Today on the hookup I’m going to show you why traditional mopping robots aren’t worth
using, and why these three robotic mop/vacuum combo are different.
We’re also going figure out if any of them are actually worth buying.
This is how traditional robotic vacuums “mop your floor”.
The problem is if YOU were mopping the floor you wouldn’t just drag a wet paper towel
on the ground, you get down and you scrub.
About 2 years ago I made a video about must have features in robotic vacuums and I said
that the mopping performance of robotic vacuums wasn’t worth the effort required to use
them.
However, as is usually the case, technology has made significant advances since that last
video and the robotic mops I’m going to show you today don’t just drag a wet towel
on the ground anymore, they actually scrub.
First, the Ecovacs T8+ with auto empty base is a very capable robotic vacuum that comes
with a standard not so great mopping attachment.
However, for $100 you can add the OZMO pro mopping attachment which significantly boosts
the mopping performance.
The ozmo pro attachment has a built in motor that oscillates rapidly to scrub your floors
during mopping runs as well as a pump to precisely dial in the amount of water you want used
for your flooring type.
The Ecovacs T8+ with auto empty base can frequently be found on sale for around $550, so adding
in the OZMO pro mopping attachment brings the total cost to around $650.
A similar oscillating mopping technology is used in the Roborock S7.
The S7 is $649 and I also tested it with its auto empty base, which doesn’t have any
effect on the mopping capabilities, but in my opinion is an essential aspect of robotic
vacuums these days and adds $299 to the price.
Like the Ecovacs T8+ with OZMO Pro the Roborock S7 mop has a scrubbing action, but unlike
the OZMO pro, the scrubbing is more of a vibration than a side to side movement, and even at
240 frames per second I wasn’t able to actually capture the mopping pad moving.
That being said, you can HEAR it vibrating, and as you’ll see later on, whatever it’s
doing it’s definitely effective at removing floor stains.
The major advantage the Roborock S7 has over the Ecovacs T8 is that it can also lift the
mopping attachment whenever it detects a carpet or a rug, so you don’t have to babysit the
Roborock S7 as much as other robotic mops.
As I said, the total price, as tested for the Roborock S7 was around $950, and since
the S7 and auto empty base are pretty new to the market, I haven’t seen any significant
discounts or sales on them yet.
Last, usually priced just around $1000 is the Narwal T10, and while the Ecovacs T8+
and Roborock S7 are robotic vacuums that can also mop, the Narwal T10 is a robotic mop
that can also vacuum.
Everything about the narwal is designed to be the best robotic mop on the market.
There is no beater brush on the Narwal, so in vacuuming mode you switch out the mopping
pads for side brushes and rely on suction alone to pick up dirt and debris which isn’t
ideal for carpet, but works just fine for hard flooring.
However, instead of having a single vibrating pad like the other vacuums, in mopping mode
the narwal has two spinning mopping pads that apply a fairly significant amount of downforce
to clean stains.
Also notably absent on the Narwal T10 compared to the other robots is an on-robot water reservoir,
and that’s because the base contains both a clean water and dirty water reservoir, that
the narwal periodically returns to the base during its mopping runs to rinse, clean, and
re-wet its mopping pads.
As I said, basically everything about the Narwal is designed with the best mopping performance
in mind, so lets see if all that extra tech lets it wipe the floor with the competition.
Get it, wipe the floor, because they’re robotic mops…
I’m all about getting to the important stuff first, so let’s talk about how well they
clean.
In my house, 3 things end up on the floor on a semi regular basis: Coffee drips, mud,
and in the workout room, sweat…
Since the dirt in Florida is significantly more sandy than most other places I mixed
in a little bit of clay to make it more muddy, and I used salt water in place of sweat, because
gross.
I made 3 separate testing sites with 2mL each of these staining substances on both my laminate
flooring and tile flooring, and to make it as difficult as possible I put it right in
the middle of a grout line for the tile.
I gave each sample 24 hours to dry before I sent the robots to clean them up.
Since these were extreme stains I selected the most aggressive and wettest mopping option
on each robot, and had them each do two total passes on the stains.
All the robots use a similar mopping pattern where they mop the edges, and then compute
a path to fill in the area completely.
One notable difference that you can see during the testing is that the ecovacs T8+ and roborock
S7 both allow for mopping a custom area, while the Narwal can only mop an entire room, and
that meant that I had to block off the other areas to stop the narwal from cleaning the
other testing sites.
