware specs

The battery is rated at 2200mAh and 300 charge cycles.  This is fairly typical for Lithium-Ion batteries and should last 2 to 3 years.  The manual says that the expected run time is only 20 to 22 minutes, so its best used for quicker jobs.  It also says that it takes 4 to 5 hours to fully charge.

Setup

The battery is not pre-charged, so the first thing to do after unboxing is to insert the battery into the bottom of the vacuum, attach the charger, and then plug it into the wall.  Then it’s time to wait; my battery took nearly 5 hours to charge.  Although the battery is removable, it must be in the vacuum in order to charge; the length of the cable on the adapter is a handy 6 feet, allowing it to be put up on a table or counter while charging.  While the battery is charging, there’s a red light on top; when finished, the light turns blue.

Design and features

After the blue light appeared, I promptly set out to do some vacuuming.  I unplugged the adapter and pressed the on button.  Nothing happened.  I was suddenly concerned that I had a lemon on my hands.  After a bit of experimenting, I found the trick:  You have press and hold the on button for a couple seconds before it turns on.  I suppose this prevents it from being accidently turned on, if it gets bumped in the closet.  This is not really a problem, but it is a bit unexpected; I imagine that I’ll get used to it eventually.

Off I went on a cleaning frenzy.  No nook or cranny escaped the suctioning power of my little friend, not the floor in the half bath, the space beside the fridge, the edge of the stairs, not even the floorboards along the hall.  The most important question at this point in the review is obvious:  Does it work?  Does it do a good job vacuuming?  Yes, it works, and yes, it certainly does a good job.  In only a few minutes of vacuuming, I could see a considerable amount of detritus and debris in the vacuum’s dust cup, doing its best to clog the filter.

To clean the filter, I first pressed the button on top.  This allowed me to detach the dust cup from the base.

I then pulled the filter out of the dust cup.  Look at all the junk it captured!

I took the filter over to the trash can and pulled off all the easy to grab junk, like the hair and the yarn.  Although this cleared out the vast majority of the junk, there was still some finer dirt and dust captured in the ridges of the filter.

To clean this out, I took the filter to the sink and ran water over it, just like it shows on Audew’s website.

For the really stubborn dirt and dust that doesn’t want to come out, there’s a small cleaning brush.  Rubbing this back and forth a few times completely cleaned the filter.  I put it on a towel and left it to air dry.

Although Audew’s website says that the filter is made of stainless steel, small spots of what appears to be rust showed up on the filter after the first washing.  I think it’s better to not use water. In the following days, whenever I needed to clean the filter, I used the cleaning brush and brushed out the dirt and dust into the trash can.  It’s the perfect tool for this task, and I’m really glad that Audew included this nice touch.

The mouth of the vacuum is only 2 inches wide at its widest point.  This was perfect for vacuuming hard to reach places, like the floor behind the toilet and under the cabinets in the kitchen.  It was not, however, a good match for vacuuming the carpet on the stairs.  Although it’s light and easy to use, the small mouth meant that it just took too long to clean each stair.  Perhaps if it had a wide-mouth attachment, this problem would be solved.

To test the brush attachment, I began dusting all the places around the house that don’t get dusted enough, like the top of the door frames, the desk behind my computer monitor, the windowsills, the top of the fridge, and the blinds.  The light weight of the vacuum made it easy to dust these hard-to-reach places.  Although it did a good job and got most of the dust, it didn’t quite do a perfect job.  After dusting my desk carefully, I rubbed my finger along the top and there was still a fine layer of dust there.  For most tasks, however, Audew’s vacuum does a more than good enough job.

To test the nozzle attachment with the long nozzle, I headed out to the garage to vacuum out my car.  It was handy for vacuuming the floors, along the edge of the seats, and other hard-to-reach places, although I again wanted that wide-mouth attachment for the seat backs.

In order to test the battery, I charged it up and then ran it non-stop.  It lasted for 20 minutes and 30 seconds, which is within the range specified in the manual.  While this is just fine for small jobs, keep in mind that it’s not going to be as helpful for big jobs, like spring cleaning or moving day, where you need to use it again and again.  When the battery starts to run low, it doesn’t give any visual indication; the vacuum simply turns itself off when the charge runs out.  Although the battery and the filter are both removable, I couldn’t any mention of where to buy replacements, should that be necessary, neither on Audew’s website nor on Amazon.

What I like

• Light weight
• Easy-to-use
• Gets the job done

What needs to be improved

• Wide-mouth attachment
• An option to buy a second battery

Final thoughts

In the end, Audew’s Cordless Vacuum Cleaner is a welcome addition to our house.  This vacuum is perfect for those small jobs where it’s either too much hassle to get out your big vacuum or for those hard-to-reach places.  It’s definitely worth your consideration, so long as you keep its (few) limitations in mind.

Price: $48.00
Where to buy:  Amazon
Source:  The sample for this review was provided by Audew.