Miele Blizzard CX1 Comfort PowerLine Vacuum
WHAT IS THE MIELE BLIZZARD CX1 COMFORT POWERLINE vacuum?
The Miele Blizzard CX1 Comfort PowerLine is Miele’s first bagless vacuum cleaner range. Having been a staunch proponent of bagged cleaners for years – and it still is – Miele has now thrown down the gauntlet and lot of reasearch and development dollars to offer a bagless option. It’s a winner and stunner vacuum.
Enter the range-topping Miele Blizzard CX1 Comfort PowerLine. This premium bagless cylinder vacuum cleaner is a suction powerhouse that is bristling with features.
Wireless remote control, variable power, self-cleaning low-maintenance filters, easy-to-empty bin and a raft of tools are just the beginning of the story. It is not great for pet hairs on carpets (there’s the Miele CX1 Cat & Dog version for that) – but otherwise, the Miele Blizzard CX1 Comfort PowerLine never fails to impress.
Out of the box, the flagship Comfort Miele Blizzard CX1 edition is a sleek-looking cylinder cleaner. Its white coachwork, darker panels and sweeping lines are reminiscent of a fly-bridge on a luxury yacht, and the crystal-clear bin offers you a window into the centre of its single cyclone bagless system. The Miele Blizzard CX1 isn’t small, nor is it light, but it certainly looks like it means business.
Pulling the cleaner around, the weight and size become irrelevant thanks to four Dynamic Drive casters. These combine 360-degree rotation with air-filled open rubber tyres, giving the cleaner super-smooth movement even over rough surfaces such as riven floor tiles.
They lose a little of their grace in very deep-pile carpet, but each caster body has a pair of parabolic ski-like mouldings to help stop the wheels bogging down.
At the back end of the cleaner a handle pulls up, allowing you to lift off the large cyclone and bin assembly with one hand. The single cyclone sees air-flow over 100kmh in its vortex, and Miele claims that it’s quieter and works more efficiently at variable power levels than multi-cyclone designs.
A full-size flap at the bottom swings open for easy bin unloading, aided by the fact the vortex chamber is at right angles to the bin so fluff and other larger debris can’t get stuck around a central core.
There’s a mesh gauze cup in the centre of the vortex, accessed by a panel that pulls off the back of the bin, and a finer mesh filter in a frame inside the bin. This doesn’t need regular cleaning, but when it does you have to get your hand in the bin to unclip its support frame.
The Miele Blizzard CX1 s real business filter is huge, housed in its own separate dust bin and has a self-cleaning function. Made by Gore (the company famous for Gore-Tex), the CleanStream filter is a folded fibrous canister with a row of prongs on the inside that rotate to agitate and flick dust out of the filter into the base of its bin.
The Miele Blizzard CX1 automatically detects when this filter is becoming blocked and pauses the vacuuming power for 20 seconds while it rotates the prongs to clear the filter. You can also initiate automatic filter cleaning by using the Comfort Clean button on the cleaner control panel at any time.
The filter canister pulls out of the cleaner and the filter pulls out of the bin so you can empty the contents; we found this didn’t need doing very often either. We got in the habit of giving the Comfort Clean feature a whirl every couple of cleaning sessions to keep the filter in tip-top performance.
Beside the Comfort Clean button, the control panel sports four power level indicators with graphics depicting increasing power for curtains, rugs, carpets and parquet/hard floors. There are no controls for this on the cleaner, however. That’s handled by Miele’s sumptuous comfort handle with its wireless remote control.
Powered by a long-life replaceable button battery, the remote buttons offer thumb control on/off and /- for power level. With the cleaner switched on, the last-used power level indicator pulses slowly until you press on/off on the handle. It starts slow and builds to that level. Up/down adjusts power level accordingly, and another press of the power button puts the Miele Blizzard CX1 into standby.
There is no shortage of tools on this top-spec model, although the Miele Blizzard CX1 Comfort PowerLine is clearly leaning towards hard floors and homes without pets.
The flexible hose, handle, tubes and tools all clip together and unclip with the consummate ease of a very slick and well-designed product. The telescopic metal tubes are a fine piece of engineering, feeling solid in the hand and fitted with a simple collar that pushes up or down to unlock the telescopic action.
At full length they offer plenty of scope for high-up cobwebs, and we found them comfortable vacuuming at floor height with the tubes extended about half way.
Six tools are supplied, majoring on Miele’s EcoTeq Plus multi-purpose floor-head. This mid-size head is nicely articulated with a tilt-and-pivot neck and two large rear rollers, so easy to manoeuvre around obstacles.
The base runs flush over carpet, with just a couple of thread-catching pads for support. This provides a good, deep clean of carpets – but will see the head sticking down on full power. Tap the foot switch on top of the head and two rows of stiff bristles drop down for hard floors.
- 21 Mar, 2022
