Rowenta RO8049

Rowenta pitches its Silence Force Cyclonic RO8049 as an ultra-powerful, ultra-quiet vacuum cleaner with the added advantage of a self-cleaning filter.

The manufacturer claims that this excellent performance is due to a suction power of 29 kPa, cyclonic technology, a motor that is four times quieter than the competition and a huge energy consumption of 2100 Watts.  The one thing we know for certain is that turning it on will send the electricity bill sky-high, but does it do the job?

Ease of use


The RO8049 is very easy to use, made up of a single unit with big buttons.  The finish is impeccable, and the different parts clip together well with a reassuring click.  When you first use it, it takes a little while to work out how it all fits together but it soon becomes clear.  There's no mistaking what the two controls do: one is the on/off switch, the other winds the cable.  There's nothing else to worry about.  It's the same with the different accessories, like the brush for wooden floors and the attachments for furniture and getting into corners: they clip neatly on to the handle.

The handle left us somewhat surprised, actually, as it weighs 1.5 kg on its own.  If you add the main unit, the total weight climbs to 7 kg, which makes it much more tricky to handle than upright vacuum cleaners.

Other than that, there's an indicator of how full the bin is (though at 2 litres, it doesn't hold much), along with another for washing the HEPA 13 filter.

Suction

Five seconds from beginning to end to suck up two litres of dry rice: the RO8049 is a fast worker!

Surface	Score
Lino
Floorboards
Carpet tile
Deep-pile carpet

Logically enough, it turned out to be very efficient on hard surfaces (only one pass over our lino and floorboards) a little less so on carpet tiles (we needed to go back over them) and finally, like almost all the hoovers we tested, much less effective on deep-pile carpet.  We had to go over the hairs five times to get them all up.

It won't be the quickest at getting the job done either, because even if you go over the same ground the same number of times, it only covers around 27 cm of carpet at once.  That means it will take more work than some others to cover the same area.

However, you'll see later on that it's only this fast if you regularly maintain it and keep the filter clean; otherwise, the performance worsens.

Noise

We measured noise levels of 70 dB from a distance of one metre, so calling it 'quiet' seems a little bit of an exaggeration to us.  That said, it's still an excellent result for a bagless vacuum cleaner.


Other hoovers definitely make more noise, with the Dyson reaching 80 dB, but the quietest hoovers with bags are closer to 60 dB.  The noise levels are the same no matter how full the bin is.

Energy Consumption

So the big question is: have Rowenta's engineers delivered their promised threat, and made you use 2100 W as soon as you turn your new vacuum cleaner on?  No, but they came close: we found consumption peaked at 1860 W, which is a huge amount of energy however you look at it.

Emptying and Cleaning

Things really didn't go well here.  The cone-shaped filter really couldn't handle cocoa powder, and the way you get it out doesn't help matters.  Opening the bin causes a small amount of air to rush in, causing some of what's caught in the pleats of the filter to fall out.


Cleaning the filter wasn't much fun either.  We got it back looking new again, but it took a lot of work.  The smell of the cocoa powder took a lot time to disappear.  The most annoying thing is that the suction power falls if you don't do this regularly.  Because it starts so high to begin with, you probably won't notice at first, but as time goes by, the filter gradually gets more and more clogged up.  We found this happened more quickly here than it did on some competing models, with Dyson not affected by the problem at all.

• Weight of filter before the cocoa test: 917 g
• Weight of filter after: 927 g

So 10 g are stuck in the filter somewhere rather than on the other side in the bin.

The RO8049 also has an automatic filter cleaning mode, which you can sometimes hear working.  We weren't at all convinced that it did anything to help matters.