So I have tested the mopping feature of the newest Roborock S5 Max.
Firstly: what is new about mopping in the Roborock S5 Max the S5 and S6 don’t have?
- A bigger water tank (290 ml vs. 140 ml)
- 3 levels of water flowing through the app (the S5 does not have it, the S6 has a toggle on the container with 2 volume settings)
- No-Mop zones. Now you can set no-mop zones that are purple in the app, and no-go zones that are red. These are separate kinds of blocked areas. (the S6 and S5 only have no-go zones)
- Scheduling for mopping. The S5 Max can be scheduled to mop particular rooms
- The S5 Max has a different way of water flowing which I will talk about later
- The S5 Max has a big water container that is attached all the time and a mopping pad with a cloth. The pad is not attached too close to the water tank, it slightly moves thus making tighter contact with the floor providing better mopping results
- Because of this pad, the robot does not leak when is not moving
- Water flows once in 10 seconds.
A bigger water tank means you can run the robot for about 100 minutes covering about 100 square meters of hard flooring area.
My place is about 70 square meters. After mopping on the highest water leaking level, 130 ml of water was left. On the lowest level, 170 ml of water was still in the water container.
The idea behind the Roborock S5 Max is to provide proper mopping and control water flow depending on the cleaning needs like setting a higher level of water dripping on high-traffic rooms like a kitchen and less in the bedroom, etc.
For the mopping test, some cocoa was mixed with Coca-Cola to make dry stains. After setting zoned cleaning (drawing a rectangle on a map), and adding some oatmeal, I let the robot mop the stains.
Since the Roborock S5 Max can do mopping and sweeping at the same time, it picked the debris and removed the stains at one time. On the photo down below you can see the robot removed stains in one pass and after three passes.
Because of setting no-mop zones around a small rug I have in the corridor, the Roborock avoided that rug and left it untouched when mopped there.
So the mopping system of the newest S5 Max works differently. In the water tank there is a thin tube, that is contacted to the robot’s body and with help of a special mechanism the water flows through the mopping pad right on the cloth.
Because of the S5 Max being closed to the floor it does a better job at mopping than almost all of the previous robots I have tested did.
To conclude: I was very impressed by the results of mopping, the Roborock S5 Max might be the best robot vacuum on the market that can properly do both: mopping and sweeping. It is able to remove stains, has a big container and can cover a large area of hard floor before you need to refill the container again, avoids carpeted areas and can be scheduled to mop in a specific room. What else to wish for?