Sweeping and mopping your floors are often bothersome but necessary chores. You can get a cheap robot vacuum, but in most cases, you’ll have to clean up after it. Thankfully, theSwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Prowill do your chores for you and clean itself up afterward.
SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro
The SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro is one of the best robot vacuums on the market. Its small size allows it to fit nearly anywhere, while the auto-empty stations means you only need to service it once per quarter.
Price and Availability
The SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro is available on Amazon and the SwitchBot website for $599.99. Inside the box, you get the vacuum robot itself and the auto-empty station. You should look inside the station’s dust bin to find the included dust bags (two pieces), a spare filter, and a pack of disposable wet mopping cloths.
The mopping pad plate and a mini cleaning tool are also in the dust bin, making it easy to switch cleaning modes and maintain the robot vacuum. SwitchBot also included two side brushes in the package, giving one spare brush in case the other gets damaged or worn out.
Specifications
Set Up Is a Breeze
Although the K10+ Pro box is a bit substantial, it’s actually a breeze to set up. I just had to take out everything in the package and find a good location for the auto-empty station, and I was good to go. If you haven’t done so, install the SwitchBot app on your phone to connect it to your smart home network. While you can use the robot vacuum without the app, you need it if you want to use its advanced features, like mapping your home, setting up No-go zones, adjusting settings, and more.
It took me just ten minutes to take it out of the box and place it in a corner of my home. Afterward, setting it up with the rest of my smart home took another five minutes. Note that there’s a slide switch under the top plate to ensure you may physically turn the mini robot vacuum on and prevent accidental starts (like when you’re leaving home for an extended time).
Before starting its first full cleaning run, the K10+ Pro needed to map my home’s interior. This took about 10 to 15 minutes, during which it scanned my home using its LDS radar system and traced the edges of each room.
You should be aware of the region or plug that you’re getting, though. I was mistakenly sent the U.S. version, which required 120V AC, but my electricity supply is 240V AC. So, when I tried to run it for the first time, the auto-empty station popped and smoked (which, I admit, is not fun at all), and I needed to ask for a replacement.
Compact Size for Cleaning Nooks and Crannies
Once the mapping was completed, it immediately went into cleaning mode, where it took about 21 minutes to clean the three sections of the ground floor of my home. The total area the K10+ Pro cleaned was 15 square meters or over 160 square feet.
I had to mark my kitchen (which is about an inch up from my main floor), the dining and living room walls (which have cables and floor-to-ceiling curtains), and my mini gym area as No-go zones to ensure that my stuff doesn’t get entangled, but the rest of the space is open for cleaning.
I found that the K10+ Pro can get into the nooks and crannies of my home and clean under them. It handily crawled under my dining table and cleared the floor between the chairs—there was no need to take them out so that the robot vacuum could see clearly. Note that I use folding chairs, which are different from the usual dining chairs with four legs, making the floor around them much trickier to clean.
It’s just too bad that my sofa is still too low, so I have to order taller feet so that the K10+ Pro will fit underneath. But at less than four inches tall, it should be good enough for most nooks and crannies in your home, even under your bed.
Comes With All the Accessories You Need
As I said earlier, the Switch Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro includes all the accessories you’ll need to clean your house. The included dust bag is good enough to use for up to 90 days—if you include the spare dust bag in the package, you won’t have to purchase a replacement bag for six months.
The robot vacuum itself also has three replaceable parts. SwitchBot recommends that you replace the dust bin filter after 150 hours of use, and a spare is included in the package, so you’re good for a total of 300 hours of use. On the other hand, the side brush is good for 200 hours, and SwitchBot also includes a replacement in the box.
The only part that doesn’t come with a replacement in the box is the anti-tangle rubber brush. This part is expected to last for about 300 hours of cleaning, though—so if you use the K10+ Pro at once per day, you don’t have to order replacement parts for at least a year. The pack of 30 disposable wet mopping cloths should also last you around the same time if you order it to mop your house just twice a month.
The SwitchBot App Makes It Safer and More Efficient
You can run the SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro without the SwitchBot app—press the Power button to start cleaning and press the home button to command it to go home. But if you want to make the most of it, you should download the SwitchBot app and pair the K10+ Pro with your smart home network. It’s available for both Android and iPhone, so you’ll likely have a device that can operate it.
The app shows you three basic functions—clean, finish, and recharge. But if you tap on More, you will see a lot more features. This includes the interior layout of your home plus the route that the mini robot vacuum took during its last vacuum session. This is also where you set up cleaning schedules for automated cleaning and No-go zones to ensure that your K10+ Pro avoid areas where it could create a mess or fall into (like the stairs).
You also need the app to manually control the remote and see how many hours you have left on the replaceable parts and accessories before installing new ones. And if you can’t find where your robot went (maybe it got stuck under the sofa), the SwitchBot app has a handy Find Robot function to help you locate it.
Quarterly Maintenance Is All That’s Needed
What I love most about the SwitchBot K10+ Mini Robot Vacuum is that you don’t have to clean it after every use. It’s an auto-empty station, so you can just let it do its thing and then clean up after three months. I also love that the dust bin automatically seals up when you pull it up from the station, so you don’t get a faceful of dust when you replace it.
Since the K10+ Pro does not require a water connection, it’s pretty easy to find a place for it. For my home, I placed it near one of the unused corners in my dining room, as it’s the only place that’s easily accessible for the mini robot vacuum but is also not in the way of everyone else.
The only downside is that I need to manually place a mopping pad on the mini robot itself if I want it to mop. But if you live in an old home and don’t have a purpose-built nook for smart devices such as this, then the K10+ Pro is an excellent addition to your household.
Should You Buy the SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro?
At $599.99, theSwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Prois quite expensive, but if I consider the time it saves me, it’s definitely worth the purchase. Just look at it like this: if you work for yourself and spend that hour working for about $30 an hour instead of cleaning your home, you will break even on your investment in about 20 hours.
There are a few cheaper robot vacuums available on the market, but they do not come with an auto-empty station. This means you must service them after every use to ensure they remain effective. This negates the idea of clean-and-forget, so the extra cost is definitely worth it.
Now, if you find this price a bit steep and you really don’t have that many nooks and crannies (like you have an open floor plan and you have a minimalist home), then consider theSwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+(the non-pro version of this device), which is just $399.99.
But if you have kids and pets who often make a mess, then you’ll definitely appreciate theSwitchBot S10, which we’ve previously reviewed. It comes with an auto mop function and will even replace the water for you, but it’s priced at $1,199.99, and you need to have a ready water supply (or build one for it) to use its auto-fill and drain water station.
