Roborock Q Revo Pro in-home review

A robot vacuum is supposed to, well, vacuum. So when it barely picks up a thing, what gives? And is this a big red flag or is Q Revo Pro misunderstood?

The new Roborock Q Revo Pro is one of Roborock’s newest floor bots. But what makes this one worth the money? And what differentiates it from the basic Q Revo model? In my hands-on in-home review I’m going to put it to the test. I’ll try it out on day-to-day cleaning and put it through some specialized cleaning tests to see if it’s capable. I’ll wrap up this review with the pros and cons and let you know if I think I can recommend this robot to you.

What you get

Q Revo Pro is a robot vacuum-mop combo that will automatically vacuum and mop your floors. It comes with a special self cleaning and maintenance dock that will not only empty the robot’s onboard dustbin, but it will refill the onboard water tank with fresh clean water. When a full cleaning cycle is over it will even wash and dry the mopping pads with warm water and warm air. And if it detects your mopping pads are especially dirty it will give them an extra clean.

You may have noticed robot vacuum cleaners are climbing in price. Why? Mainly because every year since I’ve been reviewing them, the manufacturers are adding more and better technologies. With high suction power, sophisticated sensors, and advanced chips for things like dirt or poop detection, plus more self cleaning and automation abilities, all that advanced tech can really drive up the price.

So what’s a person to do if you don’t want to spend up to $2,000 on a floor cleaning bot? If you don’t have the need for all of those fancy technologies and you can adjust your expectations to be more silver or bronze medal instead of gold medal, you might find you’re able to get a really great floor bot at a more reasonable cost.

Surprisingly, $1,000 US/$1,499 CAD has been the midrange price point for quite a while and because tech progresses quickly year over year, I expect these vacuums to perform as well or perhaps even better than the flagships of yesteryear. Roborock has certainly proved that in the past as I gave their Roborock Q Revo a full five stars for being an exceptional vacuum despite its lack of fancy technologies. Is the Roborock Q Revo Pro worth the extra $100 over the non-Pro model?

Watch my full hands on video review + cleaning tests

What makes it Pro?

The Roborock Q Revo Pro is one of several new Roborock vacuums that expands on the mostly midrange-focused ‘Revo’ sub-brand. So what separates the “Pro” model from the original Q Revo?

Increased Suction Power

The Q Revo Pro has a higher suction power of 7,000Pa which is 1,500Pa more than the Q Revo. That modest increase technically makes the Q Revo Pro more powerful than last year’s Roborock S7 Max Ultra, which Roborock now sells for $1,099 USD.

FlexiArm Design Mop

During a mopping session, the Q Revo Pro performs a cool maneuver when it mops alongside a wall or approaches a corner. The right spinning mop extends out from the body of the robot, touching the wall and more effectively mopping baseboards and under toekicks, which saves a lot of effort in mopping difficult spots.

Intelligent Dirt Detection

Many floor robots tend to carry out their mopping orders the same way they would for vacuuming. The problem is mops can dirty themselves really quick depending on how messy your floors are. Rather than configuring the robot to take frequent washing trips, the Roborock Q Revo Pro can use Intelligent Dirt Detection.

This works both on your floors, and on the mopping pads themselves. The robot can recognize how dirty it’s spinning mop pads are and head back to the base station for mop washing when necessary.

And using the same technology if it happens to detect a lot of dirt on your floors, the Q Revo Pro can also automatically re-mop any dirty spots that the bot may not have fully scrubbed after a single pass. You do need to turn this feature on inside the app for it to take effect.

Cleaning tests

Let’s get to what you all want to see and that’s the cleaning tests. I run all my robots through the same set of cleaning pieces. I will run it around the house for a week or so just to see how it does with day-to-day cleaning. Then I put it through a series of more vigourous tests. I spill dry things like cornmeal, rice and cracker crumbs on both carpet and hard floors. For the mop, I will create wet spills on the floor and let some dry to test the mop’s scouring power.

With Q Revo Pro I found it was fine for light day-to-day vacuuming, but once I started to give it more challenging tasks, this robot seemed to lose it, and I was confused…
Let me back up. It has actually been an excellent mop. I ran it through a series of mopping tests and it was extremely good at getting targeted spills as well as doing day-to-day wiping of the floor.

