Verdict

Handheld, stick or hybrid vacuum cleaning with solid results and great pet hair pick-up make the Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner a serious contender at the price. It performs well on carpet and with pet hair, but so-so performance with larger debris on hard floors slightly holds this model back.

Pros

• Excellent pet hair pickup
• Very light
• Good stair cleaning
• Handy floorhead lights
• Removable battery
• Easily emptied

Cons

• Poor edge cleaning
• So-so on hard floors

With a 30-minute run time and groovy looks, the Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 is a super lightweight cordless hand-stick cleaner weighing in at only 2.6kg. It’s got plenty of highlights including washable filters, floorhead headlights and three cleaning modes; Carpet, Hard-floor and Max, which delivers everything it has to offer.

We loved crisp, bright LED lights on the floorhead and it generally cleans very well on a mix of hard floors, rugs and carpets. The lightweight makes it easy to handle on open floors and stairs, it’s excellent for pet-hair, and we got a whopping 18 minutes run time on the Max mode. Our hard floor test with oats caused the Swan a few issues and edge cleaning aren’t the best, but you do get a whole lot of cleaner for less than £200.

Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner– What you need to know 

• General vacuuming over carpets/hard floors – The Swan feels nicely light in the hand and is easy to manoeuvre as a hand-held or stick vacuum. General results are good all round.
• Animal hair pick-up test – Excellent, every dog hair in our tests was collected even without the added power from the Max mode.
• Hard floor test – Not so great. There were quite a few oats left remaining on out tiles test although a few passes did see pick-up reach 100%.
• Edge test – Could do better. A fair bit of test powder (talc and carpet freshener) remained up to 1cm out from the skirting edge on carpet.

Related: Best cordless vacuum cleaner

Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 Design and Features – A stick vacuum, hand-held cleaner and something in-between for carpeted stairs.

Unpacking the Swan HyperClean we resisted shouting Eureka and running naked through the streets like Archimedes but we did notice it looked pretty cool in its blue, grey, silver and black colours. It’s a pistol-grip style cordless handstick that can be used for up-close cleaning with detail tools, as a stick vacuum with the extension tube and motorised brush floorhead or as a hybrid of the two. Attached the floorhead direct to the body for intense stair cleaning prowess.

It has super bright LED lights on the front of the floorhead, so not a speck of dust under the sofa will go unnoticed. The on/off switch, display with battery indicator lights and setting buttons are all within fingers distance from each other although their location means it is near impossible to transport the Swan to different rooms without turning it on halfway. Not a huge problem just slightly annoying.

It comes with a handy wall mount that doubles up as the charging base and the initial charge is going to set you back around 4 hours. That is not too bad in comparison to similar models that sometimes need an extra long charge before you get going. The battery pack is fully removable, opening up the option to buy spares for longer cleaning time or replace the battery as it wears out and loses charge. That is about 500 cycles for good Lithium cells.

Complete with two detail tools, you get a 2-in-1 upholstery tool which is great for vacuuming blinds, vents and sofas. Its soft brush end works wonders for cleaning ornaments around the home too. There’s also a decent length crevice tool. Combined with the extension tube, finished in funky electric blue, the smaller tools give good reach and versatile cleaning abilities.

For greater manoeuvrability, the floorhead has a tilting and pivot neck. Its steers well, making the Swan especially useful for vacuuming crumbs hiding around table legs or chairs. Combine the svelte 2.5kg weight fully assembled as a stick cleaner and the Swan is super-nippy around the home. Remove the head and tools and the hand-held weighs in at just 1.8kg.

The floorhead is large but not too bulky or heavy and its large wheels make it a smooth roller on carpets or hard floors. Switch to the carpet setting and the floorhead’s single traditional brushbar whizzes around at some speed to agitate and sweep dust from carpets. The headlights are bright and capable, illuminating darker areas and highlighting dirt on hard floors with ease

The mid-way options is attaching the floorhead directly to the body. This feels mighty peculiar at first but for carpeted stairs, it combines serious cleaning gumption of a powered floorhead with the up-close and personal approach of a hand-held. It works well but is best for straight flights of stairs as its not particularly wieldy for twisting steps.

The Swan’s 0.5L capacity bin is average size for a quality stick cleaner. There are larger bins out there but usually associated with more substantial or more affluent cleaners. There are plenty a lot smaller too, so at under £200 the Swan isn’t too shoddy in bin capacity at all. Unusually there are two ways to empty the bin. You can either press the releases button to release a large flap at the base or unscrew the whole bin. The latter is most useful when you have debris likely to get stuck, such as pet hair.

The Swan Eureka is complete with washable filters that should be cleaned every couple of months to keep the vacuum working correctly. Swan doesn’t claim too much of its air filtering ability, but the filter was very effective at collecting fine dust that escaped the bagless cyclone.

