Best robot floor cleaner for smooth floors (vacuum or mop)?

September 4, 2022 11:26 AM

I have an apartment with light grey epoxy floors. The floors are very smooth (and i think very beautiful). Every speck of dust or hair is visible, though. I'm in the market for a robot floor cleaner. Do you love yours for smooth floors? Which model do you have?

I've never had a robot cleaner before, so not sure what to expect. Right now, we mop the floors every other day. Admittedly, it's very quick to do, maybe 10 min max. They dry very fast and the surface is just not that big, our place is about 80m2/860 square feet. All on one floor, with no thresholds anywhere, including the bathroom and the walk-in shower.

I barely ever vacuum now because the (microfiber) mop picks up all the dust and hairs and also wipes off anything sticky or smudgy like food.

We have a cleaner who comes once a week, but we also both have very demanding jobs. It would be great to not have to spend even those 10 min every other day dealing with the floors.

It's 2022, is there a magical floor robot floor cleaner on the market that would do a good job? And like, charge and clean itself?

We don't have pets, so most of the hair on the floor is mine (long and dark). We do have quite a lot of plants everywhere, so the robot would have to go around them, but for the rest, not much clutter on the floor, and all the furniture is on high enough legs that it would fit underneath. No carpets.

We're in Europe, which might matter in terms of availability of certain brands here.

posted by PardonMyFrench to Home & Garden (3 answers total)

We have wood floors through out the house. Through the years we've owned a few brands of robot vacuums including the Neato, eufy, and Roomba. The Neato was ok but for the price I expected it to last longer. The Eufy was less impressive then the Neato but you can buy them really cheap and if it breaks down within the warranty they send you a new one. I like the Eufy because it was quiet but in all honesty it's not a machine that in our experience lasts very long. We currently own the Roomba i3 robot vacuum with self emptying. So far it's worked well. More expensive then the Eufy and about the same price as the neato. I like the self cleaning as it's virtually no work involved. Despite none of the vacuums lasting a long time...and I'm sure our roomba won't last forever...the robot vacuums are worth it for us. We have multiple pets and it really cleans the place nicely. You can schedule cleaning or turn it on when you want. Not perfect by any means but handy for sure. I guess you have to way the cost over the long term and figure you'll need to replace it probably every couple of years. But they do work well...when they work, LOL.
posted by ljs30 at 4:09 PM on September 4, 2022

2nding the Roomba i3 with a self emptying base, I hardly have to touch mine and it's great at handling long hair.

The self emptying base is a bit noisier than I expected (it's like a loud vacuum cleaner for about 30 seconds), but that's the only real negative I can think of. The bag in the base lasts for a couple of months cleaning every day.
posted by samj at 4:31 AM on September 5, 2022

I’m in the UK and maybe models are different, but I have a Roomba Combo I bought earlier this year. It vacuums but also has a water tank and a flat cloth attachment. It basically drips the water/floor cleaner mixture from the tank into the cloth and drags it around while vacuuming.

It doesn’t do the self emptying thing but was much more reasonably priced than those that do. I don’t feel like I spend a lot of time emptying dust/filling with water/changing the cloth. It is definitely a vast improvement on my previous ancient Roomba, floors are really clean. It’s also really quiet compared to its predecessor.
posted by ElasticParrot at 5:23 AM on September 5, 2022