Watch my full video review linked above to see the robot in action.

Vacuum not working?

When it came to the vacuuming however the performance seemed abysmal.

I ran it through my regular series of cleaning tests and was shocked when it barely picked up anything. It was almost like the vacuum had zero suction power. I was so disappointed in the performance I decided to run the test again, this time with the vacuum at maximum suction power. After a couple of minutes it was very clear the vacuum just couldn’t cut it. So is this the end of it? Not yet…

Dustbin not auto-emptying

Puzzled about why such an advanced vacuum would be struggling so much I decided to check the onboard dustbin. Despite the fact that I’ve only been running it for about five minutes, I was surprised to find the dust bin was crammed so full there was absolutely no room for any more dust or dirt inside. This is surprising because the robot is supposed to manage emptying of its onboard dustbin itself and most robots will empty it after every cleaning run. It appeared to me that it had been running all week in my house but never emptied itself once. But since it was crammed so full it was likely impeding the suction a lot.

With the dustbin clear, I decided to re-run all the tests again. This time the performance improved from capturing only about 40 or 50% of debris up to about 60 or 70%. I was still pretty unhappy with the performance, but it turns out that might just be a first pass. I let the robot carry on cleaning, and when it was finished I’d say it had gobbled up about 99% of the debris. After that cleaning session it also emptied the dustbin.

Not sure if this was a one-off I decided to re-run all my tests for a third time and capture it on timelapse video… you can see the sorry state I left my floor in.. and while the Q Revo Pro looks like it’s missing stuff at first, if you wait until the end, you can see it gets everything eventually. Again, about 95-99% of all debris on the floors was gone.

What is still missing?

Like the original Revo, the Roborock Q Revo Pro still lacks the high-speed sonic mopping feature found in a higher-end Roborock, but I found the dual spinning mop configuration to function just fine. Plus, the added “Pro” mopping features more than make up for this missing feature.

Also missing; the small corner brush on the robot does not have the ability to extend and reach like the mopping pad does. That would be a cool way to improve the vacuuming and edge vacuuming prowess.

But if there is one reminder that the Roborock Q Revo Pro is still in the past, it is its use of a single roller brush. Personally, I did not find that an issue, but if your room requires a lot of pet hair cleaning, you might like the anti-tangle nature of the DuoRoller brushes found in the S8 series and the expensive Q Revo Master.

Q Revo Key Features

All the things I loved about the original Q Revo remain true with the Roborock Q Revo Pro.

The dock has the essential dirty/clean water tanks and it boasts a sleek design that shouldn’t offend.

Obstacle avoidance is phenomenal thanks to PreciSense LiDAR Navigation. The Roborock app is polished to a tee offering great mapping and flexible scheduling features. If you have a lot of carpeted areas, the Q Revo Pro can automatically lift the mopping pads when it approaches them to prevent soaking.

Overall Thoughts: Roborock Q Revo Pro

Overall, I went from shocked to really happy with this vacuum review. Let’s go over the pros and cons…

On the pro side, it’s a fantastic mop, with spinning scrubbing pads, and that reaching mop really does work at edge and overhang cleaning, and if you leave it to its vacuuming it finishes the job leaving floors really clean. It’s a nice looking station, and reasonably compact, given what’s going on. It empties, and washes and dries itself so there’s very little maintenance for you. It avoids tangles and obstacles well and never got stuck. The battery lets me clean the whole house, and it’s got adjustable suction and waterflow too.

Downsides?

It’s important to understand how this robot works; it does have less suction than some other premium level bots, and that shows in its first cleaning passes. It seems to do a first and then second pass over an area so if it seems like it’s not picking up everything after it rolls over it the first time, let it finish the job before you judge. I also wasn’t able to figure out why the onboard dustbin wasn’t emptying itself after my first few days of tests. But since it seemed to resolve itself, that’s good. I’ll just keep an eye on things.

Despite getting off on the wrong foot with this robot, I found that once I gave it a chance and understood it, it’s a capable and thorough floor cleaning bot and I can recommend it for you.

Roborock Q Revo Pro sells for about $1,499 CAD or $999 USD and you can get it from Roborock or Amazon, and if you’re not sure about this robot for your home, Roborock has plenty of other options and I’ve reviewed many of them.

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