Xiaomi Robot Vacuum X10+ review

The X10+ is not yet available to buy in the US or the UK – unless you’re able to find a retailer that has imported it. It will become more widely available in the coming months.

Xiaomi may have called the X10+ a robot vacuum, but, in reality, it is more of an automatic, hands-free floor cleaning system.

What does this actually mean?

You get a robot vacuum, with mopping functionality, which auto-empties the robot’s dust compartment into a disposable bag in the base station, auto-fills the tank with clean water from the base station tank, auto-empties the dirty water from the robot back into the base station, and also washes and dries the mop pads, all to fit around a schedule and a cleaning circuit that you choose.    

Once you set up the X10+, all you need to do is periodically refill the clean water tank, empty the dirty water tank, and change the disposable bag. The X10+ does everything else.

There are caveats to this. As with all robot vacuums, particularly those that mop, you need a fair amount of clear floor space to make it worthwhile. If your home is cluttered, it’s not going to work. Likewise, if your ground floor is a carve-up with different flooring heights and a step or two between rooms, you’ll get less from it.

But if you have a neat, orderly, and fairly open-plan home, with a decent amount of hard flooring, the X10+ will take a lot of regular floor maintenance tasks off your hands.     

Let’s see what you get.

What’s in the box?

• Large self-emptying station (59cm x 42cm x 34cm)
• Robot with twin spinning mop pads
• Comes with a spare 2.5 litre dust bag

The first thing you notice is that the box is heavy: over 11kg, or 28lbs, so be prepared for that. Most of this weight, a good 8.3kg of it, is the white plastic Omni station, which is the charging base and holds the two 2.5l water tanks, the 2.5l disposable dust bag, and the cleaning tray.  

The Omni station is substantial, standing at 59cm high, 42cm wide and 34cm deep. The robot docks into the tray at the bottom, and there’s a flip-up lid on the top to allow you access to the two water tanks. It also has a power indicator light on the front and three buttons on the top: one to make the robot leave the station, another to start a clean of all areas, and one to start or stop drying the mop pads.

The white plastic robot vacuum itself is 3.9kg, 35cm in diameter and stands about 9.7cm high. It’s got a couple of chunky wheels underneath, alongside the revolving brush, with two revolving mop pads at the back and another side brush to the left at the front, next to the omnidirectional wheel.

There are two buttons on the front: one for power and to start a clean, and another to dock and set the child lock, and an indicator to show charging status, errors, or the Wi-Fi status. Under the cover of the robot, there’s a reset button, dust compartment and Wi-Fi indicator.  

You also get a handy cleaning tool, a spare 2.5l dust bag, the mop pads holders and side brush that you fit into the robot, the power cord, a manual, a quick start guide and the warranty.    

Set-up

• Choose a location before setup
• QR code for quick start
• 3D mapping

First, you unpack the X10+, remove the protective coverings, install the brush and the mop pads, and place your Omni station in a viable place: 0.5m to either side and with 1.5m spare at the front. The power cord is 144 cm long, so you have some leeway with a power point location.

However, once you place the Omni station, put the robot in to charge and fill the clean water tank, you can’t move it from this point, and as the mopping facility relies on the robot drawing water from the station tank, you can’t really take the robot to another floor to mop.

So, if you are looking for a mopping robot that you can move between floors of your home, you might want to think about a robot with a clip-in tank. 

Then it’s time to connect to Wi-Fi. Download the Xiaomi app (the QR code is in both the manual and the quick start guide) and set up your profile. Then you add the device and follow the instructions on your phone. We found this process simple and straightforward, although if you are not that tech-savvy, you might need additional help. 

You then get a prompt to create the quick map. This is where the robot vacuum uses its LDS and line laser sensors to generate a map of your floor, which forms the basis for its cleaning manoeuvring. The mapping feature is impressive; it also generates 3D mapping, but our experience was that it didn’t put in obstacles, so it seemed a little pointless. At this point, you can adjust the map, relabel rooms, set virtual walls and restricted areas.      

Alex Greenwood / Foundry

Then it’s time to start cleaning.

