This Robot Vacuum Empties and Refills Its Own Water

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Key Takeaways

• The plumbing integration provides automatic water tank emptying and refilling.
• The mop performs well, but lackluster vacuuming in some areas.
• There’s an external water tank option available for non-direct plumbing setups.

With the introduction of its robot vacuum line, SwitchBot wanted to make a splash by taking mundane tasks off your plate when it comes to cleaning. Since the S10 robot vacuum can tie into your home’s plumbing system, it means you’ll no longer have to worry about emptying the dirty water tank or filling clean water again, and it might be the best feature the robot has to offer.

Pricing and Availability

The SwitchBot S10 Robot Vacuum/Mop retails for $1,199.99 both directly from the manufacturer and at Amazon. However, it has been on sale for as low as $799.99 direct from the company.

The Days of Refilling Water Tanks and Emptying Dirty Water Are Behind Us

Robot vacuums and mops have been around for many years now, and while auto-empty stations have made them more convenient, they’re still not maintenance-free. Well, SwitchBot is taking us one step closer to a maintenance-free experience with its S10. I’ve had several robot vacuums over the years, but this is my first robot mop. I’m happy that I’m starting out with the S10.

Instead of having to worry about emptying the dirty water tank and refilling the clean water whenever it’s time to mop, the SwitchBot S10 can tie into your home’s fresh water and sewer plumbing. This allows the robot to dock at its water station, empty its own dirty water, and then refill the clean water, all without any intervention from you.

This solves one of the biggest pain points with robot mops, in my opinion. The dirty water in a mop is always nasty, and something that can sometimes smell, and is something you wouldn’t want to spill when carrying it. So, the fact that the S10 can empty and refill itself is pretty stellar. In my testing of the robot, it did this perfectly every time.

Be Ready To Do Some Plumbing Work, or Just Pick Up the External Water Tank

When it comes to installing the water station, there’s a bit of plumbing that goes into it. It’s critical to make sure you have a place for this to live before buying. Initially, I planned to install the water station in my guest bathroom under the toe kick. The station, however, didn’t fit there. So, I moved to my laundry room, where I planned to tie it into my washer water and drain lines. And, to my surprise, the ¾ to ½ tee was already in the package! Sadly, my washer uses a different thread type (GHT instead of NPT), so I wasn’t able to hook the S10 into my main water supply.

However, SwitchBot does have an external water tank for scenarios like this. And, while it costs $80 more, if you aren’t ready to tackle plumbing just yet (or don’t have a place to plumb it in), then this will still allow the robot vacuum/mop to work well. And, while it won’t have an infinite fresh water source, and you’ll have to refill it, there is a benefit to having the external water tank. When set up with the external source, you can, conceivably, put the water source anywhere in your home. I’d venture to only put it on a hard floor, but you’re not limited to where it has to go.

This gives the main auto-empty and charge station a smaller footprint and allows you to split up where things go. The water station is powered by the robot vacuum’s integral battery, so you don’t have to worry about finding an outlet to set it near.

Regardless of whether you’re using the external water tank or piping it into your home, simply find the place you want the water station to be, and tell the S10 where it’s at in the app. It’s that simple.

The SwitchBot S10 Cleans Well, if You Don’t Mind the Noise

Robot vacuums are nice in that they do a task for you, and can do it at any time of the day (or night). Well, having used several robot vacuums in the past, the S10 is definitely on the noisier side of the ones I’ve used. While there are multiple vacuum modes, and “standard” suction is quite quiet, it also doesn’t pick up a lot.

When I had the S10 set to “standard” suction, I thought the vacuum wasn’t even running. It would go over multiple small pieces of dirt, debris, or other junk on the floor (like popcorn kernels) and just not pick it up.

When I did the first mop and vacuum run with the S10, I thought it was only mopping the hard floors and not vacuuming. It turns out, it was vacuuming. Just on the standard setting. When it started to go over any type of carpet, a sensor on the bottom of the vacuum immediately noticed and picked up the mopping roller. Then, it would kick into strong suction, and it would really suck (in a good way). But, once it was back on the hard floor and the suction went back down to standard, it was back to not picking anything up.

To remedy this, I just set the vacuum strength to the strongest it could be, and that allowed the S10 to pick up the junk that was on the floor with relative ease, though it was much, much louder during the process. I wouldn’t recommend running the S10 at night with how loud it is, as it would keep me up while cleaning.

The S10 Could Do a Better Job at Cleaning Under Cabinets and at Transitions

In addition to having to turn the suction up to the strongest setting to get the S10 to effectively clean my hard floors, it also didn’t do the best at cleaning under the toe kick of my cabinets or at the transitions from hard floors to carpets. There’s the side brush that’s supposed to kick the stuff along the side into the path of the vacuum, but, because of how tall the vacuum is, it just doesn’t fit under those cabinet areas. Now, your mileage may vary, as our house was built in 1993, and the toe kicks are shorter than in modern homes. But, it’s a problem I ran into nonetheless.

The transitions are something that took me by surprise, however. The S10 left some dirt and dust in the transition between carpet to hard floor in my home. The transition is a bit tall, but I would still expect it to clean it; the other robot vacuums I’ve used cleaned that area (and the area under my toe kicks) with no problem, for comparison.

