My first stop was my basement, where I’d prepped the cement floor two days earlier with smears of coffee, ketchup, and baby food. (This scared the pants off my unsuspecting husband, who thought that something horrible had happened with either our plumbing or my brain.)
Here, the WashG1 and I got off to a rougher start than we had in the hushed elegance of the Dyson store: I couldn’t figure out how to use it.
Unlike other models, which typically come with an old-fashioned print manual or a quick-start sheet, this Dyson model forces you to download an app and watch a series of videos on your phone. (I eventually found the written manual online.) You control the machine via buttons and an LCD screen. But how does it work? Watch a video. How do you take off the water tanks? Video. How do you remove the WashG1’s debris tray? You guessed it, another video.
Dyson’s spokesperson had told me that I could fill the tank with water alone or add any cleaning solution I had on hand. I used a capful of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Multi-Surface Cleaner Concentrate—and, boy, was I in for a frothy surprise. Had I added too much? There was no video discussing which detergent to add or how much.
I cleaned up the mess with an old towel under my feet and started over with water only.
Dejected by the floor washer’s foamy rebellion, I thought it wise to first revisit the foolproof in-store demonstration: more spilled cereal and milk.
Just like at the Dyson store, in this test the WashG1 hungrily gobbled everything up without protest. No snowplowing, spitting, or spreading the mess.
More challenging, though, were the dried stains. It took many passes to remove the majority of coffee stains. Sure, my basement’s slightly uneven, painted cement floor, with its tiny cracks and ridges, may have exacerbated the WashG1’s poor performance on those stains. But if it couldn’t eliminate dried gunk in the shallow grooves of painted cement, how would it clean the grout in a tiled bathroom or kitchen?
The WashG1 smeared some of the ketchup but left it largely untouched, and it failed to remove the dry baby-food splatters altogether. (I ended up having to scrape the baby food off the floor with a knife because no type of mop was able to remove it.)
Next I took the WashG1 to Wirecutter’s test facility to compare it against some of its competitors, namely the $550 Tineco Floor One S7 Pro and the $375 Kärcher FC 7, the latter of which, like the WashG1, lacks a vacuum pump, separating liquids from solids in a brush-roll tray.
On a large vinyl floor mat divided into even rows, I spilled some of my favorite testing liquids and food: coffee, Nutella, and oat milk with green food dye for visibility. I then commanded a colleague, updates writer Evan Dent, to dirty his sneakers in a bowl of wet mud that I had dug up from a tree pit outside the office.
“Now jump around as if you were dancing,” I told Evan, aiming to get everyone in mopping spirit. While we were waiting for the mess to dry, I dumped some more milk and Cheerios on the floor (I’m starting to get a reputation).
The WashG1 scarfed them up, to my co-workers’ cheers. What a spectacle!
In contrast, both the Tineco and Kärcher models snowplowed the Cheerios and spread the mess across the floor.
After cleaning the machines’ debris screens and trays, we gave each model one minute to remove the dried-on stains. Still in shock from the basement bubble bath, I made sure that we used water only.
Generally, the WashG1 performed better on smooth vinyl flooring than it had on the textured concrete in my basement, but it still didn’t seem like $700 well spent. Sure, it felt lighter and smoother to maneuver than its two competitors, despite weighing about the same. But the Tineco and Kärcher models got rid of the mud prints in significantly fewer passes and in less time than the Dyson WashG1 did.
Teams Tineco and Kärcher also took on the coffee and milk stains in stride. Although they seemed to struggle with the Nutella at first, both got rid of it eventually, with Team Kärcher outperforming Team Tineco by a smidgen. Team Dyson, on the other hand, struggled with milk, coffee, and Nutella, leaving behind a large smear of the last substance.
In the race to vanquish muddy footprints, milk, Nutella, and coffee, the two older and cheaper models beat the fancy new kid on the block—even though the Dyson WashG1 was smoother and easier to maneuver.
Finally, I put all the machines aside and grabbed a good old Bona microfiber mop.
With the mop and a little muscle, we cleaned up the mess in under 30 seconds. (We spared it the Cheerios, for obvious reasons.)
