roborock S5 Max Robot Vacuum Cleaner

Roborock built its name on navigation, and the Roborock S5 Max is the model that made the case.

• How the Roborock S5 Max maps a house
• The mop here is a real mop
• No-mop zones, set separately
• The biggest bin in this section
• One published figure that disagrees

2,000 Pa of suction, and the specifications below cover the rest.

How the Roborock S5 Max maps a house

The laser rangefinder on top of the Roborock S5 Max spins at 300rpm and maps the house to a claimed 98 per cent accuracy.

What that buys you is discipline. It cleans in straight parallel lines, knows exactly where it has and has not been, and does not miss a strip down the middle of a room and then go over the same patch three times. On a large floor plan the difference from a robot that guesses is obvious within one run.

The mop here is a real mop

Two things separate it from a damp cloth dragged along. The 290ml tank is electronically metered, so water is released under app control rather than seeping out at whatever rate gravity manages. And the pad sits on a spring mount holding 300g of even pressure against the floor.

That pressure is the point. An unweighted pad skates over a mark; a loaded one lifts it. It still will not scrub a dried spill, but it does more than any of the eufy mopping modules here.

No-mop zones, set separately

You can draw no-go zones and no-mop zones as two different things.

So a tiled sitting room with a rug in the middle gets vacuumed everywhere and mopped only on the tile. Without that separation you either skip mopping the room or soak the rug, and there is no third option.

The biggest bin in this section

460ml, larger than any other robot here, backed by a 5,200 mAh battery and up to 180 minutes in quiet mode.

It runs at 60dB, climbs a 20mm threshold and keeps multi-level maps, so a two-storey house does not need remapping every time you carry it upstairs. The filter is washable.

One published figure that disagrees

Roborock publish a charging time of under 6 hours, while a spec chart for the same model publishes 4 hours. We record both rather than picking the better number.

Voice control here is Amazon Alexa only, which is worth knowing if your house runs on Google. If Google Assistant matters, the eufy RoboVac X8 Hybrid supports both and has a bigger suction figure, though its mop is the simpler drag-pad kind. Roborock publish the range at roborock.com.