The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra: my positive review

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra (🦘) is at time of writing the top-of-the-line robot vacuum cleaner from the Chinese company Roborock (🦘). In this review, I express my satisfaction - and the reasons for it - with this nifty gadget, having used one of them (Rocky - the obvious nickname for "him") for about two months now. I also share the original reasons for my purchase.

This is not a comprehensive, general-purpose review, just my experience so far. To fully familiarise yourself with the features, specifications, pros, and cons (etc) of the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra, please check out the link above and the links to the reviews below.

Why a robot vacuum cleaner?

Because I wanted to maintain the better condition of the flooring of the larger home I'd just moved into, but I find vacuuming tedious and have tended to neglect it in the past. A robot cleaner was the obvious solution, although it took me a while to realise and remember that it was available.

Why Rocky?

Firstly, because he suits my home's characteristics:

• Single-storey.
  Rocky does not climb stairs.
   
• Mixture of tiles and low/medium-pile carpets.
  Rocky both mops and vacuums.
   
• Fairly large floor area: ~118 square metres (sqm) - or ~1270 square feet (sqft) - reported cleanable by Rocky (the total area is larger because he doesn't fit under some furniture).
  Rocky's near-complete automation nearly eliminates this additional cleaning burden.
   
• Only occasional presence of non-human animals (the two very sweet dachshunds brought over fortnightly by my sister and brother-in-law when I host them for dinner).
  Not relevant to my purchase because Rocky seems to be roughly best-in-class at handling animal hair anyway, but review-relevant in that I have not personally tested Rocky in this respect.

Secondly, because his features most comprehensively automate away tedious chores. He comes with:

• A dock (the RockDock™ Ultra) at which he automatically:
  • Pre-wets his mop.
  • Cleans his mop.
  • Dries his mop.
  • Empties his dirty mopping water.
  • Fills up with clean water.
  • Empties his dust compartment.
  • Recharges.
  
  
• An app via which he can be set to clean on a schedule.

Given all of this, he is very close to a set-and-forget solution.

When?

I purchased Rocky via a preorder on the 28^th of July, 2023, receiving him on the 28^th of August, 2023.

Real-world performance: the nitty-gritty

Automation

...is at least as good as I expected. Without intervention, Rocky very accurately mapped my house and cleans on schedule. He has only required my intervention once, getting stuck between the guest toilet and the wall (despite having successfully navigated it before). This is understandable because that gap is only slightly wider than Rocky. I blocked him from that area with a permanently-placed object, and that issue is now solved.

Maintenance

...has so far been minimal. I have scheduled Rocky to clean the entire house three times a week, twice on moderate (default) intensity settings, and once on the highest intensity settings. All I have had to do so far is to:

1. About once a week, empty the dock's dirty water tank and fill its clean water tank. These tanks lift simply and straightforwardly out of the dock on a swung handle, and are just as easily slotted back in.
2. Once only so far, at Rocky's prompting (via an app notification), clean his sensors. There was no visible dust on them, and I reckon I could safely have skipped this task, but I performed it anyway.
3. Once only so far, at Rocky's prompting (via an app notification), clean Rocky's dust filter and roller brushes, and the dock's dust filter. In doing this, I saw in the manual that I ought to have been doing this more frequently, but there wasn't much cleaning to do, so a two-month interval between cleans doesn't seem to be too problematic.

The dock's dust bag is only about a quarter full after about two months of vacuuming.

Cleaning speed and battery duration

Rocky takes around two hours to complete the full clean of ~118 sqm (~1270 sqft) on moderate (default) intensity settings, including the returns to his dock to clean his mop every twenty minutes of mopping (the configurable default, equivalent to about twice per full clean of my home).

With rare exceptions, he just completes this task without recharging. Given that he automatically recharges when he reaches 20% charge, those two hours consume about 80% charge (including dockings for mop cleaning), or about 40 percentage points per hour: 40 pp/hr in abbreviated form.

