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- Very effective spot cleaning
- Lifts stains from hard floor
- Affordable
- Small capacity vacuuming
- Single-use mop pads are wasteful
- Isn’t designed for sluicing
The Shark VacMop has solved one of the key problems facing wet and dry cleaners, which is that they aren’t very pleasant to empty and clean out. When you mix moisture with household dirt, you end up with a sludgy grey mess that clings to everything, particularly the various washable parts of a standard vacuum and mop combo. The classic mop and bucket may not be very high tech but it’s an easy and arms-length job to pour out and rinse through.
The Shark VacMop solution is to remove the requirement to clean it completely. Instead, the business end of the mop uses a disposable cartridge, which Shark calls a Disposable Hard Floor Pad, which is part plastic collection bin and part mop cloth. When you’re finished cleaning you can hold the device over your bin and press a button on the top of the floor head to eject the cartridge without going anywhere near the gunge.
What do you get for the money?
The Shark VacMop 2-in-1 Cordless Vacuum Mop with Targeted Spray VM200UK comes with everything you need to get going. The device itself is supplied in three parts, but is very simple to clip together. A supplied charging cable plugs into the back of the device to top-up the battery, which ran for 11 mins 46 secs in my tests.
Also in the box you’ll find six of the disposable pads and a small 350ml bottle of Shark’s VacMop Multi-Surface Floor Cleaner. The pads are single use, so you’ll ditch them after each cleaning session. The Floor Cleaner is manually sprayed ahead of the mop as you clean, so how much you’ll use will really depend on how dirty your floor is.
When you want to replace these consumables, Shark will happily sell you a box of 16 replacement pads for £14.99 (94p each) and a 2 litre bottle of Floor Cleaner for £19.99. The Floor Cleaner can be used on any sealed floor surface including stone, hardwood, vinyl, laminate, tile, marble and lino.
The VacMop itself is compact and light. It measures 240x140x1220mm (WDH) and weighs 1.5kg. The motor sits just above the floor head, with an alloy wand extending out of the top to the plastic handle. This has a vacuum trigger on the rear and a spray button on the front.
What’s it like to use?
The trickiest thing about the Shark VacMop is attaching the mop pads, as they need to hook under a clip on one side, line up with some teeth on the front and then lock into place on the other side. Once you’ve worked it out, though, it’s all relatively simple.
After that it’s a case of holding down the trigger button while you vacuum up any dry mess, or spray the floor ahead of you with the other button and give it a wipe down with the pad on the floor head.
As we’ve mentioned, when you’ve finished, you push the release button on the floor head to drop the mop pad into the bin. That disposes of the entire pad, everything that the vacuum has collected, and any dirt that’s been picked up by the pad.
The downside to all this, apart from having to buy more consumables, is that it feels spectacularly wasteful. The collection bin section of the mop pad is essentially a plastic box, and binning one of those every time you wash your floor feels wrong. If it was food packaging, we’d at least be recycling it.
If you shop around you might be able to find a reusable version – I spotted third-party Klaqian Reusable Mop Pad Refills on Amazon, but I didn’t have time to purchase and test them, so can’t vouch for them. I also spotted reusable pads on Temu.
How well does it clean?
I was genuinely surprised with how well the Shark VacMop managed to clean up the messes I created to test it. I tried it with both my usual hard floor vacuum cleaner tests and my mop tests; however, with the vacuum tests I reduced the amount of material I used because the collection compartment of the VacMop is tiny compared to most dry-only vacuum cleaners.
I dropped the Cheerio test to 5g. They all leapt into the collection bin as I approached them and were locked away inside by a flap, making it impossible for them to fall out but also tricky to remove when I attempted to reuse the pad. Pet hair I dropped to a 2.5g test, and again it was all sucked in quickly and easily off hard floor.
The flour test I reduced to 10g, and this wasn’t quite as conclusive, at least if you count the basic dry suction. It only left about 0.1g on the floor according to my scales, but when it’s smeared across the floor, this looks like more. Having said that, I then sprayed the area with the floor cleaning solution and went in for another pass, and the floor looked cleaner than most dry-only vacuum cleaners I’ve tested would leave it.
To test the mopping ability I used my usual trio of dried-on splodges of garden mud, blackcurrant squash and tomato ketchup. I gave the spills a quick squirt of the cleaning solution as a pre-treatment before tackling them, and it visibly got to work loosening the squash stain before I even touched it with the mop. The mud and the squash were then removed in a single swipe of the mop pad.
The ketchup proved more resilient. I had to squirt then scrub it, making more than 10 passes across the stain before it finally lifted.
The only mop I’ve seen that equals this ability to remove dried-on stains is the Dyson WashG1, which uses rotating brushes to wipe and agitate. It’s worth noting that the Shark VacMop is less than a quarter of the price, but the Dyson doesn’t need special cleaning fluid and doesn’t use disposable pads. It isn’t pleasant to clean out, though.
Should I buy the Shark VacMop VM200UK?
As I said, the cleaning ability of the VacMop was a pleasant surprise. It’s a hard worker for such a slight and relatively affordable device, rivalling the cleaning ability of the vastly more expensive Dyson WashG1.
What it doesn’t do, though, is tackle huge swathes of floor. This isn’t really designed for sluicing down your whole kitchen on a weekly basis, though it does a good job of spot washes and regular area cleaning. It’s very versatile and makes short work of modest spillages whether they’re wet, dry or a combination of both.
I love the grand concept of being able to vacuum, mop and ditch the dirt without having to get your hands dirty when emptying it, but this implementation doesn’t work for me. Dropping all that plastic waste into the bin is heart-breaking. There’s a product, or perhaps a disposable mop pad design, with better eco credentials waiting to be iterated from this one. But for now, I can’t bring myself to recommend the VM200UK, no matter how good it is at spot mopping.
