There are more miracles - Xiaomi Dreame Bot Z10 Pro robotic vacuum test

The new standard has been born, I don't know a better robotic vacuum cleaner at the moment.

I think you can also watch our video presentation on our YouTube channel! 😉

Introductory

I wasn’t one of the first to start robotic vacuuming. I waited a long time for the first one to arrive, which was affordable, yet smart at the same time.

The cleverness is, of course, relative, knowing the knowledge of today's machines, the Xiaomi roborock S3 4-50 years ago is no longer in a row, even though it was the benchmark for me at the time, the best I've measured any other machine.

You always have to be a benchmark, because although I confess that for every machine, be it a phone or a vacuum cleaner, you have to look to get the performance and knowledge you expect at a given price. If so, or we get more good, if less, we should not buy it.

But you still need a benchmark. We need a point of reference against which we can measure ‘smartness’ and against which we see progress.

For me, the previous benchmark was the Viomi V3. Then last time I was able to try out the Dreame Bot L10 Pro, which became quite an awesome machine, but even then, I didn’t feel like it was time to switch.

Now here’s the latest Dreame, the Bot Z10 Pro, and the thing is, the Viomi V3 is no longer there. I sold it. I loved it, but the new ETALON was born, for which I will measure everything for a while, and this article will be about this vacuum cleaner.

Packaging and accessories

Already with the Dreame Bot L10 Pro, I remarked that we get real premium packaging, now it is no different. The only change is that the box is much bigger and heavier, of course not by accident.

The cardboard is still black, with flashy pictures on it, it looks very good, so we can assign the first red dot to the Dreams.

As with the L10 Pro, there are few accessories in the box other than the manual, vacuum cleaner and dock. The reason for this is obviously savings. I have already noted in the case of the Bot L10 Pro that the machine provides very special knowledge much cheaper than expected, and this is no different in the case of the Z10 Pro. So saving is justified.

External

The Bot L10 Pro and Z10 Pro are exactly the same at first glance. In practice, this means that the “polishing” is the same, i.e. we get the effect called piano varnish, although here the color is not black, but rather gray. For this reason, we can also say to the machine that it creates an exclusive, high-end feeling.

Anyone who has seen a Xiaomi robot will not be surprised. At the top is the laser gun turret, with the physical button bar on one side and the hinged lid on the other side, under which we find the reset button, a small indicator LED showing the status of the wifi connection, the cleaning brush with the blade and of course the dust container .

There is only one type of tank that comes with the machine, and that is a huge dust container. That is, the manufacturer did not start with VIOMI, where we already got three different tanks for the V3. In the case of the Bot Z10 Pro, the water tank is placed on the belly of the machine, exactly in the MOP head. The water is dispensed by a tiny pump that delivers the liquid to the mop through 3 tiny holes.

The real curiosity is found at the front of the machine, where instead of the usual infrared sensor, we find a second laser sensor. This will play a major role, I will write more about it.

It is also interesting that from infrared it was only on the left side, it was not needed on the right side (seen from the front).

What has changed compared to the Bot L10 Pro?

Well, not much, but these are significant differences, and all, one by one, relate to a new feature.

The dust container has changed, in which we can find plus two outside the usual one opening. The shape of the MOP has changed, even because there are two unusual openings on the bottom of the machine that the MOP of the L10 Pro would have hung on. There is no other change, at least on the machine.

However, there is a dock that has become huge. Not only is it large, but it also got a sloping platform on which the vacuum cleaner rolls up after cleaning, and we also find a pair of two mysterious openings in the belly of the vacuum cleaner on the parking platform.

Looking at the dock from below, we find something even more interesting, from one of the openings here runs an air duct made of transparent plexiglass. The dock itself is not only big but heavy as well, so there’s a reason why the machine box was so big and heavy.

Abilities, novelties

I will plagiarize now, but let me defend myself that I will plagiarize myself. The reason is simple. In the case of the Dreame Bot L10 Pro, I’ve already described all the novelties about the machine itself, and reading it afterwards, I couldn’t rephrase it any better, so part of the next chapter was taken from that article, of course covering the differences.

The second part of the chapter, on the other hand, will be about a new feature related to the dock, and I promise it will hold some exciting news!

Let's get started!

