Mop rollers are the biggest innovation for cleaning hard floors

It’s been a huge year for robot vacuums, with hundreds of models introducing new features, smart capabilities extending down to lower-priced models, category innovator iRobot losing its grip amid a flood of Chinese brands, and mopping models pushing us towards a future where every home may have a robot system hooked to its plumbing like a washing machine.

But although we’ve seen gimmicks like robotic arms and rudimentary stair-climbing in the past year, perhaps the biggest innovation that’s actually ready for practical use has been mop rollers. Recently, I’ve tested the first mop roller models from two major brands — Dreame and Ecovacs — and found them unmatched for cleaning up wet spills and dirty hard floors.

Previously, most mopping robots have had a pair of circular pads that spin and press down as the machine drives around. This is pretty good for maintaining a clean floor, but actually rather poor for cleaning up spills. The mop pads don’t absorb much liquid, and the stuff they do pick up can spread around on your floor until the robot drives all the way back to its home base to clean its mop pads. Rollers, by comparison, are more hygienic and can actually remove wet spills.

The exact method differs by robot, but in both the machines I’ve tested it’s more or less the same. You’ve got a base station with two tanks — one full of clean water and one empty — but the robot itself has two tanks inside as well. It fills up on water, then when it’s mopping the roller spins and gets soaked with clean water, while dirty water is squeegeed off and stored in the second tank. So even if it’s cleaning up a wet mess, the roller stays clean. Eventually when the robot returns home it empties the dust from its bin into the base’s bag, the dirty water into the empty tank, and it grabs more water and power if it needs to keep going.

The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller and the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni are similar in many other ways too. They’re both premium models that go for around $2500, they both have rollers that can extend out to the side to get into corners, they both have heating elements for hot water washing and hot air drying, they both automatically mix detergent into their water, and they both promise around three months of vaccing before you need to change the filter bag. But they do also each have their pros and cons.

For the Ecovacs, one potential issue is moving the roller over carpet. You can set it to vac with a dry roller, but if you have carpet or rugs between hard floors it will need to cross with a wet one at some point. It will lift the roller around a centimetre, so if you have even floors and very short carpet you may be fine, but I noticed it left my carpets a little damp.

The Dreame avoids this problem with a plastic shield that covers the roller when it’s not in use. Even if it was mopping the hallway and then needed to cross my loungeroom to mop the kitchen, there was no chance of my loungeroom carpet getting wet.