Roidmi RS70 review: A cordless stick vacuum and mop in one

At first glance, the Roidmi RS70 looks perfectly configured for hard-floor living. It’s a cordless stick vacuum with a motorised floor head that has a soft roller, well suited for picking up loose dirt and debris from your kitchen, utility or bathroom flooring.

Its super power, however, is a powered mop head, which lets you give your floors a rinse and wipe after you’ve vacuumed them. It’s a clever idea and it’s certainly more convenient than using a traditional mop and bucket, but the catch is that you do have to sacrifice some carpet-cleaning power.

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Roidmi RS70 review: What do you get for the money?

Take a close look at the soft roller in the Roidmi RS70’s vacuuming floor head and you’ll notice it also has the bristles of a conventional, carpet-agitating vacuum cleaner. It isn’t trying to take on the dual-purpose might of Shark’s Duo Clean dual-roller floor head – on the Shark IZ300UKT, for example – but it at least tips a nod to the fact that most British homes contain a mix of hard floor, rugs and carpet.

The mop head is an interesting addition. Like the standard floor head, it harnesses the power of the vacuum motor, but it doesn’t use it for suction. Instead, it spins a pair of cleaning pads, mounted on the underside of the floor head, rotating them at 200rpm. These are connected to a water reservoir you fill with tap water, which feeds into the pads, keeping them moist but never saturated.

To top things off, the vacuum also comes with the holy trinity of vacuum attachments: a crevice tool, a dusting brush and a mini motorised tool for upholstery, mattresses and stairs. All of these can be fitted to the main unit, to create a handheld device, or connected to the extension wand if you need a little more reach. In my review of the Roidmi H10, I complained it was short on extras; I can’t level the same complaint at the Roidmi RS70.

With the wand and the standard floor head attached, the vacuum measures 256 x 260 x 1,075mm (WDH) and weighs 2.7kg. This is lighter than most serious cordless vacuum cleaners; the Dyson V15 Detect, for example, weighs 3kg, and the Shark IZ300UKT is a chunky 4.6kg. The majority of the RS70’s weight is in the handheld unit, which weighs 1.6kg, so it’s relatively top heavy but it’s still light enough that you can use it for a fair while without getting achy wrists.

The collection bin has a 550ml capacity, so should cope with a fair few rooms before needing emptying. However, as with most cordless vacuums, you’re almost certainly going to need to empty it after every significant use.

The battery is integrated into the main unit and charges in around 2.5 hours. To do this you can either plug in the RS70 directly, or attach it to the supplied wall-mounted magnetic charging dock.

I was particularly impressed with the vacuum’s suction, which I measured at 27kPa when set to full power. It outperforms the Roidmi H10 and the Shark IZ300UKT by a significant margin but it can’t keep up with the superior suction of the Dyson v15 Detect.

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Roidmi RS70 review: What’s it like to use?

Using the Roidmi RS70 is simplicity itself. There are just two buttons on the device. You have to press and hold down the power button until it switches on, which takes a fraction of a second and is a bit more fiddly than simply pressing once, but it prevents it from being turned on accidentally. You can release the button once the vacuum has started; you don’t have to keep it held down like the trigger on a Dyson.

The second button, which is further up the handle, is used to cycle through the vacuum’s three power settings: Eco, Standard and Boost. Eco mode is always engaged the first time you switch it on, even if you left it in another mode the last time you used it. I found the distance between the two buttons slightly annoying – if you want to switch to a different mode as soon as you switch the vacuum on, you need to change your grip to reach the mode button.

There’s also a simple screen that displays how much charge is left in the battery as a percentage. It’s usually off when the vacuum is off, but you can tap the mode button at any time to view the current level of charge.

Unusually for a cordless vacuum cleaner there’s also an app, available for Android or iOS devices, which connects to the vacuum via Bluetooth and lets you see a range of information. The battery level, standby time and filter life – all useful information – and it also tells you how long you’ve vacuumed for and the area you’ve covered.

On hard floor, with its standard vacuuming floor head attached, the Roidmi RS70 is slick and smooth. Three small wheels on the base keep the floor head just clear of the surface and, with most of the weight at the top, the unit is flexible, light and manoeuvrable.

However, I found the wheels quickly got bogged down when used on carpet. It’s just about passable on short pile carpet, although even here it can feel stiff to move around, particularly when using the more powerful suction settings. With thicker pile the vacuum becomes unmanageably difficult to push and pull around as the small wheels sink into the carpet.

The build quality of the unit is wonderful, though. All the parts clip together perfectly, hold together well, and remain easy to disassemble. This also applies to the collection bin, which unclips smoothly from the main unit and has a trapdoor in the base that opens to let the dust and debris fall out.

