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They'll clean your floors without you even needing to be home!

Vacuuming and mopping are essential parts of a household routine, but it’s not particularly enjoyable. In fact, cleaning brand Tincture says we spend more than five hours a week scrubbing our home, which is a lot of time spent on tedious jobs. It’s true that vacuums and mops are getting better at helping us tackle these tasks easily – but what if there was a way to outsource it completely?

Enter the iRobot Roomba S9+ Robot Vacuum and the Braava Jet M6 Robot Mop. These nifty machines whizz around completely hands-free, cleaning floors without you even needing to be home.

Convenient, yes, but not cheap. The vacuum alone alone costs £1,499 and the mop an additional £699.99. Purchasing both together will save you £180, but that’s still more than £2,000 for the pair. So when offered the chance to test both the mop and the GHI winning S9+ vacuum, we were intrigued to see how they’d fare – and whether they’re worth that hefty price tag.

According to the brand, these little black machines are designed to be compact enough to reach those awkward spots under your sofa, with built-in sensors to ensure they get close to walls and deep into corners. The sensors prevent them from toppling down stairs, too, so you can set them off upstairs without finding poor Roomba in bits in the hallway later.

Roomba says that the more the robots work, the better they’ll recognise your home, so they’ll get more efficient with each job. (We’d agree with this; on their first jaunt, our tester bots thoroughly scoped out their surroundings, repeatedly going around the same areas – and occasionally bumping into furniture. After one clean, they’d created a reasonably accurate map of the flat until, within four jobs, both devices had fully fleshed out its outline – impressive.)

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The bots live on their respective charging stands. These are just over 10 inches in length, so bear in mind as they’ll need a clean run of space near a socket. It takes about three hours to reach full battery but you shouldn’t be caught without juice often; if the hub is plugged in, the bots remain on charge until they’re needed and head back to top up when they’re finished. If they do run low mid-clean, they return to the base to charge, before heading back to finish the job.

Both bots are controlled via the iRobot smartphone app, as well as the Google Home, Alexa and AliGenie voice assistants. The app can set them off, schedule and cancel jobs, create ‘clean zones’ (those to pay extra attention to, like under the hob) and ‘keep out zones’ (ones to avoid, like around your table holding that statement vase). It will alert you to any troubleshooting issues and, if you have both robots, you can link them to ensure the mop heads off as soon as the vacuum has finished.

The mop is the smaller of the two robots; about the height of a tennis ball and nine inches in diameter. It comes with two reusable wet pads and three disposable dry ones. You can use it with water alone or the solely-compatible iRobot cleaning solution.

These dry pads aren’t for buffing the floors post-clean but for picking up stray hairs and dust beforehand. If you’re using these, you’ll need to be home to switch to the wet pads afterwards; the bot can’t do it and won’t spray water when they’re installed.

In our view, though, we’d recommend using the Roomba vacuum for this job as it’s much more efficient – after setting off the dry mop, we did find a few pesky hairs left behind in the bathroom.

To clean, the mop works its way across the room in methodical straight lines, spraying water through a nozzle and repeatedly going back and forth to ensure no grime is missed. You can also use the app – or voice assistant, if you’ve labelled your rooms in the app – to send it to a specific spot, but the mop itself can’t sense when a space is extra dirty. Overall, it took 45 minutes to tackle the small flat’s vinyl hallway, bathroom and kitchen floors.

We tested the floor cleaner’s prowess by setting the robot to work both with and without the solution, then wiping the space around the hob and kitchen sink with a paper towel to check for residual mess. The result? No sign of any leftover grime either time. As such, it’s really personal preference, but using the detergent gave the floors a lovely fragrance that using water alone can’t top.

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Overall, we found the mop’s overall performance comparable to doing it yourself – the kitchen and bathroom were both left suitably gleaming afterwards. As you can set it off while you’re out, it means you can avoid getting your socks wet, which is a bonus! But if you are home, it’s quiet enough to have on while you’re watching TV, which is also handy.

