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- High-powered suction
- Good threshold/obstacle scaling
- Outstanding object avoidance
- Expensive
The new Saros 20 from Roborock is a premium robot mop and vacuum that is absolutely packed with all manner of features and boasts impressive cleaning and obstacle scaling capabilities.
All those features come at a price, though. £1,129 to be precise. That puts the new Saros firmly in the premium segment of the robot cleaner market, along with machines like the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra and the Dyson Spot+Scrub AI.
What do you get for the money?
High-end robot mop and vacuum combo systems tend to be big, both in terms of the dock and the robot itself. Saros has bucked this trend. At 381 x 475 x 488mm, the black plastic dock isn’t nearly as imposing as those that ship with the Dreame and Dyson systems, and I’m all for that.
Despite the relatively small size, the water tanks are still of a decent capacity, though: 4 litres for clean water, 3.5 litres for waste. This ensures you don’t have to fill or empty them too often, no matter how intensively you use the Saros 20.
The robot itself is smaller than many of its competitors, too. That’s because the Saros 20 dispenses with a traditional LiDAR tower, and that makes it much lower, standing at a mere 80mm tall. That means it can scoot into tight spaces like under a bed or sofa without getting stuck.
Navigation instead, comes courtesy of what Roborock calls the StarSight Autonomous System 2.0. This consists of a set of 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) IR sensors at the front and back and an RGB camera at the front. The ToF device concerns itself with navigation and obstacle recognition, while the RGB camera is just involved with the latter.
Flip the Saros 20 on its back, and you’ll find quite a lot going on. At the rear are two detachable spinning mop pads, one of which is mounted on an extendable arm, the better to get up against walls. The robot’s single edge sweeping brush is also mounted on an articulated arm for the same reason.
The suspension system is devilishly clever and is made up of a cornucopia of cogs and gears, which endows the Saros 20 with several height and angle-of-attack settings, a system Roborock calls AdaptiLift Chassis 3.0.
This allows the robot to do two key things. First, the entire robot can lift itself by 20mm to tackle deep carpet; Roborock reckons up to 3cm deep. Second, the suspension is able to elevate either side of the robot or the front, independently, thanks to the forward wheel also being mounted on an extendable arm. This system can help the Saros 20 free itself if it gets beached on an obstacle.
In more demanding circumstances, the geared arm that jacks the chassis up can also spin through 360-degrees and extend downward to boost the Saros20 over obstacles up to 4.5cm in height.
Watching a cut-away animation of the cogs and levers inside the Saros 20 as it climbs steps brought to mind some crazy Lego machine designed to traverse Heath Robinson-designed anti-tank obstacles.
Saros claims the unit can climb any two-part threshold obstacle that’s under 4.5cm and then under 4.3cm in height with between 12cm and 14cm of flat surface between them, but assuming there’s enough flat space between the two edges for the Saros 20 to settle itself horizontally, I can see no reason why it couldn’t climb step after step after step.
Usefully, the mop pads can also be raised by 15mm when attached, which means the Saros 20 can tackle medium-depth carpet without the need to return to the dock and drop the mop pads.
You can also use the Saros 20 as a security camera. Thanks to remote-control navigation, access to the on-board camera and two-way audio, it’s possible to steer the Saros 20 around the house to check on your pets and freak them out by talking to them via the onboard speakers.
And saros is pretty generous with the accessories, bundling two spare dustbags and two spare mop pads. There’s no floor cleaning solution in the box, but since you can add your own into the dispensing container that sits in the front cubby next to the dustbag, that’s really no big deal.
The sticker by the dispenser advises that you only use Saros own blend, but I added a 50:50 diluted mix of lemon-fresh Flash floor cleaner (£1.90 for 1L from Tesco), which did the trick. Roborock’s branded cleaner is £19 for 480ml.
What is it like to use?
Initial setup
Setting up the Saros 20 is pretty much robo-vac 101. You simply put the dock where you want it, clip the plastic ramp in place, put the two mop spinners in the removable holding tray, fill the fresh water and detergent containers, push the robot into the docking bay to charge and download the Roborock app.
Then it’s simply a matter of connecting the app to the robot and to your home Wi-Fi network (2.4GHz or 5GHz). There’s a QR code under the plastic cover atop the robot, and once you’ve scanned this, the app takes you through the setup in a twit-proof way.
Saros says a full charge of the Saros 20’s 6,300mAh battery takes around 2hrs 30mins and I found this is spot on, but since it came with a 75% charge in it, I immediately sent it off on a mapping run of my upstairs.
In standard suction mode, the Saros 20 cleaned my 21m2 upstairs in 38 minutes and used 30% of the battery. That’s par for the course: it’s slightly slower than the Eufy C28, and faster than the Dyson Dyson Spot+Scrub AI.
In Max mode, the clean takes 50% longer and uses another 15% of the battery, so your own mileage will very much depend on how you programme the system to perform and how messy your gaff is.
Smart home integration
As well as supporting Alexa, Google Home and Matter integration, the Saros 20 also has a native, built-in voice control system that can be launched with the phrase “Hello Rocky”.
