Robot vacuum cleaners are now present in many of our homes, helping reduce the weekly time spent on cleaning our floors. Over the years these have evolved from the basic dust and dirt collection to now include surface detection, mopping, scheduling, and even dust and water bins in the dock to allow longer times between human intervention.
If you don’t have one in your home, then any modern robot vacuum will feel like magic, but for those who have used many over the years, the question is, should you upgrade to get the newest features?
For the past few weeks, I’ve been reviewing the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra.
Dreame is a company that has been around 2017 and its products are available in China, Malaysia, United States, Germany and Australia. Dreame’s L20 Ultra Robot Vacuum is the current flagship, however, many of the features offered are available in the L10s Pro Ultra, for a more affordable price.
The L10s Pro Ultra Heat is a robot vacuum cleaner that is designed to clean your house for as many as 75 days without help from you.
Having used the robot for some time, it’s time for a full review.
Design
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat robot vacuum cleaner boasts a sleek and modern design that complements any household decor.
The solution is made up of the robot itself, but the design of the recharging dock is likely as important to owners given how substantial this is, it’ll be on display in your home to some degree. For some homes, there may be opportunities to hide this away in a butler’s pantry or in a corner.
The good news here is the dock features an elegant design, white in colour it should blend into most walls it’s placed near, with the only highlight being the bronzed dust bin cover. This is a nice touch and is a differentiator for the heat edition of the L10s Pro Ultra, the standard edition offers a silver dust cover.
The vacuum itself is circular in shape, something that is common to many robot vacuums. In the industry, we’ve seen other manufacturers experiment with different designs in an effort to collect dust in the most efficient technique, and in hard-to-reach corners. Dreame has another approach to these challenges that we’ll get to in the features section.
The robot’s low-profile body allows it to glide underneath furniture, the front of the chassis encompasses the camera and the top of the robot is a 360 lidar which combines to map your home, detecting the distances to objects from the robot.
The top of the robot provides access to the dust bin, should you need to empty it manually (typically this auto-empties to the dock), and the bottom of the robot contains the dust-collecting roller and mopping pads.
Features
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat robot vacuum features an impressive array of features.
Heated mopping
One standout feature of this vacuum is its heated mopping function (hence the Heat in the name of this edition of the L10s).
A number of premium robots now feature vacuum and mopping features, a standout feature is the heating of the water. While mopping may be fine to clear recent spills, cleaning spills that have dried are more difficult to remove.
As an example, you may have dinner one night and the kids manage to spill some sauce on the floor, but you don’t see it at the time. Overnight it dries and a simple mopping cycle just floats right over the top, leaving you with manual intervention to resolve the spill.
By heating the water before it is distributed through the mopping pads, you get an enhanced mopping experience, ensuring a deeper clean, particularly on sticky or tough stains. The heating element can heat the water to a temperature of 58°C.
Advanced navigation
Early robot vacuum cleaners would operate like drunken sailors moving about without any logical path planning and they certainly were not efficient in their movements. Thankfully things have progressed and using an advanced navigation system the L10s performs its cleaning duties in a smart and optimised route.
This navigation is done using a combination of Lidar to detect objects and AI to generate precise maps for cleaning routes to move through obstacles.
Advanced MopExtend Technology
Thanks to the technology’s advanced edge recognition, mop extension, and retraction, L10s Pro Ultra ensures flexible dirt pickup from the inside corner of the wall, irregular corners, and along baseboards.
This works surprisingly well to address the issue of fitting a round peg (the robot) into a square hole (the 90 degree corners found in our homes).
Powerful Vormax Suction
The robot has some serious sucking power with a Vormax Suction System offering as much as 7,000Pa** of suction power for highly efficient vacuuming.
By way of comparisons, the suction power of a standard upright vacuum is around 20,000 to 30,000Pa. Cordless stick vacuums typically offer between 15,000 and 25,000 Pa, while handheld vacuums offer 4,000 to 10,000 Pa.
Probably the best comparison is other robot vacuum’s given their restricted size:
- iRobot Roomba i7+:1,700 Pa
- Xiaomi Roborock S6: 2,000 Pa
- Ecovacs Deebot Ozmo T8 AIVI:1,500 Pa
- Eufy RoboVac 11S: 1,300 Pa
By comparison, the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat is incredibly powerful. It is important to understand that you often don’t need to run it at max performance, particularly if you run it on a schedule regularly.
