Nobody I know enjoys vacuuming their home. It is tedious, and vacuums are noisy, annoying devices. The noise level makes it challenging to listen to music or a podcast, adding to the boredom.
For these and many other reasons, robot vacuums are a worthwhile investment. However, there are so many models available from so many manufacturers that choosing one can be a challenge. For those living in a condominium, apartment, or small home, the SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro is worth considering.
SwitchBot has been in business since 2016 with a focus on products that make the existing items in your home smart. They have released a number of robot vacuums over the last few years. SwitchBot’s latest, the K10+ Pro packs a great many features into a small package:
- Palm-Sized – It is significantly smaller than most robotic vacuums (9-3/4” diameter x 3-5/8” high). This allows it to get farther into corners, to easily get underneath furniture, and to navigate between the legs of chairs. All this means it can clean areas that other robot vacuums can’t reach.
- Powerful Vacuum – Up to 3000 Pascals (Pa) of suction power allows the vacuum to pick up objects the size and weight of a marble.
- Intelligent Navigation – It efficiently cleans up to 150 minutes on a single charge, allowing to clean over 2400 sq. ft. of floor space.
- Hands Off Design – The dust collection and charging base has a capacity of 4L. SwitchBot estimates that the antibacterial dust collection bag will only have to be changed four times per year.
- Reduced Noise – The K10+ Pro offers four vacuum levels; MAX, Strong, Standard, and Quiet. In Quiet mode, the K10+ operates at only 45 dB, which is comparable to the sound level of a library.
- Multiple Cleaning Options – The K10+ Pro offers the ability to clean an entire floorplan, individual rooms, a defined area, or a specific dirty spot when driven to that location by the user using Remote Control Mode.
- Multiple Sensors for Enhanced Positioning – The K10+ Pro includes LiDAR and a position sensitive detector (PSD) for precise positioning and reduced collisions with furnishings.
- Multiple Floor Operation – The K10+ Pro can map 10 different floors/areas of a home and the small size makes it easy to move between floors.
- Anti-Tangle Brush – The all-rubber brush is designed to prevent the tangling of pet hair and clogging of the vacuum.
- Scheduled Cleaning – Multiple schedules can be created to clean at different times of the day and days of the week.
- Do Not Disturb Mode – The robot will not clean, play voice prompts, or empty dust it has collected into the charging station when Do Not Disturb Mode is scheduled to be on.
- Find My Vacuum – Causes the robot to annunciate “I’m here” so the vacuum can be easily found if it gets stuck somewhere during cleaning.
- Multi-Lingual – The K10+ Pro annunciates voice messages to report status to homeowners. The robot supports the ability to load different voice packages so it can speak in different languages.
- Child Lock – locks the ability for the vacuum to be controlled from the buttons on the robot.
Hands on with the SwitchBot Mini Robot Vacuum K10+ Pro
SwitchBot provided me with a K10+ Pro Robot Vacuum to test for this article. It comes well packaged in a recyclable, corrugated cardboard box with only a few, very small, pieces of foam that can’t be recycled. Inside the box you’ll find:
- K10+ Pro Robot Vacuum
- Auto-Empty Charging Station
- Two Dust Filters (one for immediate use and one spare)
- Two Dust Bags (one for immediate use and one spare)
- Disposable Mop Pad
- Vacuum Cleaning Tool
- Mop Pad Mounting Bracket
- Two Side Brushes (one for immediate use and one spare)
- Anti-Tangle Roller Brush
- Quick Start Guide
- User Manual
Installation is very simple. After unpacking the robot and the charging station you simply:
- Install a side brush on the underside of the robot
- Find a good location for the charging station and plug it into an outlet
- Remove the top cover of the robot and turn on the power switch
- Place the robot into the charging station
- Open the SwitchBot app
- Press the “+” button in the upper right-hand corner of the app to add a new device
- Select the K10+ from the list of devices
- Follow the instructions in the app to connect the robot to your WiFi network
- The app will then display the user guide for the K10+
Once the robot has finished charging, the next step is to map your home. The app displays a “Map and Clean” button that commands the robot to map your home and then automatically start cleaning. This isn’t ideal; the two actions need to be separated to allow you to edit the map and create no-go zones before the robot starts cleaning. Otherwise, the robot will clean in areas where you don’t want it to. In fact, SwitchBot does offer an option to quickly map without cleaning afterwards when you map additional areas of your home. But this option isn’t offered when you create your initial map.