If you’re not angry, I’ll skip the usual robotic vacuum cleaner stuff because there are some novelties to focus on, and that won’t be enough either!

Let’s start with the suction power, which is 4000 Pa for this vacuum cleaner. I don’t think it says much to many people, so you have to put this data into context to be understandable.

So, the suction power of robotic vacuum cleaners is the same as that of a normal crumb vacuum cleaner, which is not much. Still, the thing works, thanks to a lot of tricks. The operation of the round brush and cylinder brush at the bottom of the vacuum cleaner, the design of the air duct and dust container, and a lot more.

Manufacturers are trying to improve on the low suction power, of course. From the initial 400 Pa we first got to 1000, then came the 2000 machines, and the current peak machines are approaching 3000 Pa.

The Viomi S3, which is a very good vacuum cleaner is 2600 Pa, and the newer, more expensive Viomi S9 is 2700 Pa.

And then here’s the Dreame that kicked the door on the vacuum cleaner manufacturers, and not that it jumped to 3000 Pa, but immediately opened with 4000 Pa suction. This is then double the performance of an average mid-range machine.

Next up is the second point, the second innovation we find at the cylinder brush! I mentioned above the blade used to cut long, curled hairs or dog hair from the brush. Well, you may not really need that!

The manufacturer has figured out that he puts small plastic teeth on the part under the brush, which cut and remove hair and hair from the brush during rotation, thus improving the efficiency of the machine. It’s a tiny, penny trick, but if it comes in, a lot of people will bless the designer’s brain and ingenuity!

Well, these two points can already make the machine desirable for a target group. No, I am not thinking of the group of long-haired people, but of those who e.g. they keep a dog.

I am often asked which robot I recommend for a canine household. So far, I’ve just hummed and said, well, the strongest thing is to suck the hair off the carpet, too. Well, from now on I can safely say that the Dreame Bot L10 Pro will be a good choice!

The next innovation is even more interesting, but to understand why, I need to tell you a little bit first.

Orienteering is very important for robots. Initially, manufacturers solved this with infrared sensors and collision sensors. The vacuum cleaners didn’t have a “brain” at the time, they didn’t plan a route, they went until they met a wall or a chair leg.

Manufacturers have tried to improve sensing capabilities. The cameras came, then LIDAR. I don’t pinch the former for my part, and when asked why, I jokingly answer that because they see under my skirt.

I'm funny, but it's not a joke at all. Specifically, the skirt does, I don’t wear it as a man, I’m not Scottish either, so…

Well, that's not the point. Many times I get a question about whether the little Chinese aren’t spying and I don’t feel problematic that the floor plan of my apartment might be stored on a Chinese server. Well, in short, my answer is no! Who cares? Which one from China is interested in the floor plan of my apartment?

However, there is a limit to the private sector that no manufacturer will allow me to cross. I will not let a camera into the apartment. Nothing! Don’t have a camera on your TV, and don’t have a camera on my vacuum cleaner, even if it’s not called a camera but an opto sensor, an optical sensor, or whatever.

These are cameras, machines that see them, and by default they are used to recognize objects, but if a person is looking at a picture of a vacuum cleaner, they certainly won’t look to see what funny slippers the figure has, but a thousand other things.

Today, robotic vacuum cleaners, at least some of the better ones, are equipped with a laser sensor. It rotates on top of the machines. A laser goes out, the reflected light is received by a single sensor, and the vacuum cleaner already “sees”. Detects objects, table legs, walls. It calculates the distance from the object and the wall, and uses it to plan a route in real time. Kingdom, but there is a small bump!

And this bump is that our apartment is not a museum, not a static something where all the objects are always in the same place. Sometimes staying there under the bed or even in the middle of the room is a child’s play. We're not putting on our slippers. We push the chair further. We forget to roll up the extension cord, we forget to put away the spreader and I could list more.

Smooth laser-sensing vacuum cleaners can do two things. Either they ignore the obstacle and go through it, or if it is so high that they hit it, they get out. In the latter case, there is nothing wrong, but in the former there is more.

If the machine crosses the obstacle, a lot can happen. For example, he winds up the extension cord, hangs on the spreader tube foot, sucks up the child’s toy, disassembles the dog shit in the apartment. And what have manufacturers done to avoid this? Well, exactly what I didn’t desire was a camera mounted on the front of their latest vacuum cleaners.

