Product test for robot vacuum cleaners and floor scrubbers

Sparkling clean with product test?
Those floor crawlers do a pretty good job.

11/16/2022 12:54 pm

Robot vacuum and mop must clean the floor and vacuum while you can have a good time. That sounds promising. Warentest reveals whether you can really trust technical helpers.

If you don’t like cleaning your apartment yourself, you can have a robot vacuum and mop help you out. Or even better: never vacuum or clean yourself again, after all, that’s what robot cleaners promise.

the Stiftung Warentest Regularly check what the devices can do on hard floors or carpets, how deep they clean and how good they are in practice. On this occasion, ten cloth robot vacuum cleaners and four pure robot vacuum cleaners were scrutinized at prices between 160 and 1400 euros, some of them with service stations. A service station is offered for some models that goes beyond charging the battery. It sucks dust from the robot’s small dust box into a larger bag inside the station. Some also fill the windshield washer reservoir. Some even clean the wipe or spinning mobs under the unit.

Decisive subfloor for device selection

Result? No floor crawler is really good at everything. Above all, consumers need to look at which surface they focus on, how to clean it, and then make their choice.

But at least six devices were rated “good” in the overall rating. Four were “sufficient”, the rest “satisfied”. The test winner in the vacuum and mopping robots is the “Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra” (1400 euros, grade 2.4). It was particularly convincing when vacuuming on hard floors and with a gas station and good handling. The Medion X40 SW “X40 SW” vacuum cleaner device is also “good” (2.5), but it only costs 300 euros. It vacuums hard floors very well and at least cleans satisfactorily.

The four pure vacuum robots, without a water tank or cleaning cloth, work “fine”. The “iRobot Roomba j7+” (830 euros, 2.5) is the only device in the test that vacuums both hard floors and carpets well. For this reason, its handling is qualified as mediocre. The €400 “Neato D8” scored slightly better with a 2.3 rating, which was cheaper and had a slightly better overall result.