What testers say about the Roborock Q7 L5
The Roborock Q7 L5 is Roborock's budget vacuum-and-mop robot on a charging dock: 8,000 Pa of suction, a main brush and a side brush built not to tangle with hair, lidar navigation and a removable mop pad with a 270-millilitre water tank and three water levels. It has no obstacle avoidance, so cables and socks have to come off the floor first. Beside it Roborock sells the Q7 M5, which looks the same and has 10,000 Pa.
Vacuum Wars tested it against the Q7 M5. It navigates efficiently, at 0.82 square metres per minute where the category average is 0.72 square metres, its suction measured more than twice the average, and in the carpet deep-clean test it pulled 80 percent of the embedded sand out, above average and better than the M5. Its battery also lasted a little longer per percent of charge than the M5's. On hard floors it picked up debris of every size well.
Two results weigh against it. On flattened pet hair it picked up 12 percent, the worst score Vacuum Wars has recorded, against 78 percent for the M5, and repeated runs gave the same result. And its mop pad uses more than three times the average amount of water: it did better than average on dried-on stains, but left floors too wet, for the second-lowest mopping score Vacuum Wars has measured. It also left more fine debris in carpet than the M5. For a home with pets, or where the robot should mop, the Q7 M5 is the better buy, and Vacuum Wars reached the same conclusion.