Never vacuum again! Ecovacs T30S Combo

Vacuum cleaning – let’s face it, doing just about anything else is more fun than hoovering. Thank goodness for Ecovacs, whose capable robots free up my inner lazy bastard by vacuuming and mopping so I don’t have to.

That said, there are the odd spots that a robot cannot reach, such as stairs, ceiling architraves and behind/under furniture. Robotics are advancing at a cracking pace,  but for a robot vacuum cleaner to reach these spots, you’d need something like Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. And at around US$30K, that doesn’t make economic sense. This wee conundrum must have been weighing heavily on the minds of the Ecovacs product team as they’ve launched the T30S Combo, which along with a robot, comes with a handheld vacuum (plus attachments) that fits into the base station for both charging and emptying.

You can have the Ecovacs Deebot T30S combo in any colour you want as long as you choose matte black. Handily, this means its XXL-sized base station seamlessly blends into the background. When I say XXL, I’m not kidding. The addition of a handheld vacuum cleaner and its extra charging/emptying slot means the base station is correspondingly large, measuring at half a metre wide and tall.

The robot vacuum itself is a rounded dustbin lid-sized doodah, as is the norm for most robot vacuums. Like other Ecovacs robots, a raised housing on its top houses its LIDAR sensor (used for navigation and room mapping). Its front sports additional laser sensors for obstacle avoidance, plus a bumper that registers when it bumps into anything. There’s also a side brush for sweeping debris under the vacuum and into the roller brush, whose V-shaped bristles are designed not to get tangled up with pet hair.

At its rear are two mop pads that lift by 9mm if the robot detects it’s on carpet and descend when it’s cleaning hard surfaces. If the robot detects that it’s cleaning near an edge, the closest mop will extend to clean the outermost edges. The base station has twin reservoirs, one for clean water and one for dirty water from the mops, which get a hot wash and dry whenever the robot docks with the station. There’s also a panel on the front that opens to provide access to the dust bag. With the robot and handheld vacuum being self-emptied, anyone with allergies/asthma need not meet any dust.

So, how did the T30S perform? Because it uses machine learning to navigate and vacuum, I did notice that it initially needed some help with a few items I’d forgotten to pick up off the floor and other obstacles, such as phone charging cables and the odd sock. Over time, however, these issues became increasingly rare to the point where after a few weeks they were no longer an issue.

The T30S acquitted itself well when it came to vacuuming and mopping. As my shit-tastic luck would have it, I accidentally spilt a jar of lentils (Woke food! – School Lunch Editor) all over the kitchen floor the morning I’d planned to test the robot’s suckiness. But, like they say, “When it rains lemons (erm lentils), make lemonade (or veggie curry)”. So, using Alexa, I summoned the T30S to do my bidding and clean up the kitchen floor. Everything was hoovered up, and the floor sparkled thanks to a thorough and systematic mopping.

A key area that many robo vacs I’ve previously reviewed have sucked at (see what I did there?) is with getting into and cleaning edges, particularly under our kitchen cabinet kickboards. The T30S handled this well thanks to its mop pads, which extended out when mopping edges for a thorough cleaning.

While there were a few areas the robot could not reach (under some chairs, for instance), the handheld vacuum was more than up to the job. It follows the usual battery-powered stick vacuum cleaner design with a battery, filter and dustbin attached to a long pipe assembly with a motorised cleaning head at its end. In use, it had plenty of suction. Thanks to the useful bundled cleaning tools (the mini power brush proved great for getting into tight spaces), I was soon done and had barely broken a sweat.

Having reviewed my fair share of robot vacuum cleaners, I usually find that even if their hardware is capable, they’re often let down by poorly thought-through software. As with previous models, the Ecovacs app proved both intuitive and useful. It gives a solid level of control over the robot’s cleaning process, allowing you to choose whether to vacuum or mop and to adjust what strength both vacuuming and mopping run at. Cleaning can be scheduled, and there are a ton of other fine-tuning controls.

One area that really stood out was the mapping process, where the robot, once unpacked and fully charged, drove from room to room, mapping the layout of my home. The mapping process took 30-40 minutes, and at the end of it, I had a rough map of my house, which the app then allowed me to edit and name individual rooms. This handily allowed me to use the app and the Ecovacs Alexa skill to get separate rooms cleaned by saying, “Alexa, ask Deebot to clean the Dogs’ Bollocks.”

According to Ecovacs, the T30S robot battery will power the robot for around 180 minutes (your mileage will vary, depending on what settings are used in the app), but in practice, I found that the robot never ran out of juice while cleaning. Because the base station uses fast charging, the robot was always fully charged and ready to rumble.

So, is the T30S Combo all that and a jar of spilt lentils? While there’s no denying that its base station is significantly bulkier than its robot-only siblings, the addition of a decent handheld stick vac proved very handy indeed. That both the robot and stick vac self empties is a definite benefit. The robot, as with other recent robot vacuum cleaners from Ecovacs, proved highly capable, and its vacuuming/mopping was easily on par with what you’d expect from a human doing the same job. While the T30S Combo will set you back a cool $2499, you do get one hell of a capable robot for your money and your inner lazy bastard will definitely thank you.

https://www.ecovacs.com/nz/deebot-robotic-vacuum-cleaner/deebot-t30s-combo-complete-black