If you are used to cleaning your house with a handheld vacuum cleaner or even a good old-fashioned broomstick, the idea of switching to a robotic vacuum cleaner for the first time can be unnerving. Will you be able to manage the device on your own? What if something gets stuck inside? Will your house’s corners ever get cleaned? Can such a small device ever properly scrub your whole house?
In order to answer these questions, The Hindu reviewed the Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner that retails at ₹21,999 on Amazon, for over a month. Here is what we discovered.
At a Glance
The Dreame F10 is a robust, entry-level robotic vacuum cleaner that will help busy residents in non-cluttered homes delegate their daily sweeping and mopping to a smart and effective device
Investing in the Dreame F10 vacuum cleaner would be a no-brainer with more aftersales support
In the Box
We received the Dreame F10 vacuum cleaner, the charging base with its cable, the mop pad and the water tank, a detachable side brush, and documentation for the device.
A view of the Dreame F10 showing the mop and water tank beneath the device
| Photo Credit:
Sahana Venugopal
Design
The Dreame F10 is your standard, if basic, robotic vacuum cleaner. It comes with a glossy white plastic finish that gives it a premium look, and has a front visor with an in-built sensor to help it navigate around obstacles, even if that means bumping lightly into them first. There are two chunky rubber wheels that help the device move around, and a flimsy side-brush to sweep particles towards the vacuum cleaner’s main suction area, including those crumbs in the corners.
We would have preferred a side brush on both sides for better coverage. The white finish can also get a little dirty after some time.
A slim, detachable semi-circular tank beneath the device can be filled with water and is attached to a micro-fibre pad with velcro. This is your “mop.”
Setting up the robotic vacuum cleaner and the companion app via WiFi took about 30-40 minutes and was moderately simple thanks to the user manual and diagrams provided by the company.
Clearing out the dust box of the vacuum cleaner is convenient but requires some care so that you avoid tipping out all the dirt over your hands when turning it over.
Performance
Once you have set up your app, established a stable WiFi connection, fixed the charging station, and linked to the device, it’s time to get mapping.
The Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner needs a house clear of obstacles and clutter including cables, toys, plastic bits, papers, rug tassels, mats, flower pots, chairs, hanging curtain ends, etc. so that it can simply “explore” its new home and generate a map in the app that will be used to guide future cleaning tasks. The rooms should ideally be demarcated in the app for better accuracy. This did not happen for us the first time and the house was generated as one giant room due to a largely open-floor plan, so we later remapped the house. This time, there was an improvement, though some rooms were still clubbed together. The process requires about 10-20 minutes, depending on the size of your home.
After a successful mapping, you can start the robotic vacuum cleaner on its cleaning task. There are multiple cleaning modes available, based on whether you want a light sweep of just one or two rooms/zones, or a full cleaning where all the rooms are thoroughly swept and mopped.
One glitch that we saw here is that the device and the app failed to notify us when the mop’s water tank was empty, so this is something we had to check for ourselves in order to refill it.
The easy-to-clean dust box of the Dreame F10
| Photo Credit:
Sahana Venugopal
We tried the Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner in two locations: a large house with marble flooring that was filled with many objects, and a small apartment with far fewer things and glossy tiles. The F10 performed admirably in both settings, travelling line-by-line to cover the entire area and leave behind clean floors.
Throughout the course of its cleaning cycle, the F10 robotic vacuum cleaner neatly picked up hair, crumbs, dust, fallen food particles, glass shards, etc. on its first run and simultaneously mopped the spot, leaving you with a gleaming floor that even guests noticed when visiting. The device is mostly independent, handles dusty corners quite well, and leaves no dirt behind. However, you will need to let the vacuum cleaner have its full run of the place so that it can really get into those pesky corners and crevices. Houses with stacked boxes, blocky furniture, lots of chairs, scattered toys, floor vases/lamps, mats, etc. are not a good fit for the F10. Minimalists will get far more out of the device while maximalists will first have to move around their furniture and belongings in order to see the best cleaning experience.
The robotic vacuum cleaner handles light thresholds with some difficulty, but you can choose to still have the area mapped, and manually lift the F10 in and out of that space for cleaning. This is what we did for a balcony that the F10 could not access by itself.
