Installing a black kitchen floor was a big mistake – and extending the same material throughout the hallway and bathroom was an even bigger one. It looks super smart for the first few minutes after it’s cleaned, but every single crumb and mote of dust looks five times its actual size, and they accumulate ridiculously fast. Those specks would still be there with a different colored floor, and regular cleaning is no bad thing, but I tackle them with my elderly Dyson V8 and its crevice tool every day – sometimes several times – the place just looks awful.
The regret is real, but I’ve been a little hesitant to invest in a robot vacuum cleaner to handle the job for me. That’s partly due to the price (some of the best robot vacuums cost over a grand), and partly due to their size. My apartment is pretty tiny, so a full-size robovac would struggle to get into the smaller nooks and crannies – and it feels like overkill. Am I really too lazy to vacuum a few square feet myself?
That was until I came across the Switchbot K10+, which is one of the smallest robot vacuums you can buy, and seems tailor-made for homes like mine.
The K10+ measures just 9.8 inches / 248mm in diameter and stands 3.6 inches / 92mm tall, letting it find its way in between chair legs, slip under cabinets, sneak behind doors, and work its way into corners that would bamboozle full-sized robot vacuums.
It’s cheap too. Its official list price is $399.99 / £399.99 (about AU$600), which is very reasonable for a robovac, but you can usually get your hands on one for much less. At the time of writing, it’s half price when you order one direct from Switchbot (the discount code is applied automatically at the checkout), and it’s even cheaper when bought from Amazon. You can find all today’s best deals below.
Switchbot is perhaps best known for its retrofit smart home devices, which are handy add-ons that let you automate ‘dumb’ appliances and furnishings rather than replacing them. The company’s first product was the neat little Switchbot Bot, which uses a little mechanical arm to press just about any sort of switch. Want to turn on your dehumidifier during the afternoon? No problem. Switch on your kettle at 7am? Easy.
There are also retrofit smart locks that can rotate your door’s thumb-turn or even hold a physical key, and wheeled devices that roll along your curtain rails in the morning to wake you with natural light.
All of them can be controlled via Switchbot’s nicely designed mobile app, and integrate with all the major smart home ecosystems (including Matter if you have one of the company’s newer Wi-Fi hubs).
Most recently, I fitted my bedroom with a trio of Switchbot Blind Tilt devices, which rotate the wands on my blinds to open and close them on a schedule. They’re not super compact or quiet, but they do their job well, and are much more affordable and convenient than fitting three whole smart blinds. For more details, see my full Switchbot Blind Tilt review.
Clean sweep
The Switchbot K10+ is equally simple to use, and once you’ve unboxed it, it can be ready to clean your house in a matter of minutes. Just set up the dock somewhere flat with a generous clearance on each side, remove its protective plastic film, install the app on your phone, switch on the bot, and allow it to roam around to build an initial map.
Switchbot advises against putting the dock on a carpet, but the only suitable space I had was in my spare bedroom/study, so I had no choice. At first, the bot had a little trouble docking to empty its bin and recharge, and occasionally had to be lifted into place, but after a few days, I can now trust it to find its way home unaccompanied.
Its cartography skills are pretty impressive, and once it had completed its maiden voyage, I only needed to reset a couple of room divisions. I also created a few no-go zones so it wouldn’t get tangled in a tasselled rug or knock over the toilet brush.
Now, while I’m joining my 10am meeting in the office, the K10 gets to work whisking away the clothes fluff, breakfast crumbs, and other everyday debris that accumulate to make a black floor look depressingly dirty. When I get home, the bot is charging in its dock and everything is freshly cleaned, with only a network of furrows in the deeper pile of the living room carpet as proof that anything had happened.
Pleasingly, the K10’s rotating brush gets right to the edge of my cabinets, swirling away crumbs that would be impossible to reach with my Dyson unless I used the crevice tool.
The only issue I found is that the little bot tends to flick fluff off carpeted areas onto hard floors, but that was easily solved by changing the order in which each room is cleaned. Now the hard surfaces are cleaned last, so any rogue lumps of lint are cleaned up before the bot trundles back to its dock.
Finishing touches
The K10+ also has a mopping mode, which doesn’t seem to have impressed many reviewers, but I quite like it. Some robovacs, like the top-rated Eufy X10 Pro Omni, have a water reservoir and rotating pads that allow them to make light work of sticky spills. The K10+ is a lot less sophisticated. Instead, its version of ‘mopping’ involves a plastic plate with a wet wipe wrapped around it, which it pulls around your floors like a dog dragging its backside across the carpet.
It looks somewhat ridiculous, and the wipe has to be attached and removed by hand, but it actually does a pretty good job if your hard floors only need a quick going-over to bring them to a dust-free shine. It’s probably not up to the task if you have pets, children, or an unsteady hand with condiments, but for a final spruce-up, it’s ideal.
Switchbot has also released a most sophisticated version of its miniature robovac, the K10+ Pro, which boasts improved object detection, more powerful suction, and better edge detection (see our full Switchbot K10+ Pro review for more details), but for the time being, it’s also considerably more expensive. Its list price is $100 / £100 higher, and the price cuts are less generous. For me, and for anyone else with a black kitchen floor and a growing sense of regret, the basic model is plenty.
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