Dreamebot D10 Plus review

The Dreamebot D10 Plus is a new release from Dreame, a Xiaomi brand. Among its key features are an auto-empty dock, which can give you up to 45 days before you need to empty it, powerful 4,000PA suction and a mopping function.

Let’s take a closer look.

In the box

• Large auto-empty dock
• Comes with one spare bag
• Replacements easily available from Amazon

In the box, there’s a white plastic charging base, the disc-shaped robot vacuum and mop, a side brush, a spare auto-clean 2.5l vacuum bag, a cable with an integral plug, a 145ml water tank cartridge with a cloth mop attachment, a quick-start card, and a manual. 

The first thing you’ll notice is the size of the charging base. At 40cm high, 23cm wide and 40cm deep once the robot vacuum docks, it’s a substantial item that requires placement at least 20 inches away from an adjacent wall, which might be tricky in houses where power sockets congregate in room corners.

The base has a lift-up lid on top for access to the auto-clean bag, and the charging cable plugs into the back, with a coil holder to tidy away slack between the base and your chosen power socket.

The robot vacuum and mop is a sizeable white plastic 35cm diameter disc of a depth of roughly 6cm, with a laser distance sensor on top and two buttons: one for power and to begin cleaning, and the other to dock or start spot cleaning.

As both the charging base and the robot are white, their presence in most homes will be less intrusive than a black or grey model, although the overall effect can sometimes remind you of a high-tech Japanese toilet – perhaps scaled down for a cat.

Setting up the D10 Plus

• 2 hours for initial charge
• Voice confirmations from robot
• App available for Apple and Android

The set-up of the D10 Plus is a little involved; this is not a plug and go appliance.

First, you need to position the charging base. You need to think carefully about where to put it, because once it is on the floor and you’ve generated a fast map, you can’t move it somewhere else – the robot will just get lost trying to dock.

If you do want to move the base, you’ll need to generate a new map through the map management option. This also gives you the ability to move the robot to another storey of your home and create a fast map for cleaning on that level. In this scenario, the robot just returns to the place it originally began the map after it finishes cleaning.

Your second task is to remove the protective strips, install the side brush on the robot, and connect the base to a power outlet and start charging.

Be aware, you need to firmly plug the cable into the base and turn the robot on for it to start charging. This is where you’ll experience the first voice notification – “Robot starts charging” – because, yes, this Dreamebot talks. It took about two hours for the robot to charge fully out of the box.

At this point, you start the business of making the robot smart by downloading the Mi Home or Xiaomi Home app for Apple or Android. There’s a short cut in the form of a QR code under the robot’s flip-up cover, or you can search for it on your app store. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, you’ll need to create a profile, which some data-conscious people might find intrusive.   

Next, pair your robot to the app by scanning the QR code again, and then you connect the robot to your Wi-Fi.

If you are reasonably comfortable with pairing appliances to your phone, none of this will faze you, but if you are not remotely tech-savvy, you may find the process frustrating.

Creating the fast map

• Schedule cleaning
• Target zones within rooms for cleaning
• No-go zones and virtual walls

Once you’re set up, the app will ask you if you want to create a fast map. If so, the robot will travel around an entire storey of your house and scan the various rooms, using LiDAR navigation and an advanced SLAM algorithm, to create a 2D navigational map in the app. You’ll then use this to set cleaning sequences and schedules.

The resulting map was impressive. Our robot crossed two thresholds with a vertical step rise of 2.5cm between floor levels, although we found it could not cope with a higher step than this. It split up an entire ground floor into seven rooms, which was extremely accurate, and mapped the static furniture precisely.

You can edit this map through the map management setting: merging, splitting, and naming rooms. You can also set no-go zones for cleaning or mopping, and designate “virtual walls” that the robot will not cross.

From this map, you can then set the robot to vac, mop, or simultaneously vac and mop individual rooms, a set of rooms in a particular sequence, the entire map area, or a specific zone in a room.  You can also customise cleaning to personalise suction or mopping settings for certain rooms.   

Alex Greenwood

All in all, the control is incredible. You can, for example, set the robot to clean remotely, so if you are caught up in traffic on your way home, in two clicks you can arrive back to freshly vacuumed carpets. 

Vacuuming

• 4 suction settings
• 30-45 days before bag in dock needs to be emptied
• Quiet cleaning

We started our tests with specific room sweeping. Simply choose the room on the map in the app, and press go, and you can track the robot’s progress in real time.  

The app displays the area of a room (in sq m), how long it took to vacuum, and the robot’s battery status.

In our test, it vacuumed well, returned to the charging dock easily, and then auto-emptied into the base, which, be warned, is a pretty loud noise, reminiscent of five seconds of a light aircraft taking off.  

The cleaning itself was a quiet and unobtrusive process, although the robot failed our flour test in room 3 on a standard suction setting; it missed a 1cm strip but vacuumed up the rest.

All zones cleaning is a useful option. A 52 m2 clean took 60 minutes, and the carpeted area looked pristine with no crumbs or lint remaining. At one point, a stray balloon ribbon got caught in the main sweeper brush, but after a manual removal, the robot recovered well.

