AEG AG5012UK UltraPower review

With no cable and a rechargeable battery pack, the AG5012UK UltraPower is AEG’s most versatile upright vacuum cleaner. The lithium batteries should last for sixty minutes of continuous cleaning, which is more than enough to completely cover the average flat.

In many ways, the UltraPower is a decidedly simple vacuum. It has no hose or accessories for getting into tricky corners and only two buttons: power and suction, the latter of which adjusts suction power. The UltraPower has several power levels for dealing with stubborn dirt, but that’s it.

The brush head has built-in headlights, illuminating your floors as you clean. It’s a novel idea, but we would have liked the option to turn them off and save battery power. The nozzle itself can turn left and right with ease, but feels somewhat stiff when sweeping forward and the UltraPower works best when pulling the brush towards you.

The Lithium battery pack is removable, and therefore replaceable, so you don’t need to worry about having to throw the vacuum out when the battery eventually stops holding its charge years down the line.

The charging station can be mounted on a wall or screwed to the floor and the vacuum simply slides in. The battery pack recharges in around four hours, drawing roughly 18 watts from the mains. It’s tough to say exactly how much the UltraPower will add to your electricity bill over the course of a year, but it should be less than you would use charging a smartphone over the same length of time.

AEG doesn’t list the UltraPower’s maximum power rating, but that didn’t stop us from testing it using our suction meter. On the Turbo setting, it produced around 8kPa when empty or partly full, but dropped to 7.5kPa when full. This is easily the lowest score we’ve seen from a vacuum cleaner to date, but also unsurprising given that it isn’t using mains power and is also incredibly compact.

In practice, this meant we had to sweep more than with most other vacuums, but we still managed to get every bit of our test sample of cat litter up from both carpets and hard floors. Just keep in mind that the bin is rather small, so you may need to take several trips to completely clean a house. At 0.8 litres, it’s at least half the size of many vacuums.

At £200, the AG5012UK UltraPower costs as much as most full-size cylinder vacuum cleaners. You end up paying a significant premium for its wireless freedom, so with comparatively low suction to other cleaners and a tiny capacity, you really have to want to cut the cable to opt for this. We think the regular AEG UltraCaptic Animal is the better choice.