Are robot vacuum cleaner mops any good?

Microfibre pads are probably the robot vacuum mop you are most familiar with, and they generally suck. These mop pads are now seen almost exclusively on budget models, and are synonymous with leaky water canisters, and dragging dirt around the house. They were the first iteration of robot mops, and while we owe them for their service we couldn’t recommend using them now.

Pads like this are usually a single sheet of thin microfibre that attaches to the robot vacuum using velcro. When the water tank is inserted the robot vac will let water slowly stream out, and the mop will slide across the floor. In our testing this kind of mop head is more useful for picking up extra dust than scrubbing your floors.

The upside is that they’re very easy to clean. You can tear them off the velcro and just chuck them in the washing machine.

A more advanced robot vacuum mopping technique employs rotating pads. These pads still use microfibre, but tend to have ropey tendrils as well which help to agitate debris from the floor. 

Everything about these mopping pads is designed to add more pressure to the ground, resulting in a better mopping experience. The rotation gets at debris from more angles to help get it off the ground, the sturdier ropes are more abrasive, and in many cases the mops exert more downwards force to amplify this.

These mop heads are generally more permanent than microfibre pads, and can be removed to wash or entirely replace, but are usually on robovacs with self-cleaning features. Top-tier robot vacuums now clean their mop heads with water at up to 80 degrees celsius, and will do so periodically throughout a vacuuming cycle. This keeps them much cleaner than older versions, and somewhat eliminates the problem of dragging dirt around the home.

While rotating rollers aren’t everywhere, there is a small selection of robot vacuum cleaners that use rotating mop head rollers similar to what we see in wet vacuum cleaners. These allow for better saturation as the rollers are continuously being sprayed with water, and the old dirty water being squeegeed off and sucked away with the debris.

For now these are few and far between, but they employ the same kind of technology as the Dyson Wash G1, which is an effective mop despite only using cold water and no cleaning solution.