And after a lot of text, we just got to what we found at the beginning of the Dreame Bot L10 Pro! Well, not a camera, but something much better, a second laser sensor, but not just any, but something like what we find on iPhones, for example.

This laser illuminates and scans the objects in two directions, and “sees” a 3D image of them, and not only sees, but better recognizes what has been in front of it. So you will not identify the book left on the carpet as a threshold, and you will certainly have a good chance of seeing and recognizing the heaped end product made by our dog.

There is another novelty that is not really a novelty, we can only meet them for the first time in a cheaper robot. I mention them together because their operation is partly related. So it’s all about the carpet detection and the pump in the mop tank!

The former is good for two things. One is that it detects if you get stuck on a carpet, in which case it automatically increases the suction power (if you haven’t used the machine at maximum) to suck the dirt out of the carpet fibers as well. The other is to turn off the mop when the carpet is detected.

The latter requires a pump!

So, most vacuum cleaners transfer water to the MOP using gravity. That is, if there is water in the tank, it will flow out if you have parquet, if you follow, and even if you carpet vacuuming just the machine. Now, we can see that it doesn't make much sense to wash the carpet. For this, it is often suggested to drag a virtual wall on the map to where the carpet is.

There are two problems with the virtual wall. One is that beef is hard to draw exactly where the carpet is, the other is that the carpets are usually not nailed down, so sometimes they are sometimes moved away and the drawn wall is already worth nothing.

If, on the other hand, you have a pump and the machine detects the carpet, you can also do so by turning off the pump so you don’t wash the carpet. Or just a little bit, because there's water left on the MOP, we don't know what to do with it.

The description of the vacuum cleaner has lasted, Now things can come with the new capability, the dock!

It is slowly becoming commonplace for new, premium machines to ensure that we can forget about the only hated operation, emptying the dust container. In a larger apartment, especially where there are children and pets, the robot's dust container must be emptied after each cleaning.

This loses a bit of the comfort provided by the robot, which means that it is enough to set up the machine and cleans the apartment every day after we go to work. More precisely, this can be done, but the tank must be emptied every day. How good it would be if you didn’t have to deal with that either!

The thought followed, and the bagged dockers were born!

They’re not really just docks, they’re vacuum cleaners in themselves, they just don’t have a wheel on them and you can’t connect a hose to them. However, they have everything you need for vacuuming, such as an engine, turbine, and dust bag.

And what does it take? Surely many have figured it out already. At the end of the cleaning, we need to suck the dust from the dust container of our parked robot into the dust bag. This saves the emptying of the dust container, as the bag can hold roughly 10-15 containers of powder.

So far, this is not special, at least in the premium segment. However, Dreame’s engineers have also thrown in an innovation here that is surprising at first, yet extremely reasonable.

And here we can return to the two openings on the dust container, the belly of the vacuum cleaner and the dock.

With the docking machines I've had so far, there was only one opening for sucking out the dust, and at first we might think that was enough. Why more? Well, we will be partly right, as it works well for the VIOMI S9 as well.

However, if you look at the pictures on the Dreame Z10 Pro box, the tantrum immediately drops as to why the two slots are better, and that makes the Dreame dock brilliant.

Well, the air is blown in one opening and sucked out in the other. In other words, they do not create a vacuum in the dust container, but on the contrary, an overpressure, which makes it much easier and much more efficient to remove the accumulated dust on the suction side.

Although, I should write this for experience, but I will insert here that this solution is not only more effective, but also much quieter.

Experiences

Looking at the capabilities of the Dreame Z10 Pro, knowing its knowledge, an idea came to me. Xiaomi may have gathered the best robotic vacuum engineers from her companies, gathered all their experience so far, and released the coworker to do the best Xiaomi vacuum cleaner, but in a way that all complaints so far must be considered and remedied!

It is no exaggeration to believe this!

Let's start with the software!

The Dreame program is, of course, installed under the Xiaomi Smart Home application. This requires a fresh version that knows the machine, so we need to make sure we have the updates installed. Important information is that this software, unlike many competitors, already handles dark mode without error, so every little detail is displayed properly even when we use our phone in dark mode.

