Super flexible, super simple cleaning

Introduction

A resolutely simple upright cordless vacuum cleaner, the Gtech Air Ram 3 offers power, ease of use, and excellent edge cleaning, sacrificing handheld tools in the process.

The trade-off is that this vacuum offers most of what you need it for, but does not offer handheld cleaning options, such as vacuuming out a car or drawer.

If you’ve already got a smaller handheld cordless vacuum cleaner that you use for these kinds of jobs, then the Gtech Air Ram 3 may just suit you for everything else.

Design and Features

• Grab and go design
• Can lay flat
• Slide-to-eject bin

Cleverly designed and with some nice touches, the Gtech Air Ram 3 is an upright cordless vacuum cleaner that’s been designed to stand up by itself. That’s brilliant when cleaning, as I could simply let go of the cleaner and move things around, but it also makes storage easy.

Cleverly, the handle is extendable, so the Gtech Air Ram 3 will easily fit in an understairs cupboard, while offering versatility and catering for people of all different heights.

Once done cleaning, I just had to drop the cleaner onto its charging base, which sits on the floor, and that was it. While on the dock, the removable battery, which plugs in just at the back of the floor head is charged. Once its green LEDs are full, the battery is fully charged.

I quite like the stitched-leather effect detail on the handles, one to hold while vacuuming and one for lifting the lightweight 3.8kg vacuum around.

There’s a similar detail on the floor head’s handle, which is used to lift out the 0.8-litre bin for emptying. This bin has a wide slot at the back, so be careful to hold it straight while carrying it to a bin, and then use the slide-to-eject mechanism to dump the dirt out.

Turn the vacuum cleaner over, and the floor head has a brush roll, but it also has two side sweeper brushes, similar to those on a robot vacuum cleaner. These brushes sweep dust from the edges of the room into the main suction path.

Using the Gtech Air Ram 3 couldn’t be easier. Tap the on/off button with your foot, and the vacuum kicks into life at its single speed; there are no modes to choose from here.

I then just moved the handle back and could easily push the vacuum cleaner forwards and backwards. It’s a highly manoeuvrable vacuum cleaner, with the universal joint on the handle, letting me swivel it in any direction to quickly dart around furniture.

I could even lay the handle flat for cleaning under furniture.

That’s a neat trick, but putting the bin on top of the floor head means that it’s a bit higher than the floor heads on most cordless cleaners, so I couldn’t get under my corner sofa.

There are no handheld tools with this vacuum cleaner, so you can’t use it to vacuum the sofa or stairs, or clean in a wardrobe. Rather, the Gtech Air Ram 3 is built for floors only, and other jobs will require a separate handheld vacuum cleaner.

While vacuuming, the four LEDs on the back of the vacuum extinguish one at a time to show the current charge. It’s a very basic system, and doesn’t give you a real runtime in minutes, as you get with the Dyson Gen5detect or Samsung AI Jet Ultra.

The vacuum cleaner runs a quick burst of suction to suck any remaining dust out of the cleaner. when it is turned off.

Performance

• Works well on hard floors
• Less impressive on carpets

I normally measure a vacuum cleaner’s suction power at its handle, but the Gtech Air Ram 3 does not have a handle, so I couldn’t do that. Instead, I had to go straight for my real-world tests, starting with the carpet test.

I added 20g of flour to the floor, and then gave the Gtech Air Ram 3 a single forward and backwards pass through the mess. This left quite a bit of flour in the middle of the carpet, as you can see from the image below.

I then vacuumed the carpet from different angles until it looked clean. Measuring the weight of the bin before and after, I found that the Gtech Air Ram 3 collected 65.35% of the mess. On closer inspection, I found quite a bit of the dust around the floor head and brush. That result puts the Air Ram 3 close to the performance of the entry-level Hoover HF2 Pet.

Next, I added 10g of flour to the carpet tiles, right up to the skirting board. While the Air Ram 3 hugged the skirting board and its side brushes did a good job of pushing some dust into the main suction path.

At the end of cleaning, there was a thin line of dust left on the carpet, and no way of removing it.

Overall, the Gtech Air Ram 3 managed to collect 77.4% of the dust in its bin, which is a basic level of performance.

Hard floor performance was better, and the Gtech Air Ram 3 collected 100% of the rice grains that I dropped on the floor, while its side brushes helped collect some missed flour from the edge of the room where I’d been testing robot vacuum cleaners.

Back to carpet, I combed cat hair into the fibres, and the Gtech Air Ram 3 had no trouble removing the mess.

I then added long human hair to the carpet. This was removed, but there’s no anti-tangle brush head, so the hair was wrapped quite tightly around the brush roll. Gtech does provide a tool for cutting away hair, but if you have a lot of hair in your home, a cleaner with an anti-tangle brush, such as the Shark PowerDetect Clean & Empty IP3251UKT would be better.

I measured the vacuum cleaner at 72.4dB, which is average for a cordless cleaner in a higher-power mode. It’s certainly loud enough to hear, with the noise of both the suction power and the motorised brushes.

Battery life came in at 22m 42s, which is enough time to clean the floor space of a typical house, although, as mentioned, you’ll need to tackle stairs, soft furnishing and any other hard-to-reach areas with a handheld cleaner.

When battery life runs out, the vacuum cleaner handily says, “Battery life low, please charge.” It’s a nice little touch that shows that there’s nothing wrong with the cleaner, just that it’s time to put it back on the dock.

Should you buy it?