The steam stops automatically, straight away, when you stand the iron vertically on its heel. The iron also boasts an auto-off function that is effective but too slow: it’s good that it beeps to alert you when it turns off, but 1 minute is too long to leave an iron on your clothes if you get distracted. Steam power is modest. It gets the job done, but you find yourself having to pass the iron over a crease several times when an iron with more powerful steam would have nailed it in one.

We also found that light fabrics clung the soleplate too much as we lifted the iron from the board.Finally, there’s nowhere to wrap the power cord – if you try wrapping it round the base of the iron it just falls off – and there’s no clip to hold the cord to itself. Just the controls are visible, then. A simple red dial on the body to set the temperature, a pair of grey buttons under your thumb to trigger water spray and 120g/min steam shot, and a grey thumb lever that you push to the right to control the constant steam of up to 45g/min. This lever also doubles as a trigger for the anti-calc system: heat the iron, unplug it and then push the lever it all the way to the right (over a sink) to flush out any limescale deposits. Features include an auto-off function that turns off the power after 1 minute left still horizontally or 8 minutes when left still vertically. The 120g/min steam shot doesn’t seem remarkably powerful… until you consider that this is a budget iron, at which point it becomes impressive. We’ve seen irons at twice the price produce less steam. Steaming vertically, we found we could produce 11 good pumps of steam before it started gasping. And the 45g/min constant steam was impressive, it just kept on coming.