Outside these two areas, however, the S10 was pretty run-of-the-mill when it comes to cleaning performance. It vacuumed the hard floors well, and the carpets were left clean as well once it ran. It left nice carpet lines too, which was a bonus. However, as typical with robot vacuums, watch out for rugs with tassels. It’ll eat them and pull the rug along with it.

Where It Lacks in the Vacuum Department, the Mop Shines

While the vacuum portion of the S10 had some issues with a few areas of my home, the mop didn’t disappoint at all. I was very impressed with how well the mop worked, and it quickly cleaned up my floor and made it look fantastic. I wasn’t even using the cleaning solution that SwitchBot offers, either. This means that, if you used the solution, it could clean better, but I see no need for it. At least, not at my house. I didn’t try the “wetter” setting for the mop, as my floors were left basically dry and very clean after the robot was done.

For the Most Thorough Clean, Have It Run Twice

An extremely thorough clean is something that’s been hit or miss on the vacuums that I’ve used, but SwitchBot S10 can leave some stuff behind sometimes. While turning the suction to max does help, if there’s a particularly messy floor, you might want to tell it to clean twice. This is found in the app, and it is nice that SwitchBot gives you the option to automatically have the vacuum do it. When you toggle the clean twice mode, the vacuum will clean the first time in its normal pattern, and then the second will be 90 degrees to what it did initially.

This helps a lot with cleaning up and is particularly useful if you have a dusty mess for it to clean. I simulated spilling flour on the floor by putting some baking soda in the path of the vacuum. When set to clean and mop (and one time only), it left tracks all over the place. However, when I flipped it to clean twice, it went back and picked up the original tracks the second time since it shifted the cleaning route by 90 degrees. So, if you want the most thorough clean possible, you’ll want to make sure to enable the two passes and be prepared for cleaning to take twice as long. But, on the bright side, the vacuum is smart enough to dock itself to empty the dust bin or empty the dirty water/refill the clean water tank mid-cleaning, as well as charge, should it need to.

Don’t Place Your Dock on the Carpet

In the multiple robot vacuums I’ve owned or used, I’ve never had a problem with dock location. However, the S10 just simply refused to dock while on the carpet. In talking with a few of the other editors and writers here at How-To Geek, this seems to be something that occasionally happens with certain vacuums and not others. The thought is that docks with a long plastic entryway for the wheels to go on work best on carpets, and the more sleek docks (like the S10 has) don’t work as well on carpets.

Regardless of the reasoning, I spent about 30 to 45 minutes trying to get the S10 to dock on the carpet before realizing that it just simply wouldn’t, and it would only work on hard floors. That’s a pretty big negative if you’re planning to keep it in a carpeted area. I do have thick carpet, and on a shorter type, you might be fine. But, just keep in mind that you might have to keep the dock located on hard floors for it to function. And, the water station will likewise have to be on hard floors, but it shouldn’t be on carpet anyway just in case a leak does happen.

SwitchBot’s App Offers Some Nice Features

I was pretty surprised at how well the SwitchBot app worked for the S10. An app can make or break the experience of a robot vacuum, and SwitchBot has gone the extra mile to make the app more user-friendly, feature-packed, and easy to use.

Once I generated a map of my home (which was quite accurate, thanks to the LiDAR SLAM system in use here), I was able to easily edit it to my liking. I quickly split rooms, joined others, and also added furniture to the map. The addition of furniture was a nice touch outside of just the normal no-go zones (also present in the app), as it makes it simple to know where your dining table, couch, and beds are when looking at your house’s layout.

Resizing furniture pieces was a little finicky and sometimes worked, and other times didn’t. However, no-go zones were typically pretty reliable to resize. And, this is something that could easily be fixed in a future app update.

No Camera Access Is Both a Pro and Con

The AI camera on the SwitchBot S10 has both pros and cons. It works fairly well, and it noticed shoes as well as wires when driving around my house. It auto-updates as it cleans, so if something is in the way that wasn’t before, it gets visually tagged. And, if something was there previously and is gone now, it also realizes that too.

However, there’s no access to the camera while it’s cleaning. On some other robot vacuums, like the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra, you can pull up a live feed of the camera to see where the robot is, what it’s stuck on, or just monitor where it’s going. The SwitchBot S10 has a camera capable of this, but, for privacy’s sake, does all its AI processing locally on-device. That means the camera feed, according to SwitchBot, doesn’t go to the cloud at all. This is why you’re not able to access the feed on your phone since the camera feed never actually leaves the device.

I don’t see SwitchBot changing this in the future, as they’re touting this as a security feature that other vacuums don’t have, but it would be nice to have a toggle to tell it “only process on-device” or “let me stream the camera” so that way as the end user, it’s an option you or I could choose.

Should You Buy the SwitchBot S10 Robot Vacuum/Mop?

The SwitchBot S10 robot vacuum is a premium cleaner. With a retail price of $1,199.99 direct from SwitchBot, it’s competing with a lot of other high-end models from various well-known brands.

The vacuum cleaning performance, in some areas, is a little lackluster. However, it does a fantastic job of mopping, and the fact that the water station can be tied into your home’s plumbing for a mostly maintenance-free experience is stellar. If you’re looking for a robot vacuum and mop that you can pretty much forget about for months at a time, then the S10 is for you.

However, if the allure of the water station isn’t as big of a draw for you, then I’d recommend you look at some other vacuums in this price range, like the Yeedi M12 Pro+. It’s less expensive, and impressed Tyler quite a bit in cleaning tests, making it a solid alternative to the S10.