Take note: The brand claims the mop should fit into all corners but we found it sometimes fails to get deep enough, leading us to go over some corners of the kitchen units with a wet cloth afterwards. Our test flat is quite small and the machine wasn’t petite enough to fit between the wall and the side of the living room rug. But this presumably won’t be a problem in larger homes, and you can always shift known obstacles out of its way before setting it off.

It also had trouble returning to the charging base twice as there wasn’t a clear pathway, but it never got stuck. The app will send an alert if these issues occur but, if it is trapped, it won’t be able to free itself so you’ll have to rescue it. You also have to keep doors open so it can travel through your home – the robots are clever, but they haven’t mastered the art of opening doors yet.

Finally, a charging error meant we had to reboot it twice but the support system helped resolve this issue quickly and easily.

This is slightly larger than the mop, at approximately 12 inches diameter and a slim two inches in height. It also runs across the room in methodical straight lines but, unlike the mop, it uses its ‘dirt detect’ technology to spot grimier areas and clean them more thoroughly.

Overall, we were impressed with its performance. The ‘dirt detect’ functionality meant it spent a lot of time tackling the areas around the kitchen bin and food prep spaces, which was appreciated. It also clocked that, as I burn incense everyday, the floor area around the holder gathers lots of dust – doing a great job picking up every last speck.

The anti-tangle brushes are powerful, effectively picking up both large crumbs and fine dust from both our carpets and hard floors. Taking scissors to the roller to cut out rogue hairs is a thing of the past, too; even a face mask once got tangled in the machine but it slid out without fuss (and the app alerted us to a blockage).

Being small enough to fit into the awkward space under the sofa is a real timesaver and a feature we truly rate. Saying that, the machine was still slightly too wide to tackle the mini gap between the bed and the wall, leading us to switch to our trusty handheld vacuum instead.

We also liked that its charging hub doubles as a disposal unit, where the Roomba empties its own dust bag. It’s designed to hold 30 bins-worth of dirt and, after 24 outings, we haven’t changed ours yet. A pack of three bags is £21.95 but it comes with two and, as it only needs emptying infrequently, this shouldn’t be a regular expense.

Take note: Like most vacuums, it is really loud, so don’t set it off when you want to watch TV or hold a Zoom meeting. In true Dalek fashion, it’s thwarted by stairs, so this will have to remain on your chores roster. You’ll also need to be in to take it upstairs, too.

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We also found that it works slowly, which means a lot of noise pollution should you be in while it’s on. In our small test flat, it took about an hour to clean the hallway, kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom. This isn’t a problem if you’re out, but means it’s better to whip out the Dyson for a quick runaround if friends are due to visit. Rarely would doing the job yourself take so long.

I also had to contact customer service after two weeks due to a fault with the charging station but a replacement swiftly arrived within a week.

Roomba robot vacuum and mop: the final verdict

We’re sold on this pairing. The S9+ vacuum cleans my flat once or twice a week when I’m in office and the mop once a fortnight. Once a regular fixture in my weekly routine, my steam cleaner and Dyson vacuum now only make an appearance for quick runarounds or to tackle an impromptu mess.

There’s no getting away from the hefty price but, for anyone with a busy lifestyle or just hates cleaning, we’d say these robots are a worthwhile investment. They do a thorough job, have lots of handy features and can potentially save you much time and energy, so you can spend more time smugly binge-watching Bridgerton.

Pick up the bundle here or you can purchase the vacuum and mop separately.

There are plenty of alternatives from our robot vacuum tests to keep your floors gleaming. The GHI joint winner Roomba Series J7+ was praised for its pick-up power, while the Roomba 698 effectively vacuumed up pesky pet hairs from all surfaces.

Our team also picked out some cheaper options, including this reasonably priced Eufy robot (£209.99). We also spotted iRobot’s Roomba Combo, which cleverly vacuums and mops simultaneously.

Here are some of the team's top robot cleaner picks.