Roborock S7 Max V Ultra Robo Vacuum Mop – a robot that rocks!

In theory, robot vacuum cleaners and mops should save you a life of monotony, freeing up valuable time for reading Witchdoctor. While this is mostly true, up until recently, you still had to intervene to clean mop heads and empty dustbins. That bump in the road to robotic bliss is now fixed as new robot vacuums and mops such as Roborock’s S7 Max V Ultra – which can clean itself after it’s finished cleaning your house – hit retailer shelves. My Inner lazy bastard approves.

The secret sauce to this is an optional charging/emptying dock. As well as dustbags and a charger, the S7 has water tanks that’ll allow the dock to wash mop pads and top up the S7’s water reservoir, all while charging the S7. Once docked, It announces “Charging”, and with a whoosh, the dustbin is emptied, and its mop pad is given a wash while its reservoir is replenished. Meanwhile, yours truly has barely broken a sweat. Perfect!

The other not-so-small issue when it comes to robotic cleaners is the fact that they’re not all born equal. Some have real problems navigating and detecting floor obstacles or mapping the layout of your home. Using AI object detection and a LIDAR (laser radar)/camera, the S7 Max Ultra rarely got stuck or needed me to intervene as it cleaned. In fact, with each clean, the AI and mapping became more accurate.

Its docking station is large. That said, it needs to be as it houses a dust bag, a clean water container (for refilling the S7’s mopping tank), and a container for the dirty water from the S7’s mops. Like other self-emptying charging docks, the S7 uses dustbags that can hold two months’ worth of cruft.

Once unpacked and charged, I got the S7 to map my home. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it mapped everything. Previously with other Robo-vacs, the mapping process took several attempts, involving the robot getting tangled up in appliance cables, socks, dog toys and so on. With the S7, mapping was done in one pass. No intervention was needed.

Once my house was mapped in the Roborock app, I could label rooms and add furniture. This also meant I could set cleaning schedules for individual rooms. Living in a two-storey home, I was also pleased to note that I could save multiple maps so the S7 could recognize what floor it was on.

The S7’s Obstacle avoidance capabilities deserve special mention. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the odds are that you’ve been online and seen the iRobot Roomba’s run-in with dog shit which promptly got spread around its owner’s house by the Roomba. Keen to avoid this, Roborock built in a camera with a light that illuminates when it’s in dark spaces. This also helps it avoid a dog turd-tastrophe.

A neural processor also helps decide if the S7 should clean around things, avoid them or just clean over them. This saw it expertly winding its way around furniture, avoiding power cords and socks I’d deliberately left lying around to test it. If there are objects it’s struggling with, you can easily create no-go zones using the Roborock app.

With my home consisting of hardwood floors plus many rugs, I was pleased to note that the S7’s 5100Pa of suction could easily pick up most of the cruft on my wooden floors. For rugs, the S7 cranked up suction power, lifting dog hair, dog biscuit crumbs and dust with no problems.

On the mopping front, the S7 also did a good job. While it wasn’t quite as thorough as the Deebot X1 Omni’s dual spinning mop pads, it lifted muddy greyhound paw prints from the kitchen floor with no problem, leaving a clean streak-free finish. Much of this comes down to the ultrasonic vibration technology that sees the mop pad vibrating a whopping 3000 times per minute instead of just dragging a wet mop pad around the floor.

While some Robo-vacs/mops merely slide dirt along your floor, the S7 scrubbed, which made a real difference. Its mop is kept wet by a small water reservoir. This allows the S7 to mop and vacuum at the same time. Helping this happen is a carpet sensor. Other Robo-vacs might have similar sensors, but most merely avoid carpet when mopping. This requires another run when the mopping attachment is removed.

The S7 can switch between vacuuming to mopping seamlessly by switching off the mop attachment and lifting it when it detects carpet. This sees the mopping attachment raised by about 5mm so the rugs could be vacuumed without the mop wetting them. Once the S7 is back on the wooden floor, it lowers the mop pad and continues. While this worked like a treat for the many rugs scattered around my house, I did notice that heavier pile rugs were sometimes a little damp.

The other neat trick the S7 has is the ability to act as a remote security camera, complete with two-way talk capability. While this is turned off by default, I enabled it and found it useful for driving the vacuum about my home and keeping an eye on things when I was out.

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The S7 can be controlled using the Roborock mobile app (iOS/Android) or its built-in control buttons. It also integrated seamlessly with the many Amazon Echo smart speakers around my house. This allowed me to use voice commands to start cleaning. Frustratingly the Alexa skill doesn’t let you tell the S7 to clean specific rooms. That has to be done using the mobile app.

If you’re looking for a robot vac and mop that does it all without you having to intervene, the Roborock S7 Max V Ultra is hard to beat. Thanks to a well-executed design, little to no user intervention is needed, making it a brilliant “set and forget” option.

http://Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra Smart Robot Vacuum Cleaner & Empty Docking online – PBTech.co.nz