On high intensity settings, Rocky makes it through about 90% of the full ~118 sqm (~1270 sqft), in about 1 hr 45 mins, before hitting 20% charge and returning to his dock to recharge, thus consuming about 46 pp/hr (again, including dockings for mop cleaning). Without intervention, he charges back up to 80% before resuming the job. That recharging takes a little over 2.5 hours, at roughly 23 pp/hr or roughly 2.7 min/pp. He can, though, be manually triggered to resume before reaching 80%.

I haven't found a way to adjust the 20% lower bound at which he is automatically triggered to return to his dock for recharging, but the sometime-need for a several-hours-long recharge in the middle of cleaning isn't problematic (for me), because it's all automated anyway.

Mopping efficacy (and spot cleans)

...has been satisfactory for maintenance cleaning, but poor for spill and stain cleaning.

The first time Rocky mopped my tiles, the water he emptied into the dock's dirty tank was filthy, and since then it's been much cleaner. He seems, then, to have achieved, and to now be maintaining, a level of cleanliness that wasn't originally present.

He has not, though, during his regular cleaning, removed all of the dried spots and stains from the occasional spills of drops of liquid, such as from a morning smoothie or from the sauce in a bowl of pasta: although he has removed some of them, others have remained. I have tested the "spot clean" function on those remaining ones.

During a spot clean, Rocky cleans an area of 1.5 x 1.5 metres centred on the location to which he's been directed, using a specifiable cleaning intensity level.

One of the dried spill drops took two consecutive spot cleans to remove, with one clean at medium (default) intensity, and the other at highest intensity.

Another dried spill drop was unaffected even after multiple spot cleans at the highest intensity. I suspect that this was because the spill stain was very near a diagonal boundary with carpet, and Rocky's auto-switching between mopping and vacuuming during horizontal and vertical passes through this diagonal area inhibited his mopping efficacy.

I didn't even consider using Rocky to clean up the mess from a kitchen spill of a full small jar of oil - he's simply not designed for that sort of thing. His role and forte is maintenance mopping. Manual clean-ups of spills, large and small, are still required - but hardly a burden.

Vacuuming efficacy

...seems fine. I haven't run any express tests, but I have noted the occasional bit of fluff or small item of debris, and confirmed that Rocky successfully vacuums it up. I have also noticed that his suction leaves visible tracks in my medium-pile carpets. The other, low-pile carpets were spotless when I bought the property, and remain that way, and Rocky is plausibly a key contributor to that. This is as expected given that, to the best of my knowledge, at time of purchase, Rocky had the highest nominal maximum suction strength - 6,000 Pa - of any robot vacuum cleaner on the market. That is no longer the case: for example, the since-released Dreamebot L20 Ultra (🦘) has a nominal maximum suction strength of 7,000 Pa (more on Dreame below).

Height and manoeuvrability

...is good. Rocky fits under everything I'd expected him to, including the bed in the master bedroom. The few items above floor height that he doesn't fit under are so low that a manual vacuum cleaner wouldn't get under them either, at least not beyond a short distance. He also gets horizontally into all of the spaces I'd expected him to, and, with the exception noted above, has never become stuck.

Auto-routing

...is also good. Rocky begins by cleaning around the perimeter, and then moves systematically and logically through the house. He occasionally cleans some rooms, and within some rooms, in a different order, but never in a seriously inefficient way. In contrast, my sister and brother-in-law's Dreame L10s Ultra (🦘) - "Dreamy", of course - has, they report, routed himself in strange ways, stopping in the middle of cleaning one room to begin cleaning in a distant room, and then later returning to the first room, so Rocky's strong routing can't be taken for granted.

Side-note: Dreame (🦘) is another Chinese company producing robot vacuums. Sis and BiL picked up Dreamy, formerly Dreame's top-of-the-line model, in a spring sale - which continues at time of writing - after Dreame released its new top-of-the-line model, the DreamBot L20 Ultra (referenced and linked to above). Dreamy otherwise compares very well to Rocky, as expected given the comparison review Roborock S8 Pro Ultra vs. Dreame L10S Ultra over at Cordless Vacuum Guide, which gave Sis and BiL the confidence to buy him given my positive experience with Rocky.

