To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- About the diameter of a dinnerplate
- Incredibly easy to use
- Self-emptying
- Below-par obstacle avoidance
- Pod on the top may limit under-armchair effectiveness
- Compact dimensions equals lots of runs up and down
The best things come in small packages, so they say. And that may be an absolute truth with the SwitchBot K11+: the world’s smallest robot vacuum. How so? Well, with a similar diameter than your average dinner plate, it’s able to slide into nooks and crannies in even the most cluttered rooms.
Small dimensions don’t necessarily mean small capacities, though, because the self-emptying K11+ will eject its contents into a four-litre back hidden inside an equally tiny base station. This doesn’t mean frequent emptying either, and SwitchBot reckons it’ll take three months to fill in normal use.
The only thing that isn’t so small is the price. But even at £399, it’s far from the priciest self-emptying robot vacuum around. So, should the compact K11+ be on your shopping list alongside the best robot vacuum cleaners? Let’s find out.
SwitchBot K11+: What do you get for the money?
In terms of dimensions, not a lot. The base unit has the footprint of a sheet of A4 paper and a height equivalent to a 500ml bottle. That means you can tuck it away virtually anywhere – just as long as there’s 1.5m of space in front and 0.5m each side so it’s able to find its way back home after a hard day’s vacuuming. The vacuum measures 24.8cm in diameter and 9.2cm tall.
It takes a slightly unusual approach to mopping: rather than complex and bulky wet rollers and associated drying apparatus, you attach disposable wet wipes to the base of the unit, and it’ll happily wipe away for around 20 to 30 minutes – less if there’s lots of dust or hair about. A pack of 30 wipes is supplied, and you can use SwitchBot’s own replacements (£25 for 30), or raid Amazon for cheaper alternatives.
Like other self-emptying robot vacuums, a small internal dust collector is supplemented by far more dirt storage in the base unit. In the case of the K11+, there’s a four-litre disposable dirt sack, which SwitchBot says should only need emptying four times a year. Also in the base unit is a tool to help you de-tangle hair from the rollers – not that there should be much, because the single side brush and main roller are both designed to resist tangling.
Suction is rated at 6,000Pa, which is pretty punchy in something so small. The K11+ uses PSD optical sensors to detect obstacles and has a cliff sensor to prevent it going full lemming down the stairs. It’ll scan each room, which can be viewed in the companion app where you can also set no-go zones, and good wheel articulation means it can easily climb 2cm-tall obstacles, such as chunky rugs.
At £399, the K11+ isn’t cheap, particularly for something so small. But it counters this with an upmarket look and feel. The base unit has a matte finish which shouldn’t attract dust, and the lid is finished in a fairly convincing wood effect (at least convincing in an IKEA kind of way). The vac itself has a high-gloss finish, which does attract dust. While the black version tested here looks pleasantly discrete, it is prone to fingerprints and scratches relatively easily, so it’s likely the white version may look fresher for longer. Something to think about. Before I leave the subject of price, I should add that you might also be able to find the K11+ at a discount: I’ve seen it recently reduced to just £249.
What’s it like to use?
I went from unboxing to cleaning in less than ten minutes (although it helped that I already had the slick SwitchBot app installed). You simply click the side brush into place underneath the vac and position the base unit with the requisite space around it. The mopping wipes and spare filter are stored in the base unit, so set them to one side.
Then it’s time to turn the vac on, dock it and connect it via your smartphone app. Once you’re all set, the K11+ will work its way around your room – or rooms — mapping out the floor space, and working out where all your furniture sits using LiDAR and positioning sensors. These make it less likely that the vac will spend its time blundering into objects, and also make it possible to track its path via the app.
Once set up, the K11+ is incredibly easy to use. You can hit the button on the vac itself, or select more advanced features through the app. These include four levels of suction, and the number of times it’ll work its way around a room. It’s here where you can toggle between vac or mop modes too: for the latter you’ll need to locate the mopping pod plate which is stored in the base station lid, and clip in one of the supplied mopping cloths. These cloths take a bit of wrangling to mount onto the plate, and you’ll need to take care not to snap the stiff retaining clips, but it’s easy once you know how.
Even during our pet hair cleaning tests, the K11+ was resistant to tangling around the rollers, although there’s a detangling tool which stores in the base unit if you need to clear it. I like that the K11+ will announce if something is stopping the rollers, be that a block of Lego or strands of hair. In fact, it will declare a range of information with a robotic American accent, so you’ll know exactly what the problem is.
