Dreame Z30

If you make a so-called "cordless vacuum" and it doesn't offer any kind of floor cleaning on top of it, you're standing at the foot of the Mount Everest of marketing. How do you convince the tech-savvy, broader population that the product you've designed is better than a Dyson? Well, whether it's fair or not, they have a strong hold on this market and the collective mindshare too, but Dreame is now challenging in a big way.

The Dreame Z30 will set you back around £450, which is much less than a Dyson V15 Absolute, but Dreame is also going up against older, sensible Dyson models, so let's just say it's not exactly cheap. However, Dreame is a manufacturer worth taking note of, because they're going for a piece of the pie, and with their X-series of robotic vacuum cleaners, they have something worth saying.

The Z30 is a bagless vacuum cleaner in every sense of the word. There's a 600 millilitre circular chamber for dust and dirt, there are two 200mAh batteries that are easily hot-swappable and together provide over an hour of cleaning on even the most intense setting, and inside you'll find a HEPA filter, a foam filter and other filtration to keep even microscopic dust out of the most crucial components. It is, in other words, the essence of "pick up and play", and it requires very little setup to get started cleaning.

At the top, traditionally, we have a display that gives you access to a wide range of settings, including modes, and the build quality of this, and the rest of the vacuum cleaner for that matter, is quite sublime - if nothing else, it actually passes Dyson on this point, who are clever but not exactly streamlined in their aesthetics. The base itself is matte plastic, which gets dusty right away, but thankfully Dreame makes up for it with seven accessories in the box, including two central "heads" if you will. No, none of them are particularly good for carpets, unfortunately, but there's a lot in the box here, I'll give them that.

Both heads also feature "CelesTect LED", which means that two bright lights illuminate the floor in front of you, making it easier to hit dirt and sticks in all natural light conditions. It's a small addition, but one we praised in our Roborock review, so we'll do the same here.

Overall, the Dreame actually delivers most of what you'd expect here, from reliable suction, the aforementioned LED lights, plenty of accessories in the box, a functioning stand you actually get in the box instead of having to pay extra for (Dyson only gives you a wall-mounted stand) and a decent noise level of around 55dB in our test.

There is one annoyance, however, which is that although Dreame gives you a stand, it's not actually a charging stand because you still have to manually switch on the power supply to charge it. This means that you often grab the Z30 only to find out the power is too low, which is extremely annoying, especially because it couldn't have taken much to implement some form of charging in the base itself.

That said, it's easier to clean and maintain than a Dyson, and combined with the other factors, the Z30 only further cements Dreame's reputation as a worthy opponent to the established giants.