Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This thing is lifechanging! We have 4 dogs (2 shepherds) and 7 cats, and live in the country. We could make another cat and dog every day with what these guys shed. Without this, it was a never ending (and failing) battle to keep the home even halfway decently swept/vaccumed, let alone mopped. Living in the country we also constantly have dirt/mud being tracked in. Oh, we also have a wood stove so add ash/dirt/wood chips just for fun. (I feel sorry for this poor thing!) This sucker flat out works! I run it every day. The dust bin is a bit small, wouldn't want the vac without the auto-empty bin. It's full after vacuuming about half our living room. But the dock works perfectly. You can define "rooms" or sections of your house and have it auto-empty and charge after each one to address that. I put a new (washed) mop pad on and fill the water tank every night, leaves the floor nice and clean once it's done cleaning. Not necessarily perfect, especially if the dogs feet were muddy, but very good. By the 2nd cleaning it IS perfect, we rarely do an actual mopping, just clean up any spills. A few hints or comments. If you have laminate or hardwood flooring you will want the unit to mob the long direction of the boards. You can't specify mop direction, but you can divide a large room into longer, thinner sections, which causes the vacuum to run/mop the long way. If you have a litter box, inevitably some litter will be scattered. You'll want to vacuum that area first, not mop and vac a the same time. That litter will turn to mud and smear. Running a vacuum cycle first in that area addresses that issue. In the last 3 months we've had the unit, I think it's failed to make it back to the dock 1/2 times. At least one it ingested a charging cord, so that's my bad. Once it just got confused and refused to leave a specific area. A couple of cautions. If you have the herd we do, the dust bags don't last long. We get maybe 2-3 weeks out of one, which as far as I'm concerned is quite good. You can get some "aftermarket" ones for about $2.50 each. Far cheaper than factory ones. Get a number of mop pads. I put on a clean (washed) one each day and just toss them in the laundry. The only issue I've had with the unit involves charging. Even a minimal amount of dirt or contamination on the contacts will cause an error-it will "tell" you to clean them, doing so and all is good. It's more sensitive in that regard than other brands I've ordered. I've seen some comments with the dock plugging up. I've had minimal issues with it. I think 2 times it's jammed when it picked up a large wood chip from the wood stove. Only other time was when I didn't notice the dust bag was full and it backed up a bit. The directions say to only use water in the tank. I usually add 2-3 drops of the Bona hardwood floor cleaner to a tank. Hasn't caused any problems and does seem to clean a little better. What could use improvement? Well, a cyclonic dust bin so you didn't have to buy bags would be number 1. The mapping program should let you set direction for mopping for wood planks, rather than making you "cheat" as I described above. Would be nice to have it sense when the dust bin is full, or set run time for it to return to the dock and dump, rather than creating smaller rooms. And maybe a bigger dust bin-but there really isn't room for one. On hard surfaces, this is about perfect. It works well on most of our area rugs. We do have one that shows and really seems to cling to pet hair. The vacuum does "OK" on it, but not great and hair builds up over a few days. Frankly, our upright doesn't do much better, you have to go over and over it to remove much of the hair. I picked up one of the pet hair squeegees to work the hair out once in a while, seems like the best solution so far. The battery is the other issue. Not capacity, it runs for quite a while (2 hours or more). But charging is very slow. I've broken up my room cleaning schedule to allow some charging time between cycles to avoid running it down to 20%-at which point it stops vacuuming and charges to 100%, which takes several hours. If you don't have our herd and don't have to clean the whole house every day, that's probably not an issue. Schedule half the house each day. Or if you can get away with vacuuming alone without mopping it would go longer. Other comments. This is a really heavy, solid unit, both the dock and the vacuum. Very much feels substantial. We have previously had a couple Neatos and a Roborock E35. This is much, much better than any of the other units (and much, much more expensive). The previous units failed to return to base at least 1/3 of the time and you'd play "where's the vacuum" every night. The E35 had a mop, but it was "static" and just pulled along (as opposed to powered on the S7), it was pretty useless-and had no water reservoir. Paying for this was painful, but I have no regrets at this point. My only concern is life. Given our rather extreme use case I'm sure we won't do as well as most. For the price I still hope to see a few years from it.