Wet-dry vacuum cleaners are the hottest accessory in home care at the moment. While the category is still in its infancy, there are already several machines that show they can be worth the effort. They combine the ability to vacuum with a maintenance-level mop that is so convenient in many ways.
Roborock makes the best robot vacuum cleaners on the market, many of which are very good at mopping, so I came into this review with high hopes. While there’s no doubt that the Roborock F25 Ultra is a very capable wet-dry vacuum cleaner, there is still a lot of room for improvement, and I’m not convinced it justifies its very high recommended retail price.
Table of contents
- First impressions
- Specifications and price
- Cleaning the floor
- Steam mode
- Cleaning the device
- Who is the Roborock F25 Ultra for?
First impressions
Getting off to a good start, the Roborock F25 Ultra is easy to set up. It went from in the box to charging in under 10 minutes, and you really can’t do much better than that. Most of that time was spent trying to get the tape off the box without getting up to find scissors.
Filling the water reservoir was very simple, too.
Looks-wise, it’s pretty small. Narrower than my usual Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Series unit that lives in my kitchen. That means it looks less imposing, but the smaller head also means that it’ll require a little more effort to clean the floor, with a couple of extra laps. However, being able to fit in a smaller space makes it easier to store.
Overall, my first impression was that it seems well designed on the whole.
Roborock F25 Ultra specifications and price
| Price | $1,499 |
| Warranty | One year, in addition to your Australian consumer law rights |
| Manufacturer’s website | Roborock Australia |
| Suction | 22,000Pa |
| Self-cleaning temperature | 90°C |
| Self-drying temperature | 90°C |
| Clean water tank size | 1L |
| Run time in Eco mode | 60mins |
This has all the specs you’d expect of a flagship wet-dry vac in 2025. Aside from, perhaps, dirt detection, there’s nothing missing.
Cleaning the floor
Overall, aside from the steam mode (which I’ll get to in a second), the Roborock F25 Ultra is pretty good at cleaning the floor.
We gave our toddler pasta with tomato-based sauce for lunch, so you can imagine what my dining room looked like before I started cleaning. Catching the sauce within half an hour of the spread was key, because while the Roborock F25 Ultra can eventually pick up dried sauce with enough passes, it’s much more competent at wet sauce.
The Roborock F25 Ultra was able to pick up slimy yogurt easily, but really struggled with the mystery goo that surrounds the bin. It ended up being easier to get that off with a paper towel and some spray and wipe, with elbow grease once again winning the day.
In terms of vacuum power, it was able to pick up unpopped popcorn kernels, but failed at picking up the larger debris of actual popcorn.
What this category excels at is maintenance cleaning rather than deep cleaning. With that in mind, the Roborock F25 Ultra was able to do slightly better than expected.
Steam mode
Steam is a powerful beast. We’ve been using it to power trains and ships for years, as well as iron stuff efficiently. It can be great for lifting power to clean sticky stains on tiled floors. The problem is that steam needs to be applied directly to the affected area because it can quickly cool and just go back to being normal water.
While the steam mode in the Roborock F25 Ultra sounds like a really good idea, the positioning means that I can see the steam coming out of the front of the machine. But the roller on the mop still feels cool to the touch, the floor also feels cool to the touch, and the sticky stain remains until I do around a dozen passes.
I think the problem here is that the steam valve is set to point out of the front of the machine, rather than being directed at the floor it’s trying to clean. This is better for wooden floors that could be damaged by coming into contact with steam, but somewhat useless on my tiled floor. It’s the illusion of steam cleaning without letting the steam actually clean.
In my tests with spilled sticky soft drink and dried pasta sauce, there was almost no difference between cleaning with or without steam mode, when compared to the hot water mode.
Based on this, I’d feel comfortable saying you could probably save some money by going for the steamless F25 Ace model, which is very similar to the F25 Ultra. At the time of writing, the Ace is on sale for $549, compared to the $1,499 of the F25 Ultra.
Cleaning the device
One of the worst things about wet-dry vacuum cleaners is cleaning the dirty water tank. The whole point of using a device like this is that I don’t want to have to come into direct contact with how gross the floor is, yet somehow these types of machines often require me to become intimately acquainted with even more grossness than I could have imagined.
Because of this, I now judge wet-dry vacuum cleaners on how much therapy I think I’ll need after cleaning them.
The Roborock F25 Ultra actually had the easiest-to-open dirty water tank I’ve tried so far. It was quick to open without spilling anything.
Emptying it into the toilet (which is what’s recommended) was also very painless.
Until.
The bottom part of the filter was not properly attached to the rest of the filter, and it fell into the toilet bowl as I was moving it to the bin.
The horrors.
It then took quite a while to reattach it to the rest of the filter. Friends, it was so gross. It should be easy to empty and clean the dirty water tank without ever having to touch the bottom of the filter with your actual hands. The brush should do most of that work. I touched it with my actual hands, pulling it out of the toilet.
Had the toilet incident not occurred, I’d say it was pretty good. But that filter is so loosely attached that you can’t knock it against a bin to get the chunks out, which is inefficient.
The whole filter design is actually pretty inefficient, given how widely spaced the slats are, allowing plenty of debris to just fall directly into the water. This is going to clog a lot of pipes and sinks.
While this is closer to being good than many competitor dirty water tanks, there is still significant room for improvement.
Who is the Roborock F25 Ultra for?
This is a pretty decent wet-dry vacuum cleaner that would be worth picking up at a deep discount. It’s not suited for people who want effective steam cleaning. However, it is quite good at vacuuming and decent at mopping.
Given how early we are in the development of wet-dry vacuum cleaners, this is a solid base for Roborock to build from, even if there is still a lot of work to do before the company (and all the other companies in the category) nail it.
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