Alex Greenwood

We did find that door positions could confuse the robot if they were less ajar than they had been at the time of the fast map.      

There are four suction settings for the vacuum function: quiet, standard, strong and turbo. Dreame states that the robot has 4,000Pa suction on its maximum setting, but we found standard got everything off the floor: cracker flakes, bits of paper, and grass blades. 

After several vacuuming tests, we inspected the dirt cartridge inside the robot to find it completely empty, and the vacuum bag inside the charging base to have a substantial amount of dirt and hair within it, so the auto-empty function works well.

Dreame suggests the 2.5l bag means replacement could be as rare as eight times a year, or every 45 days. We think this might be ambitious if you have pets, children or work from home, but can definitely see the possibility for quieter households.  

You can buy a six-pack of replacement bags from Amazon for $17.99.

Mopping

• Water only, no detergent
• Three water settings
• Good for maintenance, won’t deep clean

To mop, all you do is rinse the mop pad, wring it out and attach it to the water tank, fill the water tank with water, and install it in the robot. It’ll recognise that you have installed it after a second or two and say: “Water tank has been installed”. This then releases the mopping settings in the app.

Alex Greenwood

It doesn’t specify whether to use cold or warm water, but you can’t use detergent, so if you want a robot mop that will soap your floors, you need to look elsewhere.

Just like the vacuum settings, choose where you want to mop through the app and you’ll have the choice to vac and mop, or just mop. There are also two motion choices: daily mopping or deep mopping, which is an intense zigzag pattern.

There are three water settings: low, medium or high. We started with medium and found the effect to be like dusting with a damp cloth.

We found that using this setting on tiles with a sheen brought them up beautifully, and there were no water marks or odd smells; the mopping dried very quickly.

The high water level is more like a traditional spray mop effect and takes longer to dry. We ran a spilt juice test on this setting, and it passed – although there was a slight, diluted mark on the adjacent tile, but we’d expect that if we had mopped it up with a conventional mop.

The light water setting was less useful.

Mopping is quiet – you don’t notice any noise if you are in a room next door –  and take a similar time to vacuuming. Mopping 41m² took 38 minutes.    

However, none of these mopping settings will tackle a floor with ingrained dirt that requires a good scrub, and that speaks to the nature of this appliance: it is very much a maintenance tool for an organised home.

Alex Greenwood

See also  Nothing Ear (2) review

You just won’t get the full benefit of this appliance if you have a household where toys, shoes, boxes, or extension cables randomly materialise on your floors and remain there for an indeterminate length of time. Likewise, it’s not going to remove years of grime from your tiles, bring up old carpets like new, or restore an old rug to its former glory.

But if you put in some work before employing the D10 Plus, it will keep things at a reasonable level, purely because the Dreamebot makes it so easy to vacuum and mop on a daily basis at virtually no time cost to you. All you need to do is open the app, choose the robot, choose your rooms and press go.                   

Other features

• Carpet boost
• Maps for multiple storeys
• Voice commands

The D10 Plus also has a variety of other settings. You can turn on the carpet boost, which allows the robot to automatically employ maximum suction if it recognises carpet. There’s also a child lock, and a do not disturb setting, which prevents cleaning from resuming or the robot from auto-emptying during a set period.

Through map management, you can also generate maps for other storeys of your home. These maps are stored in the app, and you just choose the one you wish to work with.

You can also connect the app to Alexa and Google Assistant if you want to use voice-activated commands. 

Price and availability

The Dreamebot D10 Plus is very well priced for its suction power and feature set. You’re unlikely to find a robot vacuum that does more and costs less. At the time of writing, you can buy it from Amazon US for $399.99, but you’ll get a better price if you buy direct from Dreamebot, where it’s just $349.99.

In the UK, it’s available from Amazon at a lower price than its £389.99 RRP.

Verdict

The paradox of the robot vacuum and mop is that to get the best out of them, your home needs to be pretty clean and tidy in the first place. You need to ensure your floors are as obstacle-free as possible, all wires are tidied away, and there are viable paths from one room to the next.

And this is the case with the Dreamebot D10 Plus. Thanks to its self-emptying technology, it’s very much a tool that’ll take the daily maintenance cleaning off your hands – but only after you’ve organised your home.

Having said that, the Dreamebot D10 Plus was a revelation. It vacuumed and mopped 85m² across two stories and twelve rooms in three hours, roughly around a minute to vacuum each square metre and the same again to mop, which corresponds roughly to how long it would take to do manually. All this took in personal time-cost was five or so minutes to change out the water tank, move the robot up a storey and interact with the app.

If you have a clutter-free home, the D10 Plus really is a no-brainer. You’ll have daily fresh floors without the effort, and you can relegate your mop and bucket to the bin. 

To read reviews of other robot vacuums and see our recommendations, have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested.

Specs

• 4,000PA suction
• 2.5 litre dust bag in dock
• 400ml dustbin on robot vacuum
• 145ml water tank
• LiDAR navigation
• Alexa- and Google Home-compatible