Shark Navigator Lift-Away Upright Vacuum NV356E

This vacuum has been on sale, in roughly this form, for over ten years. That is unusual in a category that reinvents itself every season, and the reason is that the core idea — an upright that detaches into a canister — solves a real problem better than most cordless machines do.

Lift-Away

Press a button and the dust cup and motor lift off the floor head, leaving you with a lightweight canister you carry by the handle. Stairs, curtains, ceiling corners and car interiors all become straightforward, and you are not fighting a full-size upright up a staircase. Cordless stick vacuums achieve something similar but with a fraction of the runtime and, usually, less suction.

Suction and filtration

Corded means constant full power — no fade at the end of a room, no watching a battery indicator. The Anti-Allergen Complete Seal is the other selling point: the HEPA filter is sealed into the airflow path so the fine dust it captures does not leak back out through the body. Shark quotes 99.9 per cent of dust and allergens trapped. For a house with pets or an allergy sufferer, a sealed system matters more than a headline suction figure.

The sealing is the part worth understanding, because it is what separates an allergy vacuum from a vacuum with a HEPA filter in it. An unsealed machine pulls dust through the filter and then leaks a portion of it out of the joints in the body, which is why a room can smell dusty after vacuuming. Sealed means the only way out is through the filter. It is also why a torn seal or a filter refitted crooked quietly undoes the whole feature.

Floors

A brushroll shutoff switches it between carpet and hard floors. On carpet the brushroll agitates and lifts; on wood you turn it off so it stops flinging grit around. Swivel steering makes it manoeuvrable for its size. The dust cup is 0.87 litres, which is small enough that a whole-house clean means emptying it once or twice.

The maintenance that decides how long it lasts

Almost every "my Shark lost suction" story is one of five things, and all of them are ten-minute jobs.

The twenty-four hours of drying is the rule people break. A damp foam filter restricts airflow far more than a dirty one, and running the machine with it wet is how motors get cooked. Two sets of filters cost very little and mean you never have to choose between waiting and risking it.

Corded against cordless, honestly

A cordless stick is better at the two-minute job: crumbs under a highchair, one room, the stairs on the way past. It will beat this machine on convenience every time and you will use it more often. A corded upright is better at the whole-house clean, deep carpet, and anything involving a lot of pet hair, because power does not taper and there is no run to the charger halfway through. If the house is large, carpeted or full of animals, corded is still the right primary machine. If it is a small flat with hard floors, it is not.

Where it shows its age

It is corded, so you are unplugging and re-plugging as you move through the house. It is not light — the full upright is a proper machine to carry upstairs, which is what Lift-Away is for. The plastics feel functional rather than premium, and the filters need rinsing under a tap and a full twenty-four hours of air drying, which people forget and then wonder why suction dropped.

Should you buy it?

Buy the NV356E if you have carpet, pets or an allergy sufferer in the house, and you would rather have constant power than cordless convenience. Skip it if you want to grab a vacuum for two minutes without finding a socket, or if your home is all hard floors and small.