Roborock S5 Robotic Vacuum and Mop Cleaner, 2000Pa Super Power Suction &Wi-Fi Connectivity and Smart Navigating Robot Vacuum with 5200mAh Battery Capacity, EU Warranty (White)

This is my first robot vac so I didn't really have any expectations going in... after reading a few reviews I settled on the S5 as it seemed to strike a good balance between performance and price.Let's start with what could be better...The bin is ok, but not especially large... there are other robot vacs that can eat more before getting full. It will need relatively regular emptying depending on how dirty your home gets.The mopping function requires a bit more manual intervention by fitting the mopping attachment, changing the cleaning mode, and removing once finished. It won't automatically avoid rugs or carpet while mopping so you will probably want to use zoned cleaning. You can set it to 1x, 2x or 3x and for mopping I would definitely suggest 3x as it will give the best result. That said, even on 3x don't expect it to remove dried on stains - it's just moving a damp microfibre type rag around... would be good to see a vac like this with a steam mop module which would probably improve the effectiveness. I did find if you just quickly squirt some spray cleaner on any areas that are a bit dirtier before setting it off it actually does a pretty admirable job and certainly enough to relegate a proper manual mopping to a rarer occurrence.Download the roborock skill for alexa and you can say "alexa turn on/off XXX" and it will start and stop the vac. It would be nice if you could save zones, so you could then simply say "alexa tell XXX to clean the kitchen", but that doesn't seem to be possible... it would also be nice if you could use alexa to change the cleaning mode between the different power settings. Functionality is basically the bare minimum, but at least it works.With that out the way, what is good about it?The Mi Home app is easy enough to use and it was straightforward to get the vac set up and connected to wifi. It spent about 10 minutes installing a firmware update and then it was all ready to go... you can set it to clean on a schedule, with several options including power settings available which would be useful for example to set quiet mode if you want it to have a whizz around at night. Alternatively you can direct it to a particular spot or manually start a full cleaning cycle from the app. Quite amazing to see it pootle off and start mapping your house, with the map and the route the vac has taken being updated in real time albeit with a few seconds delay. Once a map has been saved (turn on the option to save maps in the app) you can then put virtual walls and no go zones in place, and set zones that you want it to clean if you want to just clean a particular room... again you can't save and name those zones in my version of the app though which is a shame, perhaps they will add the ability. On that note, you also can't save multiple maps which is a shame if you wanted to plonk it upstairs for example - it would have to start a new map each time you move it which makes the planning a little more haphazard but only adds a few minutes to the job from what I have seen.It picks up dirt well off of both hard floors and rugs, and hasn't got stuck yet despite a few areas that try to trap it. It has also always managed to find it's charging dock at the end of the cleaning cycle. I do find Turbo mode works a bit better than the balanced mode with the tradeoff of a bit more noise, but haven't needed to use the maximum setting... you can also set it to change to maximum power when it detects carpet which is a useful feature.Battery life is great, it can clean my whole ground floor of my average sized house in around 30 minutes and using only around 20% of the battery. If it runs below 20% remaining it will return to the dock and then resume cleaning where it left off once sufficiently charged so even if it did run out of battery it's not a big deal... clever!So overall, incredibly impressive for the money. It's a clever bit of kit and I am impressed with the mapping function - I was never impressed enough with the idea of the random type navigation bots to actually buy one, and it's great to see vacs with proper navigation becoming more affordable.Do note that there is a new flagship vac from these guys called the T6 that improves on a few aspects, I didn't find that out until after I bought this one, but it looks like you will pay a bit more for the pleasure of having the latest and greatest. For the price I paid I'm very happy with this little chap, and replacement brushes/filters etc seem easy to obtain so hope to get many happy years of use!

I eventually bought the S5 after trying and returning 2 Neato D750s (pet edition of the Neato D7 Connected). The S5 is a far superior product in my opinion.Price: The standard S5 price is around £370 while the D750 can be found for a standard price of around £530 (but £400 on black friday).Navigation: The navigation of the S5 is superior in every aspect, it covered my entire apartment in one go, out of the box. Compared to the D750 which consistently missed rooms of my apartment for some reason (despite the laser mapping showing there space ahead). When I bought the S5, there was no room-by-room cleaning, a feature available on the S6 (which was no available on amazon at the time of purchase). A few days after my purchase, I was delighted to find a software update which enabled this feature on the S5 as well as "improved efficiency navigation". The room cleaning of the Roborock is also superior to that of the D750 in that multiple rooms can be selected to be cleaned unlike the D750 which can only clean 1 room at a time (or the entire house). The S5 also did not ram into objects like the D750 and once it has mapped the edges of each room (it auto detects rooms but this can be manually edited), travels along the inside very efficiently. There is also the ability to add virtual walls and no-go zones (a feature also present on the D750) which have worked very well so far.Cleaning: There are multiple modes of suction on the S5; Silent, Standard, Medium and Turbo. I didn't notice any pickup issues with standard and Turbo is significantly louder so I leave it on Standard generally. The only point which superior in the D750 is the main brush bar seems to be better at agitating carpets than the S5. This can be observed by the "ruffled" look of the carpet after the D750 cleans a carpet while the S5 leaves it somewhat more smooth looking. Despite this, the pickup of visible dirt on carpets was the same on both (no dirt left). I have not used the mopping feature as the gravity-fed water mop does not sound particularly useful.Battery: The S5 finishes a clean of my entire house in 20-25 minutes and in that time uses approximately 25% battery. Even on Turbo it does not drop below 50% on a single clean.Features: No-go zones, virtual walls, live pathing shown in app, automatic room detection, point and go (spot cleaning by selecting point on map), scheduled cleaning (room or entire house), a variety of language settings for spoken feedback, virtual remote, cleaning history (including entire path taken by the robot), triggering cleans based on input from other xiaomi smart devices (I have not explored this feature but there is an IFTTT-like mode in the settings).Note: For some reason, the map saving mode and carpet mode (increased suction on carpet) is disabled by default and needs to be enabled in the app. The map saving is marked as beta so potentially this may default to enabled in a future update.In summary, this is an excellent robot when compared to the significantly more expensive Neato D750. The features received in the software update since my purchase have improved the feature set to more than that of the D750 (because of functional room cleaning). Better value, better performance and overall better vacuum than the D750.

So I wasn't vacuuming often enough to keep up with the fluff generated by two long haired cats that I have.Love the cats but there is more to life than just cleaning up after them.Saw this reviewed on vacuum wars and the price seemed right.So ordered it from MiTech, but as it's an EU seller it came with an EU plug, I had a UK adapter spare anyway, and the cable that you need is the same as found on some laptop chargers.Robot now runs daily, scheduled after I leave the house when I'm working, or before I wake up on my days off. It takes 25 minutes to do 22m2 or 45 minutes to do 36m2 (depending on if I let it into all of the rooms) and always finishes a clean with more than 60% battery and only ever "filled" the dust box on its first run.Quieter than my Dyson, and brilliant to come back to a clean house daily, it has gotten stuck twice in a month of ownership, but still requires less of my time than a normal vacuum.Just manages to fit under my sofa (10cm gap underneath)It has the no go lines (which I never use) and the zone specific clean, which I use when I want a room that I had previously left closed that day cleaned later on.Apart from the mishaps I will find it back at the charging dock each day and empty the dustbin.Overall it's easy for me to recommend, but for you to work out if it's right for you, work out how much time you vacuum and how clean you'd like your home, this will go a long way to helping you keep your home clean.