I’ve examined dozens of home equipment this 12 months – but when I needed to maintain just one, that is the one I would choose
I’ve been in the fortunate position to have reviewed a veritable tranche of very decent home appliances this year for both TechRadar and its sister publication T3 this year, but the Roborock F25 Ultra hard floor cleaner is the product that has impressed me the most.
At this juncture you might be wondering what a hard floor cleaner actually is. And you wouldn’t be alone, because even the manufacturers of this particular household product don’t really know what to call it. Some manufacturers ill-advisedly describe it as a ‘wet & dry mop’ – which it arguably isn’t because the mop it uses is never dry – while others have settled on the more realistically acceptable but less glamorous moniker of ‘hard floor cleaner’.
You’ll also see things like this referred to as a ‘wet and dry vacuum’ (TechRadar’s preferred term), although some similar models don’t have suction, which confuses the matter slightly.
For the uninitiated, a hard floor cleaner is a battery-powered upright floor-cleaning system designed for wet mopping hard floors of all types, bar some more delicate materials like thin wooden laminates, polished concrete and marble. Think of it as a liquid-swallowing vacuum cleaner and convenient replacement for a conventional mop and bucket, and you’re halfway there.
However, do note that while it will collect dry debris during its wet cleaning regime like a normal cordless stick vac, it is absolutely not a replacement for a vacuum cleaner which, of course, is designed for sucking dry debris and dust off hard floors and especially carpets.
Strangely satisfying
There’s a plethora of hard floor cleaning models out there from the likes of Tineco (one of the first companies to introduce a system like this), Vax and Bissell but, for my money, robot vac stalwart Roborock smashed it out of the park with the recently introduced F25 Ultra.
Sleek, efficient and practical, the F25 Ultra takes cordless hard floor mopping to a whole new echelon by including a raft of new features and functions that make the unenviable act of mopping a strangely satisfying task.
Say you’ve just spilled a bowl of porridge or cereal or, heaven forfend, the new puppy has just relieved itself on your kitchen floor. With this product you simply remove it from its charging plinth, wheel it over to the offending chaos, turn it on and gently push the unit towards the mess. Then watch with a combination of awe – and possible revulsion – as the quagmire is quite literally sucked into the F25 Ultra’s 24.3oz (0.72 liter) dirty water tank, leaving no trace whatsoever of the offending spill.
But that’s not all. When you’re finished, you simply place the unit back on its charging plinth and it runs its own self-cleaning regime, returning the roller and suction tube back to like-new condition before drying it with 203˚F / 95˚C degree hot air to keep mold at bay. All you have to do is pour the contents of the dirty water tank into the toilet bowl, followed by a quick rinse of the container under a tap. That’s got to be better than using half a roll of kitchen towel, a pair of rubber gloves and, if a puppy was involved, a nose peg – not to mention the messy and time-consuming combination of a mop and bucket for the follow through.
While effectively cleaning up awkward liquid spills is undeniably this modern hard floor cleaner’s pièce de résistance, the F25 Ultra will also wet mop an entire hard floor in a fraction of the time it takes to perform the same task with a conventional mop and bucket – and with less water left in its wake. In fact, the F25 Ultra is at least two steps ahead of the competition in this regard, because it not only mops floors using water at room temperature, it will also mop using water preheated to 194˚F (90˚C) and even steam clean at a germ-annihilating temperature of 356˚F (180˚C).
With regards to battery usage, I’ve managed to eke 20 minutes of hot water mopping, 25 minutes of steaming and at least 60 minutes room-temperature mopping respectively before the Lithium battery has depleted.
Aside from these aforementioned state-of-the-art features, one of the F25 Ultra’s most appealing functions is its AI-enhanced power-assisted wheels. These kinds of cleaners can get heavy and unwieldy, but the wheels on this model automatically provide a level of self propulsion that makes it feel almost weightless in operation. And because the whole unit can be laid flat to the floor, you can even use the accompanying Roborock app to literally steer the F25 Ultra remotely like an RC car to mop deep under a super king bed.
Yes, I’ve loved most of Roborock’s robot vacs this past year – and also some products from the Dreame, Eufy and Anthbot stables – but, for sheer practicality and convenience in the face of several overwhelming household disasters, the Roborock F25 Ultra has come to the rescue more than once this year, and that’s good enough reason to name it my best product of 2025.