What testers say about the Roborock Q10 S5
The Roborock Q10 S5 is the Q10 S5+ without the self-emptying station: Roborock describes both robots in the same words, and the Plus adds the station. It has 10,000 Pa of suction, a JawScrapers comb main brush and a side brush built against tangles, lidar navigation, obstacle recognition with structured light, and the VibraRise 2.0 mop, a vibrating pad that stays mounted and is lifted off the floor on carpet. It comes on a dock that only charges.
Vacuum Wars and Tom's Guide tested the robot as the Q10 S5+. Vacuum Wars saw scores that rival far pricier robots: it removed 96 percent of the embedded sand in the carpet deep-clean test and 96 percent of the pet hair, against an average of 75, and after the long-hair test nothing was wrapped around the brush. Tom's Guide found that it cleaned carpet and hard floors very well when it was not stuck, mapped the home faster than any robot it had tried, and liked the app: rooms get a name and a floor type, so the robot mops only the hard floors, and no-go zones, a cleaning direction and maps of several floors are all there.
Tom's Guide was far less positive about living with it. It got stuck on table legs and in a fireplace, kept ramming a laundry basket, added two rooms that do not exist to its first map, and the battery lasted about 30 minutes on medium suction, against 150 minutes in the quiet mode. The mop takes a while to get damp, rests on the floor while the robot charges, and has to be filled, emptied and rinsed by hand. Without the station of the Plus you also empty the bin yourself. For strong carpet cleaning on a small budget it is exceptional value on paper, but it wants an owner who keeps an eye on it.