I also found the floor head very easy to maintain. Close inspection of the soft roller reveals a comb system behind it, which does a fine job of keeping the rollers from becoming entangled with long hair.

Moreover, the mop attachment is simple to attach and use. It has a small tank on the top, which you fill with tap water before use. You can’t put detergent or other cleaning fluids in, as the unit is only designed to work with water, but it does a much better job than most mop-equipped robot vacuum cleaners, which typically just drag a damp cloth over your floor. Instead, there is some agitation, as the power from the vacuum engine is used to spin the RS70’s two circular pads.

You can choose how much water is expelled as it mops, with a button on the side of the mop head switching between regular or reduced flow. I found the heavier flow left the floor feeling slightly damp, while the reduced flow put down a bare minimum of water, which might suit delicate surfaces.

In use, the mop glides around the floor smoothly and elegantly but it feels too light-touch to make much of an impact on a properly filthy surface. Even with the maximum flow mode enabled it doesn’t release a lot of water, ensuring that your floor will be dry again within a few minutes.

As a way of following up a vacuuming session with a little sluice down, the mop is an interesting addition and it could certainly prove useful if you inevitably end up with muddy footprints in the house every day, as family and pets return from outdoor activities. However, you’ll need to keep a traditional mop and bucket to hand for more stubborn dirt.

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Roidmi RS70 review: How well does it clean?

Vacuuming performance, like the mopping, is a mixed bag. Soft rollers are generally the best tool available to a vacuum cleaner to gather up large particles, such as in our Cheerios cleaning test, but this didn’t prove to be the case with the Roidmi RS70 in our tests.

The Roidmi’s roller is more velvety than fluffy and the brushes that extend out of it to help with carpet scattered Cheerios on both carpet and hard floor before the roller could mount the particles and suck them up. Even when the vacuum did manage to swallow some particles of the O-shaped cereal, these became clogged at the top of the extension wand.

The entry to the dust collection bin is U-shaped, and there’s a stiff rubber flap to prevent blow back, but this arrangement quickly created a logjam, preventing further cleaning. As a result, only 9g of a 26g Cheerio spillage was collected in our hard floor test, and this only increased to 11g on carpet. Ironically, if you were to grind them into the floor with your foot to break up the particles before trying to pick them up, it would probably do a better job.

Things improved in the fine particle test, with smaller plain flour particles travelling smoothly into the collection bin without obstruction. On hard floor, the RS70 picked up a respectable 48g of a 50g spill, with most of the remainder appearing to be caught in the tubes rather than left on the floor.

On short pile carpet, the vacuum only collected 40g on its first pass in the default Eco setting, although this increased to a respectable 47g by the time I’d performed a couple of passes and increased the suction power.

When compared with other models in the chart, below, you can see the overall cleaning performance is somewhat disappointing; just bear in mind that this is mostly thanks to the difficulty the RS70 had in picking up whole Cheerios.

What none of the RS70’s rivals have, however, is the option of mopping hard surfaces once you’ve finished vacuuming them. Here, I was pleasantly surprised with how the mop performed.

Despite the fact that it uses only plain water, it did a good job of removing some questionable stickiness from my kitchen floor, and removed a patch of dried mud I found in the utility room. You won’t see it cutting through dirt like the mops on a TV advert for floor cleaning products, but it’s perfectly good for giving a lightly soiled floor a wipe.

There’s even a neat cleaning station for the mop head supplied in the box. After you’ve finished cleaning with it, simply place the unit into the cleaner and turn it back on. The pads rotate against the surface of the cleaner, rinsing through water from the tank, and the dirty water then drips down into the collection tray beneath.

Finally, as you can see from the chart below, the battery life of the RS70 is superb and, in Eco setting, it lasted 63mins 12secs. Of the cordless vacuums we’ve reviewed in the last year or so, only the Dyson V11 Outsize outlasts it, and that’s a significantly beefier cleaner. Once you engage the Boost mode, its advantage over other devices disappears, but it still holds its own.

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Roidmi RS70 review: Should I buy it?

Roidmi is pushing the RS70 as a suitable cleaner for any surface, but it isn’t really. While its soft roller does have integrated bristles to help flick dirt out of carpet, I found the design of the floor head meant it became awkward to push around on anything but short-pile carpet.

It comes into its own on hard flooring, where it rolls around smoothly, does a decent job of scooping up most mess (aside from large particles) and cleans up surprisingly effectively after using the mop attachment. However, it’s expensive and for those with a mix of carpet and hard flooring, there are better choices.

Our top choice remains the Dyson V15 Detect, which although expensive is beginning to see the occasional price drop. The Shark IZ300UKT is a great stick vacuum at a slightly lower price, while the chunkier Shark ICZ300UKT cordless upright is even more effective.