The K10+ Pro did an excellent job creating a map, but it was a frustrating process because the side and roller brushes were running during this process. This led to the robot becoming stuck multiple times during the mapping process. Several times it became entangled in the fringe border on one of my rugs and it also became stuck on some extension cords. If the side and roller brushes were simply turned off during mapping, this would have been a much simpler process.
Once the map was created, the SwitchBot app made it very easy to create no-go zones and virtual walls. The map included a great deal of detail that made it very easy to accurately position no-go zones. My one suggestion is to edit your map on a tablet, with its larger screen, and using a stylus. Trying to use your finger to adjust the size and position of a no-go zone or virtual wall can be a bit challenging.
The SwitchBot app did a reasonable job of dividing my floor plan into rooms. However, I did need to do some editing to make the division of the map into rooms reflect reality. This process involves dividing some spaces into two and combining adjacent spaces into one, until you have things arranged the way you want. Doing this efficiently was a bit of a mental puzzle, but eventually the layout of rooms properly represented my floorplan and they were all properly named. Now I was finally ready to start cleaning.
Vacuuming with the K10+ Pro
The K10+ Pro proves that bigger isn’t always better. The robot does a very good job of navigating when cleaning a room. It first works its way around the border of the room and then cleans the remainder of the space by navigating back and forth in neat rows.
The K10+ Pro will take a little longer to clean a space than a larger vacuum because its smaller size means that it will simply need to traverse more rows, than a larger robot vacuum, to cover the same area. However, this is more than made up for by the robot’s ability to get underneath furniture and into nooks and crannies in your home that other robotic vacuums are too large to enter.
My only complaint about the K10+ Pro’s vacuuming ability is that it still bumps into furniture legs more than I would expect, given that its navigation is driven by both LiDAR and a PSD distance sensor. I am especially sensitive to this issue as I have some antique furnishings in my home that I don’t want a robotic vacuum damaging over time through repeated bumps.
As a final test, I did something I had never tried with a robot vacuum before: I placed the K10+ Pro in my shop, where the dust level after sawing and sanding wood can far exceed what a normal person would find in their home. With the vacuum level set to Max, the robot did a very good job of cleaning the floor.
Mopping
The K10+ Pro comes with a mop pad that you can attach to the base of the robot. However, unlike other cleaning robots that offer more thorough mopping capabilities, the K10+ Pro’s mop pad functions more like a wet wipe. If you want a robot that offers both vacuuming and mopping then you should consider other cleaning robots.
Integration
The SwitchBot K10+ Pro integrates with a wide range of smart home ecosystems
- Matter (with a compatible SwitchBot Hub)
- Alexa
- Google Home
- Siri Shortcuts
- Additional third-party smart home platforms through the SwitchBot cloud API
I believe that integration is an important feature for a robot vacuum because it allows homeowners to schedule cleaning when the home is unoccupied. While the K10+ Pro can clean in quiet mode, any robot vacuum is still disruptive to the people occupying a home so cleaning is best performed when they are not there.
Conclusions
The SwitchBot K10+ Pro is proof that good things come in small packages. While the mapping process can be frustrating, the robot includes a wealth of features, vacuums very efficiently, and its small size allows it to clean areas that larger robotic vacuums can’t reach.
However, the K10+ Pro’s mop pad is really just a wet wipe. So, if you are looking for a robot that vacuums and truly mops, you should consider other cleaning robots.