Performance

• 4 suction levels (up to 4000Pa)
• 2.5cm climbing ability but can be hit and miss
• Noisy auto-emptying

You get four suction levels with the X10+: silent, standard, strong and turbo, which makes the most of the 4000Pa suction. We did our first test on standard, and felt we needed something stronger for our dust and crumbs. Strong seemed to work for our floor with the majority being hard flooring, both tile and engineered wood, with an additional small, carpeted room. For pet dander on carpet, you’d probably need to rely on turbo, although this still won’t pull out years of vacuuming neglect from your carpet.

You can set the robot to vacuum the whole floor, a particular room or set of rooms or a certain zone within a room. We were puzzled at first as the in-app “pause” button has been mislabelled “paused”, which makes you think the cleaning has stopped when it hasn’t. Cue: repetitive pressing of the pause button, trying to un-pause a non-paused cleaning programme, which confused the robot no end.

The robot appears to vacuum the edges of the room, as far as it is able, and then ladders up and down the centre of the floor. On occasion, it struggled to cross a boundary height change of 2.5cm, but then later managed it with no problem. Nevertheless, the robot consistently covered 47m2 in 59mins, and you can watch the progress on the map in real-time.    

Be warned though: the auto-emptying is loud and sounds a bit like a jet engine. Thankfully, it doesn’t last long.

Mopping 

• 3 water settings
• Revolving mop pads
• Designed for light, regular maintenance

We had a few hiccups with our initial mop tests as no water filtered through from the base. Upon investigation, we discovered that we hadn’t fitted the clean water tank properly into the base, and we had to fiddle for some time until the base finally fed water though to the mop pads. However, we didn’t experience this issue again, so it could just be a few teething problems straight out of the box.

There are three water settings: low, medium, and high. High is very much a light mop, with medium being more of a damp dust. We couldn’t discern much from the low water level at all, and the medium level didn’t lift significant dirt scuffs from tiles, although the high level did.

We were impressed by the spinning 180rpm mop pads, feeling that they not only mopped but also buffed the floors at the same time. Lustre and sheen seemed higher than other robot mops.

Alex Greenwood / Foundry

Like most mopping robot vacuums, the mopping function is really designed for daily maintenance of floors, rather than a weekly deep clean. You will need to use a conventional mop with hot water and soap to shift significant dirt or grime.

When the robot returns to base after a mopping session, the Omni station washes the pads in the cleaning tray and dries them. This is quite a loud process, so be warned. We’d reckon it at around the same sound level as a conventional vacuum cleaner, but it keeps things fresh. Indeed, there were no mouldy or damp smells from the X10+ over the month of testing.   

You can also set the robot to vacuum and mop at the same time. We found that this setting provoked the robot to return to base for an exchange of water and took approximately one minute per m2.  

Other features

• Roughly 2 hours of vacuuming time
• Good navigation and obstacle avoidance
• Custom cleaning available

Xiaomi states that the X10+ has about two hours of life in its 520mAh battery, and we found this to be accurate. The X10+ also seemed to navigate temporary obstructions quite well, such as a toy left on the floor or the change of the position of a chair. 

You can also set a custom mode for your cleaning sessions, selecting a specific suction, water level, action, and cleaning pattern for each room, and the order in which the robot should tackle each room. There’s also a deep cleaning setting for dirtier floors, where the robot will return to clean the mop pad more frequently to prevent cross-contamination. Again, you can also schedule clean-ups, set Do No Disturb parameters, and connect the robot to Alexa or Google Assistant. 

The app will also tell you the status of the filter, side brush, main brush and whether you need to replace the mop pads.

Verdict

The X10+ robot vacuum takes automated floor cleaning to the next level, and if you have the right kind of home, it will keep your floors dust- and crumb-free without you having to think about it. That kind of freedom from chores is quite a remarkable liberation. With the X10+, you don’t even have to fill, load and empty a clip-in tank or wash the pad after a mopping session. You simply open the app and press start.

That said, to make the most of the X10+, you are going to need a fairly minimalist interior set-up. The X10+ will give you a perfectly vacuumed expanse of carpet, almost zen in its smoothness, but you are going to need that clear expanse of carpet in the first place, no matter how clever this robot may be in identifying temporary obstacles. 

We, however, liked it. A lot.

For more robot vacuum cleaner options, have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested.