The WashG1 is a dedicated wet floor cleaner and Dyson‘s first attempt to prove that it doesn’t just do carpets. It launched in the UK and Australia last month but has just gone on sale in the US. It’s currently only available to buy direct from Dyson, and has a list price of $699.99.
Unclutch those pearls; we all knew it was going to be expensive. I do think that some Dyson products justify their eye-watering price tags, but in this case, there are things worth factoring in before you decide to gamble your child’s college fund on a wet floor cleaner.
I tested one out and you can get the full low-down in my Dyson WashG1 review, but the gist is that it works fantastically well on perfectly smooth, flat floors like linoleum or polished concrete but is nowhere near as impressive on textured or uneven floors (including tiled floors with grouting gaps).
This is Dyson’s first dedicated wet floor cleaner (I say ‘dedicated’ because we do have the Dyson V15s Submarine, which is a vacuum cleaner with a wet floorhead that can be swapped in). Significantly for this brand, which has built its reputation on being really good at moving air about, it doesn’t use suction. Instead, it employs a combination of agitation, hydration and separation to get your floors gleaming.
Water is expelled through the cleaner head, rollers help loosen the dirt and pick up things like hair and solid particles, and then the inner mechanisms separate liquid and solid spillages. That last part is designed to make maintenance easier.
Should you buy one?
It’s very good at certain things. Like today’s best Dyson vacuums, it’s extremely maneuverable; the floorhead can pivot any which way, and it’ll get right up close to baseboards, too. The fact that it can handle liquid and solid waste is really helpful for things like dinnertime messes. I have a small niece and nephew who cannot complete a meal without coating everything in the vicinity with whatever they’ve been eating, and a once-over with the WashG1 is by far the least disgusting way to deal with it that I’ve found so far. The base will take care of some of the maintenance by running a self-clean cycle, when you dock it, too.
However, it’s not worth the investment if you have uneven floors. The WashG1 will struggle to clean them evenly, as I discovered when I tested mine on a flagstone floor. Because the rollers don’t really ‘scrub’, it’s only really capable of tackling surface dirt.
That includes missing the grouting cracks between tiles. (Apparently, the engineers found that adding more water is a more effective way to tackle stubborn dirt than rubbing at it, and while they might have a bit of a point, I still think there are limitations to this approach.)
Those niggles aside, it still might be a good investment for some shoppers. Because it’s brand new, don’t expect discounts any time soon – I have my fingers crossed for a price-drop in the Black Friday sales, though.
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ruth.hamilton@futurenet.com (Ruth Hamilton)