We love the Xiaomi Mi Home app, easy to use, user friendly. The installation of the vacuum cleaner is also simple, basically we just need to turn it on, start the program, it will detect and set it up. We give you what your name should be, we physically determine which room you are in, and then you can start working.

If the software does not recognize it, you need the + sign in the upper right corner, by clicking on it and then selecting it you can add the vacuum cleaners to the system.

We don’t find insane big differences in the software itself. You can choose four levels for suction strength, three for mopping. We can use timing, we can store 3 maps (I’ll come back to that later), there’s a virtual wall, and there’s also a no go zone, meaning we can exclude complete rooms or just areas from cleaning.

So, we can say it's normal. However, a bug in the software that has ripped my hair off every Xiaomi vacuum cleaner so far has been fixed. And this is the placement of virtual walls.

The problem is that the software can't zoom in on the map enough to drag the virtual wall to where I want it. However, the Dreame software creates a tiny magnifying glass when you move the end of the wall so you can see the endpoint in a big way, you can pinpoint the location of the virtual wall.

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but anyone who has tried to set up a virtual wall knows that with just one operation, it can take 10-20 minutes. Irritating!

Another good news is that automatic location recognition has also been damn good. After the first vacuuming, the birth of the first map, it is appropriate to set on the map where the living room, where the kitchen, etc. This is so that we can later issue cleaning instructions for some rooms as well, so we can say that all we have to do now is vacuum the kitchen.

This is a house where each room is separated from the other by a door is not a problem. However, where there are no doors, such as our American kitchen, robots treat the larger space as a space.

We have two such points where all vacuum cleaners have failed so far. The kitchen, which is somewhat separated from the living room, and the passage between the living room and the hall, which is large, and of course there is no door.

Well, at these locations, the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro (and of course the Bot L10 Pro as well) was the first to be able to recognize how long the living room lasted and where the kitchen or hallway started.

Finally, the thing that is most interesting to me about map management.

The tried-and-tested vacuum cleaners that have visited me so far were able to find out properly one by one, starting from the kaptafa, in this case the dock. At such times, there was never a problem, they went to the designated room, put them back, or cleaned the whole apartment if needed.

However, they were lost. They got stuck in a carpet, the wheel spun, but the vacuum cleaner couldn’t move, from that it was already completely different on the map than in reality, and it got lost forever. The only way to fix it was to stop it, take it back to the dock, and start cleaning again.

Even worse, in some cases, from the fact that the machine starts cleaning in the wrong place, it starts drawing a new map, overwriting the old, good map. That's when I got a brain problem.

And what did the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro do compared to that?

I grabbed it, lifted it off the dock by hand and put it down in the other room. I started the cleaning. The machine said it was now refining the position. After about 1 minute of rotation, he announced that the positioning was ready, and he appeared on the map on the phone with centimeter accuracy at the new location where I put it down.

Well, I haven't seen anything like this before. I guess from the position of the furniture he figured out where it is, so I don’t rule out that it could be confusing, but to be able to figure out where the apartment is physically, it’s new to me.

By the way, not only in this case, but at the beginning of every vacuuming, as you start from the dock, make a check to make sure you are where you need to be.

Let's go on!

The capabilities of the vacuum cleaner, object recognition and orientation are just like in the case of the L10 Pro, ie they are almost perfect. For this reason, here too, I take over the experiences described from the previous article, culminating in a few essential sentences.

Let’s start with mopping, which is perhaps the weakest of the abilities.

We say at the beginning it is worth clarifying that a robotic vacuum cleaner that can mop does not exist. Manufacturers are trying to improve the effectiveness of wiping in one way or another, but unfortunately they are not getting much.

The Z10 Pro doesn't even wash, it just wipes. Unfortunately, the water tank is quite small, and this is only minimally improved by the fact that water consumption is extremely economical. In larger apartments, especially when set to plenty of water, wiping the tank capacity will not be enough.

Here I would return to the fact that the machine can “only” store three maps instead of the usual 5 lately. This is because there is simply no need for more maps.

Most vacuum cleaners are not able to turn off the wiping on the carpets, they also get out of the water. The solution is to create a map that declares, for example, carpets as no go zones. Well, with the Dreame Z10 Pro, this is not necessary, as it detects the carpet, maximizes the suction power on the carpets and also turns off the water.

