DreameBot L10s Ultra review: A floor-cleaning dream machine

Price When Reviewed

$1,299.00

Best Prices Today: DreameBot L10s Ultra

While inexpensive robot vacuums are perfectly capable of restoring some luster to your floors, manufacturers continue to tack a greater number of convenience features onto these products, with increasingly higher price tags to match. The Dreamebot L10S Ultra is a perfect example. This luxe all-in-one robot vacuum/mop hybrid can build detailed maps that recognize room and flooring types, empty its own dustbin and dirty water, and wash and dry its mops. It also includes a navigation camera that can double as a home-monitoring tool. But most of these features fall into the category of “nice, but not necessary,” earmarking the L10S Ultra for adventurous folks who are all-in on home automation.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot vacuums.

The core of the L10S Ultra is its 16 × 13 × 22-inch base station. In addition to keeping the robot charged, the unit provides cleaning support by emptying the robot’s 350mL dust box after vacuuming runs, and emptying and refilling its water tank during mopping jobs. This accounts for the base station’s size; it houses a 3L dust bag in its belly, accessible by removing the chrome panel on its front, and 2.5L clean- and dirty-water tanks in a compartment under its top lid.

The robot navigates using an RGB camera and LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), which projects laser light into its environment and calculates the distance to surrounding objects based on how long it takes for the reflected light to return to the robot’s sensor. This essentially enables the robot to “see” in 3D and build an accurate map of the room. The RGB camera’s live feed can also be accessed through the DreameHome companion app used to operate the L10S Ultra, allowing you to also use the robot as a roving sentinel.

Given its abundance of premium features, it’s not surprising the Dreamebot L10S requires a little more preparation than the typical entry-level robot vacuum. The base station comes assembled with its water tanks and dust bags in place, so you only need to plug it in. To ready the system for mopping, you must first remove both water tanks and install a supplied bottle of multi-floor-surface cleaning fluid, fill the “clean” tank with fresh water, and reinstall both tanks.

To connect the robot, you download the DreameHome app and select the Dreamebot L10S Ultra from a product list. From there, the app walks you through the steps for connecting the robot to your Wi-Fi network. The L10S Ultra even offers a “fast mapping” option that generates a map more quickly by not carrying out any cleaning during the robot’s first run.

During my testing period, Dreametech’s claim of a “set it and forget it” cleaning experience proved true. The initial map of my downstairs level accurately divided the floorplan into four color-coded areas, even cheekily dropping a toilet icon into the bathroom area, and thus didn’t require any editing from me. Object avoidance was excellent—the robot nimbly maneuvered around furniture, got in and out of tight areas, and never collided with a wall or other obstacle. It even successfully navigated trouble spots in my living room that have ensnared other robot vacuums, and it avoided new objects, including my kids’ shoes, that got dropped on the floor since the bot’s cleaning.

The L10S Ultra vacuums and mops in sequence. In a multi-floor-surface home like mine, it automatically lifts its mop heads and boosts its suction when it moves from hard flooring to carpet. That spared me the burden of babysitting it to ensure it didn’t turn a couple of throw rugs into a soggy mess. After each job, the robot returned to its dock where its dust-box contents were automatically sucked into the base station’s dust bag and its mop heads were scrubbed clean by immersing them in water and spinning them at high speed against grooves in the station’s base plate. It then dried them with hot air.

All the convenience the L10S Ultra’s autonomy affords wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t get your floors clean. Fortunately, it fulfills its promise here, too. The robot delivers powerful max suction of 5,300Pa, more than twice that of the average robot vacuum, and that was more than enough to rid my floors of dust, tracked-in dirt, and pet hair. I even manufactured a heavy-duty job by crunching a fistful of potato chips on the floor, and it easily sucked them up leaving not a single crumb behind.

Mopping was just as impressive. The robot’s twin mop heads spin at 180 rpm and provide firm pressure to scrub stubborn dirt from hard floors. That agitation, along with the L10S Ultra’s solution of water and cleaning fluid, left my floors looking as if I had just gone over them with my stick mop.

The DreameHome app makes it easy to control and customize your cleaning experience. Rather than cleaning an entire floorplan, you can perform room cleaning by clicking a room on your map before starting a job. You can clean even smaller areas with zone cleaning, which lets you resize a box over a targeted area on the map. Similarly, you can set virtual no-go and no-mop zones to keep the robot out of certain areas. The app also lets you manage suction settings, cleaning times, mop-pad humidity, and self-cleaning particulars.

The app requires you to create a PIN number to access the RGB camera’s real-time view. When activated, it opens separate interface that allows you to remotely control the movements of the robot, speak through its speaker, and take snapshots. You can also dispatch it to waypoints by tapping on the same map used during cleaning. While this allows you to monitor your home in real time, it obviously lacks a lot of the capabilities of a dedicated home security camera, such as motion detection and real-time alerts. Paired with such a device, on the other hand, you could respond to a push notification of unexpected motion inside your home by dispatching to check areas where you don’t have fixed cameras.

As independent as the L10S Ultra is, there will be times you’ll need to intervene. The base station’s dust bag will need to removed and replaced about every 60 days, and its water tanks and base station must be regularly cleaned and dried to prevent mildew and odor. The mop pads, cleaning fluid, and other consumable components will also need to be replaced periodically. It’s worth weighing this routine maintenance against the cost of the L10S Ultra. You might find that a more rudimentary vacuum, or even your conventional vacuum and mop are more cost-effective cleaners. Ultimately the L10S Ultra’s high purchase price and ongoing maintenance made me reclassify “hands-free cleaning” as a want more than a need. But if the opportunity to offload this hated household chore is too good to for you to pass up, you’ll likely find the L10S Ultra well worth the expense.

Best Prices Today: DreameBot L10s Ultra