Minibot X5 Robot Vacuum Water Tank and Mop Pads Review

Minibot X5 Robot Vacuum Water Tank and Mop Pads Review

Buy it at Amazon: Minibot X5 Robot Vacuum Water Tank and Mop Pads [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Good for light mopping but needs close monitoring, wipes up mild sticky/damp messes, easy to clean.

If you bought the standard Minibot X5 robot vacuum package, it doesn’t come with this water tank, which I got because I have a lot of tile, cement and hardwood flooring that it could work well on. The tank comes with two microfiber mopping pads, one which is pre-installed. This tank replaces the standard dust bin on the vacuum, so you can only use one at a time. Note that the water doesn’t have a motor inside whereas the normal dustbin does. This means that while mopping, the robot vacuum will not have suction. It will simply wet (or dry) mop your floors and the front of the bin will collect anything kicked in by the main roller. Also, because it doesn’t have a motor, the tank is fully submersible and washable in water, unlike the standard dustbin. The pads are held on the tank by micro-Velcro strips under the dust collection opening and on the bottom of the tank.

The capacity of the water tank is 300 milliliters; about 10 oz or 1.25 cup. There's a gray stopper in the top left hand corner that's easy to opena nd seal for filling the tank. The opening isn't terribly large, but it's big enough you don't need a funnel to fill the tank. Then just insert the tank into the robot vacuum and run like normal.

Instead of suction, the pad slowly draws water out of the tank and mop your floors. It starts off a bit slow, but the entire mop pad eventually gets saturated. It only work on hardwood and tile, not carpeting or rugs. As the unit moves around it leaves a light wet water trail, like a snail. After about an hour the tank was nearly empty. When I removed it from the unit, there was quite a bit of dust and debris in the catch bin, though not as much as when running in normal vacuum mode. A lot of the contents were damp which meant shaking it out wasn't so effective, but you can just rinse out the bin in the sink. The mop pad wasn't as dirty as I thought it would get, but it was easy to wash/clean too.

Overall, the mop function did an ok job polishing the floors and picking up any dust and kitchen stickiness that might have been missed in the normal vacuum mode. However, since there wasn't any detergent and not a lot of pressure applied, it wasn't a super deep clean. I did like that it didn't use a lot of water and the floors dried fairly quickly (~15 mins) You do have to make sure you're around to remove the water tank in case it goes back to the charging base before its empty, otherwise water pool around it, which isn't a good combo. You also don't want it to get stuck somewhere and just leak water all over and you can't pre-fill the tank for a scheduled run, so it's not as easy to ""set and forget"" as the vacuum dustbin. Mopping performance was decent as an intermittent wet clean option.

Buy it at Amazon: Minibot X5 Robot Vacuum Water Tank and Mop Pads [Affiliate Link]