Cost Per Litre: The Real Price of a Henry Hoover Bag

Most people compare vacuum bags by pack price and stop there. It is a reasonable shortcut, and it is the wrong one. A bag is a container, and what you are buying is capacity. The useful number is what each litre costs.

Why pack price misleads

A pack of ten bags at one price and a pack of ten bags at another look comparable. They are only comparable if the bags are the same size. If one bag holds 9 litres and the other holds 6, the packs are not the same product, even though the label says “10 bags” on both.

The genuine Numatic bag for the Henry (the NVM-1CH) is a 9 litre bag. Most compatibles on the market are 6 litres, which is 33% smaller. We covered that in detail in our 9L vs 6L guide. Here we just do the sums.

The arithmetic on our packs

Cost per bag and cost per litre, for each NuClean pack. Every NuClean bag is a full 9 litres.

• Pack of 10, £9.99: about £1.00 per bag, which is 11.1p per litre.
• 10 Pack + 10 Freshener Sticks, £11.99: about £1.20 per bag, 13.3p per litre, with a freshener stick for each bag included.
• 20 Pack + 20 Freshener Sticks, £19.99: about £1.00 per bag, 11.1p per litre, freshener sticks included. This is the best per-bag value in the range.

Delivery is free in the UK on every order, so there is nothing to add on top of those figures.

What a 6L bag would have to cost to match

Take a pack of ten 6L bags. That is 60 litres of capacity. A pack of ten 9L bags is 90 litres. To get the same 90 litres from 6L bags you need 15 of them.

So for a 6L bag to cost the same per litre as our £9.99 pack, it would need to cost about £0.67 per bag. If it costs the same £1.00 per bag, you are paying roughly 50% more per litre than you need to. That is the whole argument, and it needs no adjectives.

The gap is easy to see in a table of how many bags it takes to move the same amount of dust:

1. 90 litres of capacity: 10 bags at 9L, or 15 bags at 6L.
2. 180 litres of capacity: 20 bags at 9L, or 30 bags at 6L.

The costs the per-litre figure does not show

Cost per litre is the cleanest comparison, but it understates the difference in a few ways.

• Fewer changes. Every bag you do not have to swap is a job you do not do. Over a year that adds up to minutes, not seconds.
• Fewer bags to store and reorder. One pack lasts longer, so you run out less often.
• Less waste going in the bin. Fifteen bags to do the work of ten is five extra bags of packaging and plastic neck.

If you want to know when a bag actually needs changing rather than guessing, our guide on how often to change your Henry Hoover bag covers it.

When per-litre is not the point

A cheap bag that tears, leaks fine dust or does not fit the collar properly is not cheap, whatever its per-litre figure says. Capacity only counts if the bag holds together. That is a fit and build question, not an arithmetic one, and it is worth checking before you buy anything.

For cleaning businesses buying in volume, the same sums scale up quickly, which is why we offer bulk trade packs.

Related guides

• 9L vs 6L Henry Hoover Bags — Why Size Matters
• The Hidden Costs of Cheap Vacuum Bags

Written by the NuClean team. We're an independent UK brand; NuClean bags are a compatible replacement, not manufactured by Numatic. The Numatic and Henry names and part numbers are used for reference only.