Apart from the regular selection, the Dreame F10 offers a deeper, denser mopping pattern that ensures a more intensive cleaning experience. While impressive in its gap-free coverage, this greatly slows down the speed of the cleaning task, so it took around two hours to finish our entire house.
In addition to this, the deep mopping mode consumed far more battery, so the device sometimes needed to charge in the middle of a cleaning session. However, you can always opt for the faster, less energy-intensive standard mode and save this mode for a slow weekend.
When finished with its task, the F10 returns to its charging station and powers up again. In case you have to flip the robotic vacuum cleaner in order to clean out an obstruction or avoid a tangle, the machine quickly stops its suction but finds its former position rapidly once the wheels are in contact with the floor again.
The Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner does emit a constant sound when running, but it is similar to that of white noise and will not bother those who are trying to work or study in your home.
When the robotic vacuum cleaner does snag a foot mat or fallen object, the machine struggles for a bit but frees itself after several seconds without causing too much of a mess. However, it does produce a rather loud and alarming grinding noise when an object gets caught up in its active components. You can also get a notification sent to your phone, informing you that the main brush has wrapped around something
App
Unlike a stick and/or cordless vacuum cleaner, the Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner is fully dependent on an app in order to map out the household it is in and cannot be run independently. However, it is easy to download the Dreame Home app on another phone and set up the map in another location, as long as you have a stable WiFi connection. It is also compatible with smart home devices.
The app itself is thoughtfully designed and is a breeze to use, regardless of your comfort with technology. There are intuitive options that let you decide which zones or rooms you want the robotic vacuum cleaner to cover, the intensity of the cleaning cycle, and whether you want the full sweeping + mopping experience or just one. You can also draw up no-go zones through the app to keep the robotic vacuum cleaner away from spaces containing breakables, your pets’ resting/feeding areas, and stairwells.
You can further track in real time the progress of the F10 as it cleans each room, apart from checking on the battery life. Users can also set up automatic cleaning schedules for the future, when in contact with the activated device.
A screenshot of the app’s map controls
| Photo Credit:
Dreame App
Battery life
You will be pleasantly stunned by the battery capacity of the Dreame F10 robotic vacuum cleaner. The risk of the Dreame F10 losing juice midway through its task is low, as it automatically goes to the charging station after the cleaning task ends, or when its power is at 15%.
What’s more, you can clean a large house about 2-3 times on a single charge before the device battery level falls too low. You can safely put battery anxiety out of your mind and let the machine worry about itself, so to speak.
It took us a little over an hour to complete the sweeping and mopping cycle for both houses, excluding bathrooms, when using the most powerful turbo mode. However, the deep mopping mode required a mid-task recharging session and took over two hours.
The robotic vacuum cleaner was also able to tackle a balcony floor that was completely coated in dust, though it didn’t quite do a deep clean here and a manual scrub was still required later.
Dreame claims 300 minutes of runtime with a 5,200mAh battery capacity. The device can also clean upto 270m² on a single charge, per the company. Your average Indian home is far less than this when considering the floor space not occupied by furniture.
After sales
This is likely to be an area of concern for many customers, as Dreame is a newer contender in the home tech space with a largely online presence. For its part, Dreame offers a pickup and drop service in case of any technical issues, while the year-long warranty is active. However, it would inspire confidence to see a local service centre or visiting technicians in the near future as the company works on its offline push. On-site installation is offered by the company.
Dreame further provides home kits with replacement parts that can be ordered. However, we would have appreciated getting a spare mop pad or two along with the original unit, especially when considering the company’s still mostly digital presence.
Verdict
The Dreame F10 is a solid introduction to the world of robotic vacuum cleaners. Powerful, intelligent, easy to operate, and largely fuss-free, the F10 takes over your daily sweeping and mopping routine with ease and lightens your mental load as well. Shining, dust-free, mopped floors are achieved with just a few taps on your phone, and the device cleanup is convenient too.
While we hope to see more aftersales support for Dreame customers, the F10 robotic vacuum cleaner is a strong yet simple-to-use product that will save you hours of time and effort every day.