There is a plethora of commands available, covering navigation, system settings and dock actions, which makes the only challenge remembering them all. In use, I found the voice control system to be impressively reliable, although you do have to say the launch phrase quite loudly.
There’s something disturbingly decadent about the “Clean here” command, which summons the robot to find you and clean where you are standing. Given that you could just bend down and pick whatever it is on the floor up, this sort of thing is what’s likely to trigger the robot uprising.
For the “clean here” command to work, however, you have to be in the Saros 20’s line of sight. If you are not, it plaintively asks, “Are you hiding?”
Companion app
Given the long list of features, the Saros 20’s app does a good job of layering functionality so that the controls you need are up front and the lesser-used ones are buried deeper in the menu structure. The menu system is well-labelled, too, with titles like Carpet Cleaning Setting and Floor Cleaning Setting making it obvious what lies within.
There’s a wide array of options for both vacuuming and cleaning, so you can choose to Vac followed by Mop, Vac & Mop, just Mop or just Vac. Or you can leave it in AI SmartPlan and let the system decide what’s best. That is surely the point of having one of these things: spend too much time manually adjusting its routine, and you get perilously close to having-a-dog-but-barking-yourself territory.
If I had to pick a hole in the Roborock app, it’s that the maps don’t look quite as neat in 2D as they do, for example, in the Eufy app, with walls not showing up as straight as they should. It’s really more of a cosmetic thing and doesn’t hinder usage. In the 3D view, the Roborock maps look just fine.
Is it good at finding its way around?
The Saros 20’s initial mapping run was faultless. A quick spin around the upstairs and downstairs of chez Taylor quickly produced a set of maps that, if not quite as visually neat and ordered-looking as in the Eufy app, were certainly good enough for the job in hand.
If you need to place certain areas out of bounds – I always do this for the area around the top of my stairs after a test unit plummeted down them once and ended up in pieces at the bottom – it’s very easy to create no-go zones.
Object avoidance is superb, the best of any robot vacuum I’ve tested. The primary reason I say this is that the Saros 20 is the first robot to successfully avoid my small fake animal poo.
Before this, every robot vacuum I’ve tested has merrily ploughed into it, leaving me to imagine the horror that would have befallen if said doo-doo had come out of Mylo, my greyhound, rather than from the joke accessory aisle at Amazon. When faced with the small rubber jobby, the Saros 20 came to a dead stop and gingerly made its way around to continue its cleaning run.
Unwelcome pet deposits aside, the Saros 20 deftly avoided shoes, chair legs, ethernet cables, dog chew toys and all the other random stuff I threw in its path.
The AdaptiLife suspension articulation system generally worked well, too, and the Saros 20 only once got stuck when I was testing it – when it charged under my bed, only to jam itself when it tried to jack itself over a piece of discarded clothes rail that I’d left underneath and forgotten about.
How well does it clean?
Across the board, the Saros 20 performed very strongly. The vacuum is capable of a maximum of 36,000Pa of suction, which is the highest we’ve tested, easily besting the Dreame Aqua10’s 30,000Pa, the Dyson Dyson Spot+Scrub AI’s 18,000Pa and the Eufy E25’s 20,000Pa.
In our standard cleaning tests, the Saros 20 achieved a 100% result, and in everyday use it proved highly adept at getting dog hair out of deep carpet and from the crevices between the edge of the carpet and the skirting board.
The trick, self-rising suspension pays real dividends when the Saros 20 encounters thick rugs, especially small ones like extra-fluffy bathroom mats. Most robot vacuums will move or at least ruck these up, but the Saros 20 cleaned them thoroughly and left them flat and in exactly the same place as I had left them.
The Saros 20’s mopping standard capabilities are effective, too, and even more so if you engage the Automatic Re-Mopping and Deep Cleaning options in the Floor Cleaning menu. Faced with dried coffee grounds and ketchup, the Saros 20 scrubbed away until there was no trace to be seen. Colour me impressed.
The Deep Cleaning mode also increases the downward pressure of the mops from 8 newtons to 13 (think of that as the difference between something weighing around 800g and something weighing 1.3kg) to give the 200rpm mops the best chance of removing the maximum amount of gunk.
The intense mopping action wouldn’t be much use if the cleaning dock couldn’t keep the mops clean, but Saros has addressed this with a 100℃ cleaning cycle with a 55℃ warm air drying cycle as well.
And there’s even a new Soaking mode that fills the now deeper mop tray with hot water to soak out stubborn grime that’s become embedded in the mop pads. Of course, you can also remove the fabric mop pads and chuck them in the washing machine if all else fails.
Eufy Omni C28: Should you buy one?
There’s no questioning the fundamental quality of the Saros 20. When it comes to cleaning and object avoidance, it’s second to none, and the absence of a LiDAR tower atop means it can go places other robot vacuums fear to tread. The entire system is well-endowed on the features front too.
But it is rather expensive. Both the Tapo RV50 and Eufy C28 offer around 90% of the capability for 50% of the price. If money isn’t an object or you specifically need the Saros 20’s object-avoidance and threshold climbing capabilities, then the Saros 20 is just about as good as robot vacs get. For everyone else, the Tapo and Eufy machines make more financial sense.