Customer service

...has been excellent in both interactions I've had. I originally hadn't realised that my purchase was a preorder, and when informed by Emma from Roborock customer service that the preorder status was the reason for the delay about which I'd inquired, I expressed my concern that I had been misled. It turned out though that the preorder had been advertised, on Rocky's product page, just not when clicking "Buy Now" under "Roborock S8 Pro Ultra Robot Vacuum with RockDock™ Ultra" on the main store page at store.roborock.com.au, which was how I had purchased him (presumably, I'd seen the product page earlier but not noticed or remembered the preorder message on it). Emma was polite and friendly and didn't take offence, assuring me that Roborock's intent was not to mislead, and even offering me the chance to cancel my order for a refund.

After a few days of use, I then noticed that Rocky seemed to have developed a "limp", and I contacted customer service about this. Tessa very helpfully responded with a set of troubleshooting steps including images and videos, which led me to the realisation that the "new" "problem" was simply the bumping of Rocky's front wheel over the small gaps between tiles, which I presumably hadn't noticed beforehand, noticing it then only out of worry that Rocky had damaged himself trying to traverse the slider of a cupboard door I'd accidentally left open. Tessa's response to my realisation was friendly and positive.

Concerns and niggles

Privacy

Questions which I haven't yet attempted to find answers to include:

• We know that Rocky stores data about our homes including our wifi credentials, map(s), cleaning history, and settings. Where is this data stored? Presumably, it is somewhere in the cloud (maybe excepting wifi credentials?), because it is accessible via the app even outside one's wifi network, but where?
• What, if any, other data does he collect?
• How is all this data protected?
• Who (else) has - or can gain - access to all this data?

Thankfully, Roborock has excluded the remote home monitoring feature (streaming video) that other manufacturers have included in their robot vacuum cleaners, so at least there's no cause for concern about that feature being hacked.

Mobile app requirement

Personally, I'm not a fan of being forced to use a mobile phone, and would prefer a desktop app variant (which might exist, but probably doesn't - I simply haven't attempted to find out yet).

Lower-automation alternatives

For about 37% of the price, you can purchase the (mostly identical) robot alone, i.e., without the dock: the Roborock S8 Robot Vacuum and Sonic Mop Cleaner (🦘).

Whether it's worth paying the extra to include the bells and whistles (via the RockDock) is a subjective matter. I decided though that if I'm going to automate cleaning, I might as well automate it as much as possible, even if it costs extra.

Reviews

These reviews helped to convince me prior to purchase:

• Roborock’s Robot Vacuum Delivers on Almost Every Front, but It Will Cost You by Isabella Noyes on Gizmodo AU. Isabella points out that the dust emptying process is very loud, which I guess it is, but to me it's not much louder than the sound of a regular corded manual vacuum cleaner (Rocky's noise when vacuuming is more tolerable). She also asserts that the dust emptying process takes about three minutes, which differs from my experience, in which dust emptying takes in the realm of tens of seconds - maybe at most thirty.
• Roborock S8 Pro Ultra Review by Angela Moscaritolo on PC Mag. Note: prices in this article seem to be in USD.
• Roborock S8 Pro Ultra review: for sparkling floors by Danielle Abraham on TechRadar.
• Roborock S8+/S8 Vacuum Review by various authors on RTINGS.com. This is of the S8/S8+ variants (i.e., one without a dock, and the other with a less featureful dock), but it's still very informative. I anonymously posted a question underneath it, their answer to which helped me to finalise my decision.
• Roborock S8 Review: Great, But There are Better Options by Bryan M. Wolfe on How-To Geek. This is of the basic S8 variant (without a dock), but, again, it's still helpful. Bryan doesn't list the "better options" alluded to in the title, but I get the sense that his main criterion for "better" is "more affordable". Fair enough.

Final comments

Despite its price, and aside from the vaguely paranoid thoughts I have about the robotic presence of an authoritarian state in my domestic space, I don't regret this purchase. Rocky does save a lot of time, and, as the saying goes, "time is money", so, in a way, the purchase makes financial sense over the long term. If you are looking to purchase your own robot vacuum cleaner, then the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is a good choice, and I recommend it, but do your research, because the market is constantly evolving, and by the time you read this review, there could be a whole new generation of automated cleaning tech out there.