Design & features
It’s a straightforward, tubular cleaner in plastic and metal that comes in two shades of grey: a darker space grey and a lighter shade. It’s much more attractive that many of its competitors at the same price point and it has a couple of useful features that you’d expect from a much more expensive cleaner – namely headlights and a colour OLED display. You might wonder why you’d really need a display on a vac but it has one really stand-out advantage. It shows you the remaining battery life, which is absolutely invaluable in a cordless. Without a display, you need to be incredibly vigilant and organised about charging your cleaner so that you don’t wind up holding a useless cleaner with half a bag of rice spilt over your kitchen floor and guests knocking at your door.
As it’s displayed as a percentage, rather than the standard four bars, you get a much more accurate sense of how long you have left. And when you switch to a higher power setting, you’ll see how much more quickly the battery drains. The photosensitive vacuum cleaner headlights are also an excellent feature, illuminating all the little bits that would otherwise escape your notice. (If you haven’t used a vac with LEDs before: welcome to the nightmare of seeing how gross the floor next to your fridge really is.)
Performance
The X30 Pro is a really efficient cleaner, with 155AW of suction power. It’s often quite hard to compare vacuum cleaners head-to-head as some manufacturers measure the wattage and some use air watts and some are pretty cagey about the whole business. But in this case, the X30 Pro measures up pretty well to the king of the cordless cleaners, the Dyson V11, which has 185AW of suction. It also has a well designed cleaning head and is easy to manoeuvre, both of which improve its cleaning power. At 2.7kg, it’s also one of the lightest cleaners we’ve tested. This may or may not be a dealbreaker for you but the weight of a vacuum cleaner makes a huge difference to me and I found the X30 Pro very comfortable to use. The bin at 0.55 litres isn’t massive, but it’s roughly comparable to other cordless cleaners of this kind. Miele’s TriFlex is 0.5l and the Dyson V11 is is 0.75l. It’s easy to open and empty (if a bit stiff) and the Hepa-grade filter can be taken apart and washed out, which is handy. It claims six levels of filtration, including two antibacterial filters. This is obviously very hard to test, so we’ll have to take their word for it. One slightly negative point is the noise the cleaner makes. It claims to be an ultra-quiet 75dB but it’s quite a high, whining sound, set at just the right pitch to make a headache or a hangover go supernova. It’s not too bad on the lowest setting, which is all you’ll need for most cleaning jobs, but the noise levels of the medium and high settings are a bit stressful.
Charging
The manufacturer claims that the X30 Pro will run for 70 minutes before needing to recharge. That’s obviously on the lowest setting. I can’t confirm this exactly as I tend to turn up the power as needed, which affects the running time but I think the battery life is as good as anything else on the market and, with the clear display, it’s easy not to get caught out. The charging dock is a great feature. You can choose to charge the vacuum cleaner by plugging it straight in to the charging cord but it also comes with a handy little charging disc, which can be screwed or stuck to the wall. The cleaner attaches and charges magnetically. It’s a neat little solution that means you don’t need a cumbersome dock and you don’t have to remember to plug it in when you finish cleaning.
Accessories
Good accessories can make a huge difference to how well you can clean a room and how easy – or conversely, how annoying – it is to do so. Some cleaners (for example, the Miele Triflex) come with only the standard accessories. Others, like the Samsung Powerstick Jet, come with an armful of useful add-ons. The X30 Pro has some strange options where accessories are concerned. It comes with the expected bits: a crevice tool, soft brush, motorised main head and compact mattress head.
Then there’s the mop. The mop head is a bar-shaped attachment that clips magnetically to the back of the main vacuuming head. Fill the tank, attach it and you can vacuum and mop at the same time. But do people want to do this? Is it effective? Is it a time-saver? I’m not sold. I found myself sawing back and forth several times just to make a little tea stain disappear, and I don’t think I’d reach for this cleaner over an actual mop next time. There’s also an extension hose and pet brush attachment. You might imagine that this is for vacuuming up pet hair – and you’d be right. Except that you’re supposed to use it to vacuum your pet itself. Does that sound mad to anyone else? I can’t fathom the logic of deciding you have the budget to include an extra accessory and deciding that it should be a pet-hair-vacuum-brush. Do pets generally like vacuum cleaners? Mine don’t. I dutifully followed the cat around with this Ghostbusters-like attachment until his wild-eyed terror convinced me it was never going to happen. In short: this was not a welcome technological advancement in my household.
App
The X30 is a connected device, although as the screen displays battery and filter life, and the main body of the cleaner has a button that allows you to change the power setting, you don’t need the app for everyday use. It’s useful for longer-term settings, for example, adjusting the screen brightness and resetting the filter usage display when you change the filter. These settings are very straightforward to change. The app also shows some mildly interesting info, including the cumulative cleaned area (measured in basketball courts) and the total amount of calories expended while using the device. But novelty value aside, this information isn’t particularly useful, so essentially you’ll be downloading yet another app just to manage a few settings.
Price and availability
At £320.87, this is a mid-price cleaner. It’s currently only available from Indiegogo, but like Roidmi’s earlier cordless models, we expect it to be rolling out more widely to online retailers in the coming months once it gets CE approval.
Verdict
There have been a host of great vacuum cleaners coming onto the market recently, but a number of these have been at the £600 price point, as competitors to the Dyson V11. The Roidmi X30 Pro shares some of their upmarket features, including an OLED screen and vacuum headlights, but at half the price. We’re not convinced by the mop and the pet brush is a missed opportunity to include a really handy extra attachment, but these are essentially just add-ons. This a great vacuum cleaner with features that will genuinely make your life easier. While we can’t recommend it for larger homes – you’ll really need a spare battery to make a cordless practical for that – it would be a great buy for city-dwellers and people living in smaller homes. Emma is Home Tech Editor at Tech Advisor. She covers everything from kitchen appliances to smart home devices, from floor care to personal care to air care technology. She’s particularly interested in environmentally conscious brands and products that save people time and money.
