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Review: Get Yourself the Roborock S5

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roborock s5 review

We’ve all seen the memes:

roborock meme

Nope, they aren’t just click bait or people trolling for “likes.” This happens in real life, as I painfully discovered a few nights ago.

Three hours, three new parts ordered, and one very shampooed carpet later, I’ve learned my lesson to never leave my robot vacuum in the same room as a known house-pooper dog.

Now, this personal FML moment aside, I actually have really LOVED my robot vacuum, a white Roborock S5.

roborock floor

Every mom needs as much help and assistance as she can get, right? We aren’t ones to turn down anything that will make our lives easier, especially when it comes to the endless amount of cleaning e have to do. So every mom needs to get herself a robot vacuum sooner rather than later. But not just any robot vac—they need the Roborock S5.

“What? That’s not a Roomba; it’s an “off brand.” That must mean it’s somehow, lesser, right?”

Wrong. This robot vacuum wins hands down in functionality, sound, ability, price and overall greatness when compared to other brands. Let me explain:

What is Great About the Roborock S5

  • It maps the floor plan and remembers it. This means it will take some time outlining the space it’s going to vacuum first, and then will go back and forth to clean, instead of using random strokes, like most Roomba models. Then, you can look back when its done and see the cleaning history so you know exactly where it went!
roborock mapping
  • Set no-go boundaries easily from the app. See the red in the picture above? That’s where we keep our dog’s water bowl so obviously I don’t want the robot vacuum bumping into it and spilling water. All I had to do was set that quick little no-go space and the Roborock avoids it perfectly. No having to lay down black strips on my floor, no hassle.
  • It has great sensors. These sensors, located on the sides, bottom, and one main one on top, work really well to keep the Roborock from falling off stairs and from running hard into walls or the random, forgotten toys in the middle of my living room floor. The obstacle avoidance works really well because the sensors are more sensitive and upgraded.
  • You can set schedules of when it should clean. We set ours to start at 7 PM; usually when we are getting our kids to bed. This motivates our kids to hurry and pick up their toys!
  • Different settings are easy to navigate and set in the app. There’s the normal mode, but also Quiet, Turbo, and Max. Oh, and Mop mode (see next)
roborock 1
  • It can also mop. All you have to do is fill a little attachment with water, wet the included microfiber cloth that attaches via Velcro to the water tank, and slide it onto the back of the Roborock! Sure, it won’t do a deep clean and sure, you’ll need to pull out your actual mop every so often. But with that understanding, it actually does a pretty good job for a little robot. I mean, my toddler smeared his jelly sandwich across the floor under the table when I wasn’t looking and all it took my Roborock was two passes with the mop attachment. No leftover sticky residue!
  • No water seepage when it’s sitting still. Roborock compares their mopping system to a tree: the filters are the roots and the cloth is the leaf. The two work together to control the amount of water seepage, including shutting it down when the cleaner is still. This means I don’t have to worry about forgetting to take off the water tank when it’s done because I know it won’t ruin my floor while it sits there til I remember it!
roborock mopping
  • Easy to set customized cleaning areas. Usually I let mine run and clean the entire first floor, but there are also times I want it to spot clean. Since it has remembered the map of my floor plan in the app, it’s easy to move the cleaning frame on the map to the location I want my Roborock to go custom clean.
  • The app tells you when it’s time to replace parts. Usually, one aspect of having a robot vacuum is not knowing if it’s still working as well as it did on day one. But Roborock addresses this with letting you know the life span of your parts.And reordering parts is easy.
roborock parts replacement
  • Longer battery life and it can cross obstacles up to 2 cm high with ease. I’m surprised how little I have to go “rescue” my robot vacuum as it hardly ever gets stuck or confused. Unlike many other brands’ models that I’ve seen in action.
  • The Roborock is fitted with sealed silencer pads that optimize noise reduction! It can get pretty loud on the Max setting, but the Balanced mode is fairly quiet!
  • Connects to Alexa and you can rename your vacuum cleaner! We named ours Wheatley: “Alexa, turn Wheatley on.”
  • Sleek dock. The home docking station for the Roborock is sleek and small. While the vacuum is away, you hardly notice the little dock station wherever you choose to set it up.
roborock dock

What needs improvement:

  • It only remembers one floor plan at a time. We keep our Roborock on the first floor of our townhouse and hardly ever bring it upstairs to clean. When I do take it to the second floor, it has to re-map out the floor plan before it begins its patterned cleaning. Same thing happens when I bring it back downstairs to its dock on the first floor. I wish we could, within the app, switch between floor plans to save a little time.
  • The notifications aren’t timely. If you’re running your vacuum while you’re away at work, you can opt to get app notifications when your vacuum begins, finishes, or if it gets stuck on something. I eventually turned off the notifications, however, because I found they wouldn’t come in real time. It’d be hours after I watched my vacuum return to its dock when I’d finally get my first notification that it was going to start its scheduled clean up. But this is just a software bug from the app; it doesn’t affect the function and usability of the vacuum.

What everyone wants to know: Cost. At full price, the Roborock is $599 on their website. Currently on Amazon, it is $540.98 (but, of course, that changes daily because it’s Amazon!). When you think of all it can do, that price point is dead on. And compared to iRobot’s Roomba i7 (their latest model, $1099), that’s almost five hundred dollars cheaper. Compared to the Roomba 980 ($799), which is a close comparison in function to the Roborock, it’s two hundred dollars cheaper! Best part: we bought ours on a Black Friday deal for only $400! So start saving and look for those sales!

Still not convinced that this is the perfect gift that every mother needs? Want to see the Roborock in action and hear an expert compare robot vacuums? Check out this in depth review by Danny Winget. He addresses everything and I’m so glad I trusted him and got myself a Roborock.

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Tuesday 16th of April 2019

The Japanese cultural experience was the best part.

Leighann

Thursday 28th of March 2019

Excellent review!

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