Handheld vacuuming offered lots of cleaning versatility and there is plenty of suction on offer, particularly in the Max mode. In the standard mode you can expect the 30min + run time but we were very pleasantly surprised that the Max mode went on for nearly 18 minutes. That makes it a strong contender for the default cleaning option unless you have a very big house indeed.

Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner Performance –Great on carpet, less so on hard floors

Despite its lightweight, the Swan HyperClean is undoubtedly a powerful vacuum cleaner, managing to pick up debris and crumbs with gusto over carpet thanks to its potent suction and powered brush bar action. The bright headlights are great for spotting hairs or crumbs in dark areas too.

Kicking off the testing, the large red rug in our living room hosts the usual assortment of general household mess, crumbs and plenty of dog hairs embedded in the fibres. Impressively,  just a few passes over the rug delivered a great clean on the standard power mode. The rotating brush bar takes a great deal of credit here for effectively agitating and grooming pet hairs from the fibres and allowing the decent air-flow to suck them into the bin.

Pet hair test test: Dirty carpet (left) vs Clean carpet (right) – move slider to compare

Our carpet test using a mix of talc and carpet freshener powder to achieve different sized dirt grains was the proverbial Curate’s Egg, good in parts. General cleaning on the carpet was very good on normal carpet mode, albeit with a few grains left deep in the pile, and excellent on the Max power carpet mode, until you looked near the skirting.

There was a distinct band of powder left up to 1cm out from the skirting and plenty of the heavier freshener powder grains left in the deep channel tight to the skirting. Sadly, the Swan’s rotating brush bar ends a long way from the outside edges of the floorhead and there isn’t much in the way of air channels in the floorplate to direct suction to the outer reaches of the head. You have only got to look at the underside of the floorhead to see that the swan is never going to be cleaning super-star towards the very edges of the room.

Carpet test: Dirty carpet (left) vs Clean carpet (right) – move slider to compare

Unfortunately, our spilt oat test on hard floors wasn’t the best outcome for the Swan HyperClean either. A single pass using the normal power mode wasn’t impressive so we switched to the Max mode with indifferent results. It seemed to pick up a fair amount of debris on the open surface tiles, and certainly never flicked or swept debris out of the way, but grains of oats remains stoically in the grouting grooves on a single pass. A few passes scooped up the stragglers, but the best cordless cleaners would have dispatched the entire test load in a single pass.

The Swan fought back with an exceptionally good stair clean test. As recommended in the user manual, we configured the cleaner as a handheld and attached the main floorhead directly. It felt unwieldy at first and was a bit unbalanced moving between stairs, but no complaints about the cleaning results. On our carpeted steps it delivered the same solid carpet cleaning performance it had in stick mode with the added bonus of the user being close enough to the stair carpet to go over any areas that were extra dirty. OK, a small turbo brush tool would be a little easier to handle here, but the overall lightweight of the Swan body plus floorhead, and the excellent cleaning results make its stair cleaning performance a real step up from its competitors.

Hard floor test: Dirty hard floor (left) vs Clean hard floor (right) – move slider to compare

Back in the lounge area, using the Swan as a handheld vacuum with 2-in-1 tools demonstrated its versatility. The soft brush did a great job dusting around delicate ornaments and the light weight of cleaner ensures you never feel like there is a danger of wiping out the entire shelf. Attaching the extension tube between cleaner and tools extends the reach nicely without increasing weight, and we very effectively dusted cobwebs and the tops of wall canvases.

Despite its sub-£200 price, the Swan Eureka feels well-made and assembly out of the box is simple too. Suction is good, run times are good, and the versatility is excellent at the price. It is not too noisy at around 80dB on Max mode (slightly less on standard) and its pet-hair and stair cleaning chops could only really be improved if it came with a mini turbo tool of some sort. It’s not great for getting close to the edge and hard-floor pick up could be better, but at less than half the price of some of our favourite codeless hand stick cleaners, it remains a worthy contender.

Should I buy the Swan HyperClean Eureka 3-in-1 Cordless Vacuum Cleaner?

With its 30-minute run time and three modes of cleaning, the Swan HyperClean Eureka generally performs well around the home, has some handy tools for detail cleaning and looks the part too. The 18 minutes run time on Max mode is very good and the supplied tools for use as a hand-held deliver decent versatility too. Close to edge cleaning could be better and heavy debris pick up on hard floors isn’t the best, but for a relatively affordable cleaner, there is a lot here to like in terms of size, versatility and decent all-round cleaning. Those that want a bit more flexibility may find the Hoover H-Free 500 a slightly better choice, though.

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