You have the choice between 4 Suction Power options – Quiet, Standard, Turbo and Max, with Max being the top suction level which also produces the loudest noise. If you’re out of the home when this runs, the volume level will not be important, but if you have pets or people at home, you may wish to run it on Standard rather than Max. This level of control is rarely seen and really appreciated.
Dirt detection
Dreame engineers have included the smarts in this robot to detect how direct your floors are using smart sensors embedded in the robot. Where areas are determined to require additional attention, the robot can vacuum or mop areas multiple times to thoroughly clean your home.
DuoScrub Mopping System
The dual rotary mops are pressed closely to the floor, rotating at an impressive speed, while an in-built pressurized scrubbing solution efficiently removes dirt. An ample water tank consistently keeps the mop wet, so our vacuum can wash your floors for as long as you need.
Off-peak charging
Similar to our electric cars, the robot can be configured to only charge during off-peak charging times. You simply enable the feature in settings and define the off-peak window (i.e. 10PM to 7AM). It’s not obvious how much energy is actually consumed by recharging the robot, but this is a great option to have that would be beneficial in all consumer electronics.
Performance
In terms of performance, the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat offers a range of cleaning modes and options. From the mobile app, you get to select the cleaning mode (Vacuum, Mop, Vacuum & Mop, Mop after Vacuum). The last is to use intelligent recommendations. This determines automatically what each room of your house needs, predominantly based on the determination of your floor surface.
There is a wetness slider.. not joking, you can select from slightly dry, to moist, to wet. Given we have engineered wooden floorboards, I left ours in the middle of the range, but those with tiles could consider the wet setting for the most intense clean.
I never needed it, but there are options to run up to up to 3x cleaning cycles. I can’t imagine who has a house that would require 3 cleans to get clean, but it is there if you need it.
Ultimately the performance and resulting clean of this robot vacuum were incredibly impressive. The powerful suction capability through the heated mopping function works wonders and ultimately achieves the objective and primary reason you invest in something like this, to reduce your effort in cleaning your house.
The robot will let you know when either the dust bin or water canisters (clean/dirty) need emptying. Given the capacity of the bin, this is rare, so the reminder helps.
The robot’s ability to detect fixed obstacles and navigate around them is exemplary. The digital map that gets created as the robot learns your home layout is detailed and happens seamlessly, while others require you to do the hard work of mapping tables etc.
Issues
While the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat performs exceptionally well in many areas, it does have a couple of downsides. For example, some users might find the unit a bit noisy, especially on its highest suction setting, although as mentioned, you do have control over this in the mobile app.
I did find that the pet detection was a little hit or miss, with our dog walking close to it and the robot didn’t appear to respond. The robot never ran over our dog’s foot or anything like that, but I would have expected it to pause while the dog passed in front of it, but I didn’t experience that.
I did find that a couple of items on our floor got stuck in the air intake, something I’ve seen from every other robot vacuum I’ve used. Something as simple as a bread clip can result in a clicking sound which certainly grabs your attention and requires intervention. I’m not sure if there’s any innovation in the design of the intake or brushes that could resolve this, or we just need to do a better job of ensuring nothing like that finds its way to the floor.
Price and Availability
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat sits at the premium end of the market and with the features on offer, that is justified. There is a flagship L20s, but this is my pick, as the differences between the two models I think are hard to justify the additional price.
Those interested in the latest and greatest in cleaning technology should view this as a worthy investment, particularly if you hate mundane cleaning tasks like vacuuming and mopping the floors.
If you do decide to buy, these are easy to get, with the vacuum available to purchasable through major electronics retailers or Dreame’s own website – https://dreame.com.au/products/dreame-l10s-pro-ultra-heat.
JB Hi-Fi currently has the Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat on sale for A$1,699. For that price, it’s quite competitive with other robot vacuums and with the list of features on offer here, represents good value.
Overall
The Dreame L10s Pro Ultra Heat robot vacuum cleaner is a powerhouse gadget that merges aesthetics with high functionality. Despite a few minor issues, its comprehensive cleaning capabilities, advanced features, and robust performance make it an excellent choice for anyone looking to invest in a top-tier robotic vacuum.
Whether you’re dealing with messy kids, pets, or just everyday dirt, this vacuum can handle it all, making it a worthy addition to your smart home.