Once the vac returns to base, it’ll empty its contents into the supplied single-use dust bag. And you can select whether the K11+ will do this after 60, 75 or 90 minutes cleaning via the app – or not at all.
Is it good at finding its way around?
After an initial fact-finding mission, the SwitchBot K11+ will move around the edge of the room in a clockwise direction. It’ll do a couple of loops, before criss-crossing the room, ensuring good coverage. It’s surprisingly nippy, too – but as we’ll see, that’s a double-edged sword.
Its tiny circumference means it’s handy for getting into gaps that are off-limits for larger robotic vacuums – between my armchair and fireplace, for example. I like that you can easily see if it’s missing spots via the app, and that you can set safe zones for it to avoid. The ability to set multiple maps also means it can guide itself around different rooms or different levels of your house easily. Its size is naturally well-suited to bedrooms, and it’s light enough to carry up and down the stairs.
I particularly like that it’s cognisant of its height, so it won’t get itself wedged under low-slung furniture. It hasn’t put a foot wrong with the rug directly in front of my sofa – lesser vacs have a tendency to miscalculate and wedge themselves in – and its impressive wheel articulation means it’s not fazed by door thresholds either.
There is a but, though, and it’s quite a big one. The K11+ failed to avoid the socks and charging cables we left as obstacles in the room, and ended up rolling over them, or tangling them around the rollers. What’s more worrying for pet owners is that it was unaware of the presence of our fake dog poo. I had to remove this from the rollers; the real deal would be far more unpleasant, and would likely leave you with smears to clean up, too.
Thankfully, better are the cliff-edge sensors which prompt an about-turn rather than tumbling down the stairs.
How well does it clean?
Given its size, it’s a pretty effective operator. However, I found it struggled a little with those bits of fluff that can get tangled in carpet pile: I ended up sending it on a repeat journey before pulling some of them up by hand. It was much better on hard floors, though, and did a great job getting itself into corners.
It posted near-perfect scores in our rice test, which involves scattering 50g of grains over the floor. It gathered a really impressive 49.8g on carpet and 49.5g on laminate. It would’ve picked more up on the hard floor, but the nature of rice means some vacs have a tendency to scoot grains across the floor.
In our flour test, it collected 40g on a hard floor, which is a little under average, but it struggled on the carpet, gathering 22.6g – around three grams under par.
The K11+’s rollers are pleasingly resistant to tangling, and remained so for the majority of our tough pet hair cleaning tests. Here we found it had a tendency to roll up the fur into a sausage and spit it out. Of the 5g we spread over the hard floor and carpet, it collected 3.1g from each surface, which is at the lower end of recent launches we’ve tested. At least it was easy to pick up the deposited hairy chipolatas and drop them into the bin.
I think the mopping function is nice, but I’m not sure how much use the typical owner would get out of it. Once you mount a wipe on the supplied plate, it clips underneath the roller and the K11+ automatically switches to mopping mode. It effectively wipes the floor in the same manner as it vacs: that is to say methodically and efficiently, criss-crossing the floor.
It’s not really fair to compare it to vacs with fully-functioned mops. In our tests, it cleaned dried-on mud and orange squash in two cleans, but traces of our dried-on ketchup were still there after ten cleans. It’s worth noting here that we used fresh mopping cloths for each test. And given that these are disposable, frequent mopping with the K11+ is neither very healthy for your wallet (about 83p per mop if you’re using Switchbot’s own) or the environment.
Once the SwitchBot K11+ has mapped the zone to be cleaned, it zips about very fast. It seems slow and steady wins the race though, and if it took a little more time, it may clean a little bit more thoroughly. I also think it would benefit from twin side brushes to help loosen some of the dirt. In our test, where the flour was agitated, it seemed that little bit easier to clean.
Should you buy the Switchbot K11+?
If you need a small robotic vacuum, then the SwitchBot K11+ is a good one – indeed at the time of writing, it’s the smallest you can buy. That makes it ideal for those in smaller houses, apartments or bedsits, especially if you have lots of furniture, because it can scythe its way between legs and bases.
But you’ll also need to be someone who picks up after themselves, because its inability to avoid stray objects was disappointing. That apart, though, the quality of the vacuuming is good.
It’s not the cheapest robotic vacuum on the block, but there may be some very tempting deals around that make it worth a look for those in need of a compact robovac.
