practice test
Vacuum and floor mopping robot
Roborock S8 Pro Ultra – smart and thorough, but mighty expensive
The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is not small, the device dominates the room.
© Roborock / PR
The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra wants to be the non-plus-ultra of vacuum robots. In fact, the combination device vacuums and wipes the apartment thoroughly clean and doesn’t bitch around. But you have to swallow the price tag.
The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra – these suffixes are important – wants to mark the non-plus-ultra of the vacuum-wipe robots. And indeed, the device is impressive. The circular robot doesn’t stand out in terms of design and size, but the base station can be called a “piece of furniture”. The device has a footprint of 42 by 50 centimeters and first of all needs a place. Luckily we found a sufficiently large “spot” in the kitchen. Since the water tanks need to be filled and emptied regularly, you can’t hide the station under a table or board. The scope of delivery is as expected, there are the two devices, an extra dust bag and a power cable. With the Roborock you can start immediately. Or at least almost. You should already install the app and register the robot in the network. Then the firmware will usually update itself. Finally, water is filled into the fresh water tank and the robot is ready to go.
Strictly speaking, you don’t have to deal with the device any further if you don’t feel like cleaning plans, mapping and zones. A push of a button on the device or on the app is all it takes to start the cleaning process. Since the machine needs a relatively long time for a larger apartment, we then created a cleaning plan – starting at 5 a.m. in the morning.
self employed helper
The device starts and independently explores the rooms of the apartment. If you like, you can view the progress on the app, it’s not necessary. The default is a “caution mode” that tries to avoid collisions. Then very narrow places are left out during cleaning. After a few runs, a map is saved, you can edit it if you like, but you don’t have to. The device works largely trouble-free. As always, there is no such thing as 100% security. Now and then he chokes roborock on the rest of a cable tie or a dog toy, but larger objects are reliably detected. Now and then, and rather seldom, it maneuvers itself into a crooked corner from which it cannot extricate itself. And there are also problems with the height limit, then the Roborock gets stuck under the bed. But the system is capable of learning, after a while there are hardly any incidents. As a rule, the robot completes its tour without any problems, even in our complicated and crowded floor plan. We are very happy with that.
wipe is better
As with all robots, steps and doors are the end of the line. In addition, there is good cleaning performance. The S8 Ultra Pro wipes and vacuums and recognizes the surface. The apartment is really clean every morning. Changing the water has a positive effect. This is not just wiped over with a damp cloth. It is moistened, rubbed a little and sucked off. Fresh water has to be refilled at the station every three days and dirty water has to be poured off. Devices without a suction station ultimately do not collect the dirty water, they only distribute the dirt evenly throughout the apartment. Basically, robots that change their water at a docking station are far superior to those that only have a mini tank in the robot.
The vibrating cloth removes loose dirt, i.e. house dust and smaller dirt. It does not remove dried stains – such as ketchup or similar on the kitchen floor. We don’t expect that either. You can’t clean the floor in a horse stable with a robot like that either. Devices with a rotating mop clean even better, but in practice you have to make trade-offs. In the long term, very few floors can stand being scrubbed intensively every day.
No bad smells
We liked it that much. Cool that the cleaning pad is regularly rinsed and dried. It does not smell and there is no mold biotope. The suction process is supported by two counter-rotating rubber rollers. The result is very good on carpet and hard floor. The straight stripes that the device leaves on the carpet are very nice. Our apartment has open access to a currently muddy garden, and a large dog generously spreads hair and dirt from the lawn. The ones from roborock cleaned surfaces are practically dust-free every morning. Of course, it is also noticeable that the device works every morning, so often you would not vacuum and wipe manually. The handling of the station is also pleasant. The water tanks can be removed and reinserted with a flick of the wrist. The device itself hardly gets dirty. Once in a while you should wipe down the docking station, change the mob and rinse the filter. The dust is collected in a bag. So you have to buy more bags regularly.
Navigation and cleaning of the device are great. Whether you try all the app’s gimmicks depends on your own nature. Our bathroom and bedroom doors are usually locked. If you like, you can identify such a zone separately and give the robot a cleaning command when the doors are open. But you can also just put it on the floor there. In practice, we find it more important that the device does its job without incident and gets smarter on its own. In fact, we hardly had to worry about the helper. Only when the dog sheds too much hair does it occasionally have to be cleaned of balls of fluff from the rollers.
And in fact you don’t come into contact with the dirty water. You should rinse the corresponding container from time to time, but that’s about it.
However, the price is hot
Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they want to spend the steep price of almost 1,500 euros on robotic vacuum cleaners. The top devices move in this price segment, and the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is worth the money too. But of course you can also get a much cheaper device that is not high-end, but still works quite well.
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