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Robot vacuums have offered mop functions for years, but it’s historically been disappointing. Rather than actually cleaning your floors, it just smears a wet cloth along behind it as it travels.
But recently, we’ve seen a fair amount of improvement in the quality not just of the mopping, but also the hygiene of the mop pads. Dreame’s latest, the L10s Pro Ultra Heat, leans heavily into the mopping side of its cleaning routine.
It offers Dreame’s MopExtend technology, which swings out the right mopping pad to ensure edge-to-edge mopping. It also boasts a 58ºC hot water mop cleaning function in the base station.
I’ve been testing the L10s Pro Ultra Heat for a couple of months, and while the product still has some definite quirks, it also does a solid job of keeping your floors sparkling clean.
Design
Look! It’s another circular robot vacuum cleaner with a small protrusion on top for the sensors.
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat does not revolutionise the visual appearance of robot vacuum cleaners in any way.
But that’s okay.
There’s a reason robot vacuum cleaners all look the same, and that’s because the shape works.
The L10s does have its own combo of features to get you interested, though.
There’s only a single side brush on the right-hand side. We’ve seen that before in robot vacuums like the Dreame L20 Ultra and the Ecovacs X2 Omni.
There’s also the protruding rear mop pad, which helps to ensure the L10s mops all the way to the edge of your floor.
The L10s Pro Ultra Heat will lift the mop pads up to 10.5 mm when it’s vacuuming to help avoid dragging wet mop pads over carpets or rugs. Like every other mopping robot vacuum I’ve used, though, it still does.
Fortunately, you can set the vacuum to mop after it has vacuumed to ensure your carpets don’t get smeared with dirty mop pads. Because, unlike the L20 model, the L10s doesn’t detach its mop pads when it is only vacuuming.
You get an impressive 7,000 Pa of suction in the vacuum, which is plenty for cleaning.
The main brush is the same rubber style as the L20 Ultra. This is an immediate cause for concern for me. The L20 Ultra – while starting out as an early contender for the best robot vacuum in Australia – was let down by its rubber brush that was easily destroyed by strands of hair getting tangled.
With a 5,200 mAh battery and fast charging capabilities, the L10s Pro Ultra Heat has a fair amount of battery life, though I did find it still needed a charge mid-job when doing a full vacuum and mop.
The base station
The real hero component of the L10s Pro Ultra Heat isn’t the vacuum, though. It’s the base station.
With a 3.2L dust bag, plus a 4.5 Litre clean water and a 4-litre dirty water tank, you can almost leave the robot to clean every day for up to 75 days before you need to touch it.
Imagine it! A life where you only have to touch a vacuum cleaner every 2.5 months, and yet your home is still clean!
Unfortunately, in the real world, you’ll still need to empty the dirty water tank and fill the clean one much more frequently.
While the tank sizes are nice, it’s the mop cleaning function that really has to be called out. Using water heated to 58 degrees Celsius, which helps keep the mop clean after it works through your home. The station will then dry the mop pads with warm air, to avoid musty smells.
Performance
The Dreame L20 Ultra was one of the best robot vacuums I’d ever reviewed, except for one glaring issue. The main rubber brush was absolutely destroyed by nothing more than hair. It got tangled and tore the flaps of the rubber brush apart.
Unfortunately, the same issue is present with the L10S Pro Ultra Heat. While it seems to have fared slightly better in comparison over the same review time, there are still clear sections of the main brush with rips along the rubber ridge where hair has tangled and torn it apart.
It’s a major shame because in almost every other respect, the L10s Pro Ultra Heat does an impressive job.
Setting the vacuum to clean my home every day, it would make its way throughout the home. The suction is great, pulling up dust and dirt, and the mopping did a pretty good job of cleaning the floors.
The MopExtend function, which swings out the right mop to get right to the edge of your floor, worked surprisingly well.
It still can’t compete with a good old-fashioned manual mop on stubborn marks, but for routine care it was great.
Obstacle avoidance is solid, and shows how far the tech has come in a few short years. I only had one occasion in the time I was testing it where it got tangled on a charging cable.
Self-cleaning
The base station of the L10 Pro Ultra Heat is more compact than the L20, yet offers plenty of similar functions.
The water tanks are both nice and large. I didn’t mop the floors every day, but I only had to refill the clean water tank a couple of times over the two months of testing.
The dirty water tank I emptied after every mop because that bucket gets gross if you leave it. The vacuum does give you a verbal instruction to clean the dirty water tank after it’s cleaned the mop pads, too, so you hopefully shouldn’t forget.
The cleaning of the mop pads is a pretty key component here. There’s definitely no musty smells coming from the vacuum, and the cleaning process isn’t too loud — though there is a slight background noise while it cleans and dries them.
One thing I wasn’t prepared for was how dirty it gets inside the base station, though. You will have to periodically clean up the cleaner, so to speak. A simple wipe with a damp cloth is all that’s needed, fortunately.
Battery life
Because the mop pads lifting doesn’t do enough to avoid brushing along my kids’ carpeted rooms, I set the L10s to vacuum first, then mop.
This obviously drains the battery more, so it wasn’t able to complete my three-bedroom home on a single charge. But I did find that it vacuumed well.
Mopping also required several trips to the base station to refresh the mop pads to do a proper job, so the process of cleaning actually took a few hours from start to finish.
Verdict
The L10s Pro Ultra Heat is a solid performing robot vacuum, though like the L20 it is let down by a low-quality main brush.
I don’t understand why Dreame’s rubber brushes seem so susceptible to tearing from nothing more than a few strands of hair, when the likes of Ecovacs seem to manage fine enough.
If you are prepared to replace the brush regularly (Dreame recommends every 300 hours at most, but I used the L10s for 20 hours, and it’s full of rips already), it will set you back $50 every 6 months.
That’s far too much for something that should, frankly, be more robust.
But aside from the rubbish rubber, the L10s is a solidly performing robot vacuum. It’s a good step up from a budget model and best for those with many hard floors that need mopping.
Where to buy the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat:
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat price from our partners
Dreame supplied the product for this review.
