Roborock F25 Steam Review

Floor washers capable of generating steam are slowly but surely becoming mainstream, and Roborock has now put forward its own interpretation. Standing out from the crowd of floor cleaners filling the shelves is not easy, and one reliable way of doing it is to fit a feature the others do not have. Steam is one of those features, and the Roborock F25 Steam, as its name suggests, can wash floors with it, which in principle should lift stains without necessarily resorting to detergents.

Other touches are meant to make life easier: intelligent dirt detection, a scraper to limit how much moisture is left on the floor, an anti-tangle system and more besides. On the raw specification side, the F25 Steam takes a one-litre clean water tank alongside a 720 ml dirty water tank, and its battery is rated to keep it working for 80 minutes, which Roborock frames as enough to cover 660 m² of home on a single charge. An automatic cleaning programme followed by a drying cycle is provided to simplify upkeep.

A long way from something as visually worked as the Dyson Clean+Wash Hygiene, the Roborock F25 Steam plays it very conventionally. That does not stop it looking carefully built. There are certainly fewer moving parts, clips and retractable elements here than on a cordless stick vacuum, but the plastics appear well chosen and the F25 Steam ought to last a good few years before giving up.

Another point in its favour is that it is relatively light. It still registers 5 kg on the scales, and that is without the one-litre clean water tank being filled, but it is nonetheless 1.3 kg less than the Dreame T16 Pro Heat, another floor washer fitted with a steam generator. On top of that, Roborock has provided a self-propulsion system that works rather well and makes the job easier still. The result is that even at the end of a long cleaning session you are not overly tired, and the F25 Steam does not weigh on the arm.

Usefully, locking the machine in parking mode frees the wheels so that they turn without effort, which makes it easy to move from room to room or to park on its charging base, itself a very simple affair. Something a little more practical would have been welcome here, along the lines of what Hoover offers on the HW4 Clean Power, where the section in contact with the roller can be removed and rinsed easily under a running tap.

A small irritation is that the clean water tank is mounted on the head, and filling it means removing it, which involves crouching down at the very least. While you are there you can add a little of the supplied detergent to the compartment provided for it, on the left of the clean water tank. Staying with the head, and this is rare enough to be worth flagging, the F25 Steam carries a strip of LEDs on its cleaning head. That trick makes dirt easy to spot at a glance.

As is very often the case with floor cleaners, getting to grips with the F25 Steam poses no real difficulty. One button switches the machine on, a second selects the operating mode from the four available: auto, steam, eco and sponge. Be warned that the washer talks, announcing the chosen mode in a robotic voice that quickly becomes insufferable. A third button, on the handle, starts the automatic roller cleaning cycle once the machine is sitting on its base.

The control panel also carries a digital display, which indicates the active mode and gives an estimate of the remaining runtime. Where some models, such as the Tineco S9 Scientist, use a percentage for this, the Roborock F25 Steam makes do with a quartet of LEDs, a method that does not really allow a session to be planned with any accuracy.

The recorded stain tests were carried out without the steam function engaged, and the F25 Steam still showed real effectiveness against the standard set of stains.

Oil disappears in a single pass, and two are needed before the drops of wine can no longer be seen. Soda is removed in four passes back and forth, and traces of Indian ink are dealt with perfectly after seven passes, which is a fine performance. Dried ketchup clings firmly to the floor, taking nine passes to shift. Grease pencil, finally, is as intractable as ever and remains perfectly visible even after twenty passes of the roller.

More solid spillages cause the Roborock F25 Steam no trouble at all. Soaked cereal and egg are swallowed up in one single pass, although a little insistence is needed before the shell stops being dragged along the floor.

Automatic roller cleaning inevitably simplifies looking after the Roborock F25 Steam. Once the housework is done, the machine simply goes back on its base and the relevant button on the handle is pressed. If more is needed, the rollers can also go through the washing machine.

Like most floor cleaners, the F25 Steam has a mechanism to extract the large section of the dirty water collector, which doubles as a lid and carries both the HEPA filter and the strainer, the grille responsible for holding solid waste back out of the soiled liquid. There is no struggle to remove that part, which is not always a given. The strainer does its job perfectly, and the gaps between the bars of the grille are narrow enough not to let debris through: all that remains is to tip the waste into the bin. Some pieces do inevitably slip past, but they are genuinely small and can be flushed away down the sink without difficulty.

Another good point is that the dirty water tank has relatively few internal ridges and recesses. That is rarely the case, and it makes thorough cleaning operations considerably simpler.

Without being enormous, the endurance of the Roborock F25 Steam is very comfortable. It can run for 46 minutes in auto mode, although in practice it will stop after 35 minutes because the dirty water tank is full. It is worth pointing out that no interruption is triggered by an empty clean water tank, which is something that does happen with other floor washers.

A full recharge asks for 2 hours 30 minutes of patience.

The Roborock F25 Steam does not manage to keep its noise level down as well as the competition does. In auto mode, a sound meter reads 62 dB(A), which is a little louder than the other floor washers it is grouped against. It also makes itself heard during the brush-cleaning phase, where the level again reaches 62 dB(A). By way of comparison, the noise produced by a normal conversation is generally estimated at around 60 dB(A).

Among hot-water floor washers, the Dreame T16 Pro Heat is the closest comparison.