All I want is a house and clothes that are always clean and tidy, food that is exactly what I want when I want it. However, I don’t actually want to clean, launder or cook, and I don’t have the money for a Downton Abbey-style household staff. Robot vacuum cleaners and mops are supposed to be part of the answer for this.
While I was generally pretty happy with the performance of the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S, it’s not quite at the level where my mopping and vacuuming days are over.
Table of contents
- First impressions
- Specifications and price
- Mopping
- Vacuuming
- Dock performance
- Who is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S for?
First impressions
The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S is a sleek and premium-looking unit. It was easy to set up (though it took a little longer than I had anticipated), the app is intuitive, and the mapping process was quick and painless. It didn’t correctly identify any of my room types, but I appreciated that it tried its best.
Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S specifications and price
| Robot Vacuum Dimensions | 350 x 350 x 97.5mm (retracted LDS) 350 x 350 x 119mm (lifted LDS) |
| Base Station Dimensions | 420 x 440 x 500mm |
| Obstacle Crossing Height | 6cm (double-layer step), 4.2cm (single-layer step) |
| Navigation | VersaLift DToF |
| Battery Capacity (mAh) | 6,400mAh |
| Obstacle Avoidance | AI Camera x2 + Lateral 3D Structured Light + LED Lights |
| Dust Box Capacity | 220ml |
| Main Brush Type | HyperStream Detangling DuoBrush |
| Clean/Used Water Box | 160ml/150ml |
| Maximum Suction (Pa) | 30,000Pa |
| Price (RRP) | $2,999 |
| Warranty | 3 years |
| Official website | Dreame Australia |
There’s a lot to love in those specs. For starters, that’s a decent battery capacity, and a good level of suction power, plus I’m impressed by Dreame’s confidence in having a three-year manufacturer’s warranty. That shows that the company has faith in the product.
What surprises me about these specs is the design of the stair-climbing feature. I haven’t seen many steps that are 4cm tall with a couple of centimetres before another 2cm rise. Maybe that’s popular in other countries? Because it just seems like a tripping hazard. Perhaps it’s for homes that have a little rise between the living room and the entrance way, followed almost immediately by a very thick rug?
But again, that sounds like a fun way to constantly trip over. It just seems oddly specific and extremely niche obstacle to design a feature around clearing. However, that 4.2cm clearance is going to be great for all those homes with very thick rugs, little rises between rooms, or just unusual layouts.
Regardless of how the device looks on paper, the most important thing is how it actually performs at home. On that front, I am somewhat less impressed.
Mopping
The jury is still out on whether track-style robot mops and roller-style robot mops are better.
For those who aren’t familiar, track-style mops look like a square version of the roller mop, and the roller mop — as seen in the Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow — looks like the roller bar in any cordless vacuum cleaner.
Both sides have made good points. The only thing we can agree on is that the vibrating plates and spinning cloth mop feet are The Worst.
Personally, I think track-style mops have a lot of potential. This is because they can exert more downwards force, there’s more surface area to touch the floor, and they seem easier to scrape clean. However, after my experience with the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S, I perhaps might have to rethink my stance.
I have a toddler, so my apartment constantly looks like it’s recently been robbed by people who also paused to have a food fight mid-ransacking. No matter how many times I mop my kitchen floor each week, it will still have little lumps of dried pasta sauce, broccoli and yogurt. I’ve set the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S to clean most days, and while the apartment is noticeably less dusty, I still have to get out my wet-dry floor cleaner more often than I’d like to clean up after the robot finishes.
Navigation limitations
Part of the problem is the navigation. As part of my testing, I got the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S to clean my kitchen three times in a row on the deep cleaning setting. While it was able to pick up some of the loose debris, the things on the floor that needed to be mopped came out of the experience unscathed, when the whole point of the exercise was for them to become very scathed.
Part of the problem was that, for some baffling reason, the robot wouldn’t go up to the edges of the room. It is designed to be able to do great edge cleaning, and I watched the mop track come out of the body of the machine to get to the edges, but the wheels directed it to be at least a couple of centimetres away from the dishwasher and the cabinets every time, so the little brush would push the debris into the edges of the room, never to be sucked up, and easy spills were missed.
While it was able to pick up wet yogurt reasonably well, with only some residue left behind, anything vaguely dried was left as is. Its pick-up power was weak.
After this $2,999 robot finished deep cleaning my kitchen for the third time, I got out my stick vacuum cleaner and steam mop and finished the job.
Vacuuming
Aside from the part where the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S is bad at edge cleaning, I was really impressed by how much flour and oats the robot was able to pick up from carpets and tiles.
What impressed me more, though, and why I’m not completely writing off the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S despite poor mopping performance, is how good it was at cleaning the foam play mat in my daughter’s room. This play mat is so tall that most robots just tremble in fright and go around it. The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S used its ProLeap obstacle-clearing powers to climb up, get almost all the plaster dust that got in the foam after I put up her wind chimes, and then continued on with the job with no complaints.
I’m also impressed that I’ve barely ever had to rescue it from eating socks or cables. Not never, there’s been a couple of cases of it choking on a tiny sock, a Duplo cape and a charging cable. But most of the time it manages to avoid these objects, and for that I am grateful.
I do wish it were better at navigation, though. It’s gotten lost under the dining table a few times. Plus, there have been multiple occasions where it’s lowered its LDS navigation head to go under the sideboard and then gotten stuck because it can’t see a way out, despite being open on three sides. It doesn’t get stuck every time, and I haven’t found a pattern for why it gets stuck sometimes and not others.
Dock performance
When it comes to emptying, cleaning and other general dock things, I really love this dock. It’s all laid out in a way that makes sense, it looks sleek and attractive, and if it weren’t for all the problems, I would absolutely love it.
Sadly, the problem is gravity. Gravity is the enemy on two fronts here.
The first is the power cable. It seems to gradually wiggle its way out of the dock until the robot no longer charges consistently. I think because of the vibrations caused by the mop washing cycle? But I have had to push that plug in multiple times over the months I’ve been using it.
The second is that the robot sometimes doesn’t charge for no apparent reason, even when the power cable is plugged in. It parks itself back in the dock, recognises it’s there, and then doesn’t charge. It’s usually when the robot ends up at a very slight angle, or I think sometimes it slides back out of the dock just enough that it loses contact with the charging point.
This has meant that I’ve had to interact with the dock and think about how the robot charges more often than I have with almost any other robot I’ve tried in the last five years. It’s just annoying.
Who is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S for?
The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Track S is a solid robot vacuum cleaner; it’s great at vacuuming, as long as you don’t need it to get into the corners of your home. Fantastic suction.
But, because of my annoyances with the dock and the lacklustre mop, I hesitate to recommend it to people who aren’t willing to be a bit more hands-on with their robot. It’s not a bad machine, I’m just not sure it’s a particularly good one for $3,000. If it were a cheaper robot, I would be more forgiving of its foibles.
But with the features on paper, and the recommended retail price being at the absolute top of the range, I would expect to have the best experience available, and this just doesn’t provide that.
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