Many robot vacuum cleaners now come with multifunction stations. In addition to the load, they can take care of emptying the robot’s collector and/or cleaning its mop, and we will take this into account in our rating from now on.
Upheaval in our comparison of robot vacuum cleaners. The Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra and S7 Pro Ultra recently rocketed to the top of our rankings, while Ecovacs’ Deebot X1 Omni took third place. Conversely, others have plummeted in the rankings, like the Dreame D9 or the Neato D7, D6 and D4. The reason is quite simple: we have decided to enrich our ease of use evaluation grid to follow changes in the market, and especially in charging stations.
Extra points for multifunction stations
Increasingly sophisticated, charging stations can now provide other functions, starting with automatic emptying. Democratized in 2019, in particular with iRobot and the Roomba i7+ sound station, this frees the user from emptying the robot’s collector, often necessary after one or two cleaning cycles. If, on the other hand, the station collector has to be emptied, it can generally contain several weeks of dust and waste.
Some stations can now also take care of cleaning the mop or the pads of robot vacuum cleaners, offering a washing function, and even fill their water tank on the way.
Contributing to making robot vacuum cleaners ever more autonomous, these options deserve to be valued for the comfort they provide on a daily basis. Each therefore now weighs in our note of convenience of use. Also, bagless systems are favored. If the bags can avoid direct contact with dust when emptying, they must be replaced and therefore purchased regularly.
In a second step, the efficiency of the automatic emptying as well as that of the cleaning of the mop will also be taken into account in our rating. To do this, we are working on new tests, the results of which will be integrated into the maintenance note for the robot vacuum cleaners. Other criteria may also alter this score, such as the capacity of the station’s waste collector.