On the laminate flooring the ecovacs t8+ really struggled, and after the first pass basically
all the stains were still there and unchanged.
This was especially bad when compared to the Narwal T10 and roborock S7 single pass performance.
Luckily after a second run the ecovacs T8+ did a much better job and removed at least
some of each of the stains, however it didn’t perform nearly as well as the Narwall T10,
or Roborock S7.
The Roborock S7 ended up winning this competition, not only from a purely visual inspection,
but I also cleaned the stains with a single spray of cleaner and a paper towel and after
drying you can really see the difference in the amount of coffee that each vacuum was
able to clean off the floor.
On the Tile, the Ecovacs T8 actually performed pretty well and cleaned up the majority of
each stain, except what was in grout line.
I had high hopes for the Narwal T10’s brushes to be able to get into the grout, but unfortunately
that didn’t happen and again the tile stains cleaned up well but the grout line was still
filled with coffee.
The Roborock S7, which did the best on the laminate flooring was a total miss on the
tile, and I mean a total miss.
Remember how I said that the S7 could raise its mopping pad when it detected a carpet
or rug?
Well, something about these stains and grout lines triggered the carpet detection on the
first run and while it looked like it was going to make a perfect pass over the stains,
at the last moment it raised the mopping pad off the floor before it hit the stains.
For whatever reason it didn’t detect this imaginary carpet on the second pass and still
managed to do a decent cleaning of the stains, but not as good as on the laminate, and not
as good as the other two robots in this case.
The good news is that if you don’t have carpet in your house you can disable the auto
raising of the mop pad, but it seems like a shame to me since it’s such a great feature.
Interestingly the visual stain from the Roborock S7 was definitely the worst, but after manual
cleaning the paper towel for the S7 was the cleanest, which could suggest that there was
less coffee in the grout line and more on the tile.
The Ecovacs T8+ performed decently, but was definitely not the best.
Unfortunately, the mopping performance of the Ecovacs T8+ with OZMO Pro is the best
part of it, so lets talk about the real reasons you probably shouldn’t buy it.
First and foremost the T8+ with OZMO pro mop will not navigate over carpet.
If you have two rooms that you want to mop but there isn’t a hard floor path in between
them the T8+ will not move between those rooms because it can’t raise its mop and would
get your carpet wet, but if it detects carpet you don’t even have the option to override
that detection, it just won’t travel through that area when the mop is attached.
Based on a poll of my subscribers that means that roughly 25% of you would already not
be able to use this attachment since your hard floor rooms are separated by carpeted
spaces.
Second, the OZMO pro attachment for Ecovacs T8+ needs to be removed and stored separately
from the vacuum.
If the vacuum detects that the OZMO Pro mop is attached it will switch to mopping mode
and will not travel to carpeted areas.
That means that if you accidentally leave the attachment on, your scheduled vacuuming
will fail.
It’s also annoying that you have to find a place to store the attachment, you can’t
store it pad side down because it’s wet and dirty from mopping, and if you flip it
upside down it will leak water out the top.
Either way, while the Ecovacs T8+ is one of my favorite robotic vacuums, and the one I
use everyday in my house, I can’t recommend the OZMO Pro mopping attachment for it.
So that leaves us with the Roborock S7 and the Narwal T10, which are both very good,
from a mopping standpoint the Narwal T10 is a much better cleaner, unfortunately, I think
it’s only suitable for a small number of homes, so lets talk about the key differences.
The Roborock S7 does a great job picking stains, but those stains end up right on the pad,
and then that same pad gets used to mop the rest of the house.
Between mopping runs you’ll need to put on a new pad and eventually throw them all
the washing machine before reusing them.
The Narwal T10 on the other hand cleans its pads regularly during a single cleaning session…
Maybe even too much.
The 4L wash water tank is only enough for roughly 200 square meters or 2,150 square
feet of mopping, which for a large house with primarily hard floors means that the tanks
will need to filled and emptied every mopping session… but it does mean that the dirty
water from one room isn’t going to get spread around to the rest of your house by a dirty
mopping pad.
There’s also another huge advantage to the Narwal T10’s water tank design: Cleaning
solution.
The roborock S7 specifically says to only use water in the reservoir, while the Narwal
T10 has cleaning solution pads that dissolve and lead to a much more effective cleaning
experience.
