Easine by iLife H55 cordless stick vacuum

The more you’re at home the more you notice things like dirty floors, pet hair tumbleweeds and dusty surfaces. No surprise more of us are shopping for vacuums. I recently got the chance to test out a new brand, for me. The iLife H55 cordless Stick Vacuum arrived to my test kitchen for review. I’ll tell you what it can do, what it works well for and what it doesn’t and if I think it’s a good cordless vacuum for your home.

What is iLife H55 Easine?

iLife H55 is a cordless, rechargeable handheld stick vacuum. It’s designed for cleaning small spaces at home, or places like the car or RV, thanks to a small cleaner head and crevice tool for narrow spaces inside vehicles. iLife says the battery has a 40 minute run time. There’s a mid-sized 1.5L dust bin in the back that empties at the flip of a latch and you can wash the filters in the sink. You can usually get a few rounds of vacuuming in before you need to empty it, depending of course on how big the mess is.

The vacuum stores either on the wall with the bracket or you can actually hook the motor body onto the stick end and it will stand on its own (Look for a u-shaped channel on the bottom of the motor unit, and hook that over the small bracket/hook on the extension tube/stick) . A nice idea… my only complaint about that is iLife doesn’t tell you that or show you how to do it in the manual… so consider this our little secret. There’s also nowhere to clip the extra brush tool.

To use the H55, push the trigger once; the vacuum will run until you turn it off, which is a nice feature and means you don’t need to keep constant pressure on the trigger.

Emptying the dust bin is done by releasing the base of the cup over the garbage.

Attachments and options for iLife H55 Easine

Unlike some vacuums, this one has only the barest essentials when it comes to attachments.
There’s the key Motorized Swivelling Floor Head which is made to vacuum hard floors and carpets. You also get an aluminum extension tube, a small crevice tool, an extra bristle roller brush, extra filter, plus a wall mounting bracket and cleaning tool.

Cleaning Modes: regular and Max

The iLife H55 has two power modes: regular and Max. There is s small but noticeable noise level increase when you switch from one to the other using the button on top iof the motor body. We’ll get to the differences in actual power in a sec…

Suction power & cleaning: how powerful is iLife H55 Easine?

I wasn’t impressed with the suction power overall. When I was using the vacuum on the carpets, I found I needed to go over areas multiple times to get all the debris.

Worse for me was that the motorized brush head more often than not just pushed the debris out in front of it, and often right off the rug and into a gap where the suction just didn’t have the power to lift it.

This is why stuff is getting pushed around…Rather shockingly, the motorized floor head has no wheels and nothing to lift it off the flooring surface, which means it’s actually terrible at taking on anything with an edge head on.

Vacuum tests: iLife H55 Easine

I usually run vacuums that I review through a series of tests; picking up flour, crumbs, oatmeal and cracker bits on both carpet and hard flooring. I put the iLife H55 through those same tests.

On hard flooring, it was fine at bigger debris like oatmeal and cracker pieces. It was not good at finer debris like sugar; it just pushed it out over the floor and it took a couple passes to get it all.

On carpet, it would push the larger bits out ahead of the cleaning brush and never seem to collect them. Again, I was often using many many passes to make sure I got everything.

I decided to investigate why… and to my surprise I found there is virtually no suction coming from the base of the vacuum with the brush head on—and that’s in both regular and Max mode.

Waving a small piece of paper in front of it and the motor isn’t even strong enough to pull that in. This vacuum seems to be relying on the rotation of the brush to pull dirt in, not any kind of suction power. I have to say, I’m shocked.

With the motor head and extender removed, and just the small crevice tool on there, the motor is still barely strong enough to holds the paper up to the mouth of the brush.

Battery life & charging

View battery life at a glance using the lighted bars on the motor. iLife says the H55 has a “High capacity 8-cell Li-ion battery powers up to 40 minutes of vacuuming with strong, consistent suction, covering a space of 2100 square feet. Using that I should get about 13 minutes of battery life per bar. There’s no digital minute display of how much runtime you have left so you will want to mind the indicator.

You can charge the vacuum in two ways; remove and charge only the battery pack, or charge the whole vac.

Weight and portability

This vacuum is surprisingly a bit heavier than it looks (it weighs just over 5 lbs) and I wouldn’t say it’s weighted well, as it always wants to pull forward.

It does lock so you can just lean it in a corner, but unlocking it feels a bit like like it’s breaking.

Is iLife H55 noisy?

This vacuum isn’t overly noisy; the motor does sound more like a giant cloud of bees than a powerful motor, and it only gets marginally louder in max mode. I’d rate the noise level average to louder.

Overall review iLife H55 cordless stick vacuum

Overall there are a couple of okay qualities to this vacuum, but I’d say the cons far outweigh the pros. Rather than beat a dead horse, I’ll just say that for me, a vacuum is all about suction power and since the H55 has barely any suction, it doesn’t clean as thoroughly and therefore would not be a good choice for your home. The rated suction on the H55 is just over 10 kpa, and I’d say typical power for a portable vac is about 20, so this is definitely weak.

The H55 will be available on Amazon soon, for around $120USD.