Technology

I have a Roborock S8 Pro, and it’s doing a pretty good job! It doesn’t just drag a mop, but has actuators that vibrate the mop over the surface.

It’s not the same as a human putting in elbow grease but the point is daily maintenance rather than a full replacement for vacuuming and mopping.

I have a husky mix, so it helps a lot in keeping the floors clear of hair and outdoor filth.

I don't really trust iRobot though, their products seem like overpriced junk to me. My $300 Roborock S4 from 2019 was more sophisticated than most of the Roombas are. Can't believe they don't have lidar mapping and just ping-pong around stupidly.

I just emptied the mop water and filmed it for you. Not depicted is me rinsing out the water tank to get the last bits of larger particulate out of the bottom of it. The water in the freshwater tank is crystal clear, with a very small amount of mild detergent in it. So like it definitely does stuff, even though the floors look clean.

My floors aren't really covered in like coffee stains and whatnot that you see in adverts, but my dog does drool a bit every so often, so when the light hits right you'll see drool spots on the livingroom floor. The mop deals with those no problem. Certain corners like the one between my fridge and the cupboard next to it it doesn't deal with as well though, that requires manual work.

The area around the dog feeding station is usually fine, but it also benefits from some manual work every so often.

Edit 2: I also swear that I'm not a shill for Xiaomi or Roborock. The Xiaomi Roborock S4 just happened to be the first robot vacuum I bought. I had a tight budget, but I was (and still am) really anal about having clean floors. I like being able to go barefoot without feeling little crumbs and whatnot on my feet.

The S4 worked excellently but had a hard time keeping up with the sheer amount of hair that comes off my dog, so a couple of months ago I upgraded to the S8 Pro with the Ultra dock, and it's amazing. I do very, very little manual maintenance and my floors are always clean.

Coupled with the fact that there are parts to buy for both vacuums (including the S4 from 2019!) in case something breaks (nothing ever broke on my S4) just inspires a lot of confidence in the brand for me. I'm super happy and so I enthuse about it when the opportunity presents itself.

It'll never be as good as a human scrubbing, but for day to day touch ups it doesn't really have to be. I have the Roborock S7 maxV with the ultra dock and the mop actuator moves the pad back and forth with a travel distance of almost a centimeter, so it's not just dragging the mop but actually moving it left and right really fast. I use the deep clean mop setting which makes the bot move extra slow to get in extra scrubs as well as makes overlapping mopping passes which seem to be like 75% overlapping on each pass, as well as the 3x setting which does a criss cross pattern with multiple runs. It's good enough to mop off wet cat food which has dried which is good enough for me, that normally takes me a bit of manual scrubbing but the multiple criss crossing runs with overlapping passes probably gives the stuck on bits time to soften and come off.

There are models that actually do some level of movement. The Roborocks now have vibration on their mops. There are Dreame robots that have dual circular pads that rotate. Either should be better than said damp mop. I did use that with the last robot and I have to say it does help, and reduces the number of actual mopping sessions.