I re-ran the coffee test using cleaning solution instead of water, and the difference was significant.
I actually had to go back and check the footage to figure out where the stain was in the first
place because it was 100% gone.
No stain at all, and no residue on the paper towel, awesome right?
It depends.
Like I mentioned before, 25% of people responded to my poll saying that in their home, rooms
that need to be mopped were separated by carpeted areas or large rugs.
Unlike the Ecovacs T8+ with OZMO Pro Mop that just refuses to travel over carpet, the Narwal
just ignores the carpet altogether and runs it wet brushes just like it would on hard
flooring resulting in a very damp path in between rooms.
This also applies on the path back to the base which means every time it returns home
to clean it’s pads dirty water will get ground into your carpet.
If you are like the 25% that has a mix of carpet and hard flooring, but HAS is a clear
path between all mopping rooms, you can set up no-mop zones in the narwal app, but I did
find that they weren’t as precise as the ones in the roborock S7’s app, and unlike
the roborock app there is no visual cue to show you where a rug or carpet might be.
Still, after some trial and error I was able to get the Narwal T10’s no-go lines dialed
in which prevented it from pushing around small rugs while it was mopping.
Almost 50% of people responded that their entire home had hard flooring, so Narwal T10
is definitely going to work for them, right?
Well, maybe not.
Mopping is most effective if the floors are relatively clean and free of debris, and for
that you need to vacuum first.
The Narwal T10 does have a vacuum attachment which while lacking a beater bar, will do
just fine on hard flooring using just suction and side brushes.
Unfortunately, with the Narwal it’s a one or the other situation, so you’ll need to
manually switch out the vacuum brushes for the mopping pads every time you use the Narwal.
In addition to that, despite its large base, the Narwal doesn’t have any auto empty capabilities
for its dustbin, and its dustbin is also really small compared to similar robotic vacuums
on the market.
This means that the Narwal T10 is probably not up to the task if you have shedding pets,
and if you do, you should expect to empty the dustbin several times during the vacuuming
runs that you should do prior to mopping.
You could solve this issue by purchasing a separate robotic vacuum to run before your
narwal T10 mops, but that of course comes with an added cost, and the annoyance of needing
a place to put two large bases.
In contrast the S7 mops and vacuums at the same time.
It runs its beater bar, vacuum, and mopping attachment all at once.
When it’s on hard flooring it runs both the vacuum and the mop, sucking up any debris
before it gets to the mopping pad.
Whenever it encounters a rug or carpet it lifts the mopping attachment which not only
keeps your carpets and rugs clean and dry, but it means they won’t get pushed around.
The roborock s7 even has a feature where if it detects a new rug it will stop and map
out the entire border of the rug before continuing with the mopping run.
Add to that the fact that the Roborock S7 is also one of the best performing robotic
vacuums on the market, and the just released auto empty bin basically means that it is
easily the all around best choice for a robotic vacuum or mop as long as the water only mopping
and dirty pad issues aren’t a deal breaker for you.
If your home is under 200 square meters of hard flooring with not too many rugs, and
you are willing to purchase a separate robotic vacuum to run before you mop, the Narwal T10
is undeniably good at mopping.
The T10 is the first product from Narwal, and I think they are really on to something.
If the next generation of Narwal could raise its mopping pads, and automatically switch
from vacuum to mopping modes it’s going to be a game changer, but for now as I said,
I think the Narwal T10 is only suitable for a very specific subset of people.
If you’re one of my normal viewers you’ll be happy to know that the Roborock S7 integrates
easily into home assistant without installing any custom firmware and exposes the status
of robot and allows you to issue commands like start cleaning and return to base.
More advanced functionality is also available if you’re willing to do a little tinkering
like downloading the maps from the robot and cleaning specific rooms.
If you’re not a home assistant user you’ll be happy to know that you can also control
the S7 with Amazon Echo and Google Home.
If it hasn’t come across in this video, I’m blown away by the quality and performance
of the Roborock S7, and its 100% my recommendation for anyone looking for a high end robotic
vacuum and mop.
If the $950 total price tag of the Roborock S7 and auto empty base is too rich for your
blood, I can’t blame you, however hopefully combos and sales will eventually make it more
affordable.
I do watch for unusually good sales and post them on my twitter account, so follow me there
if you’re interested.
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and as always, thanks for watching the hookup.