The latter ability again only improves water conservation, but it can’t do a miracle either.

Well, as I have already written, the suction power can be set in four steps, the strongest is not much louder than the maximum for my Viomi V3, even though it is only 2600 Pa, that's 4000. I'd be happy to say that 4000 Pa is enough for everything, but unfortunately not. Even with such force, some dirt remains in the carpet, at least if it has a longer strand than ours.

It would be difficult to measure whether this residue is more than in the case of Viomi, but probably not, as it is better at heart.

I couldn’t try long hair and vacuuming dog hair. My couple has long hair, but for some reason it only falls in the bathroom. We don’t have a dog, so I couldn’t do either the fur or the dog poop test, the soul didn’t get me to bring in a pile from the square. But everything has a limit…

On the other hand, in the meantime, I found a warped figure on the net who was demoting the dog poop with Nutella, plus with complete success, because the vacuum cleaner saw and avoided the pile. So the dog dog test is okay too, although I didn't do that.

At the same time, I tried object recognition with three things. With a pile of books, a phone charger and an extension cord, and the foot of our expander. The latter, which I especially hate, so far all of our vacuum cleaners have tried to go through it, and they’ve all come up.

So, the result is mixed. Definitely better than any machine I’ve ever had, but there’s still something to learn.

He always avoided the thicker cord of the extension cord, there were none of the 5 times he went through it. The phone charger cable remained intact four times out of the 5 tests. At the last one, however, the roller brush was wound up, not because it was not “seen” by the machine, but because it did not come out in a large enough arc, and the round brush got stuck in the end of the cable, pulled it under the machine.

The pile of books (2-3 thinner) didn't catch on either. The question here for me was whether he sees books stacked at a threshold as an obstacle to be overcome or avoided. The threshold should be seen as a threshold, you have to go through it, but for books, this may not be a good idea, especially if the MOP is also in use.

So, the book test is also ticked.

So object recognition works visibly. Of course, I can’t tell if the objects were recognized correctly by the machine, but I’m sure it precisely avoided what had to be avoided.

What was even more surprising was how well the Bot L10 Pro handled when the environment changed during cleaning.

With the vacuum cleaners I have had so far, I observed that the apartment was treated as a static, unchanging area. If the blind was retracted during the first cleanup, i.e. crawl, it was viewed as a wall, and even though I pulled it out for the next cleanup, no attempt was made to clean up the location of the “wall” because of the previous map.

I did the same way last year when we moved. There were boxes in random places in the apartment. Sometimes only for 1-2 days, sometimes longer. Sometimes the box was included in the mapped apartment, and then it was no longer there for the next cleaning, the vacuum cleaner was neatly removed, as if nothing had changed.

Well, that’s not how it works with the Dreame Bot L10 Pro. If I put a pile of books in the middle of the room during the cleaning, it got out nicely, but it didn’t leave a definitive mark on the map.

If I took the pile again and the vacuum cleaner cleaned its place nicely afterwards. Of course, this probably also requires you to “notice” the books are no longer there, but the point is not. The point is that it treats the environment as visibly dynamic, which can certainly change, even during cleaning.

Which didn’t show up during the L10 Pro test, but now it is that the Dreame software divides the larger rooms into zones quite differently than the machines I’ve had before. Sure, there were some that weren’t able to zoning large areas, but those that did, they usually simply bisected the rooms.

The laser sensor tells the machine how far the opposite wall is, so a relatively simple solution, if the room is large, cleans one half first and then the other.

Dreame machines do not work this way, they also take into account where there are more and where there are fewer obstacles (eg chairs, sofas, etc.). It is also interesting that the machines known so far went from room to room, even if no cleaning area was designated, the whole apartment had to be vacuumed.

Well, the Bot Z10 Pro (and of course the L10 Pro too) doesn’t care where one room starts, where the other ends. If it makes more sense because of the cleaning route, the area is merged.

It’s also interesting how accurately the machine can calculate where it will fit and where it won’t.

Older vacuum cleaners sometimes went into narrower areas and then never came up again. The Dreame Z10 Pro does not make such an error. It moves amazingly precisely, which is certainly due to the dual laser sensor. The first of which takes a real-time 3D image of the objects in front of the vacuum cleaner, which, of course, are also identified by artificial intelligence.

Summary

I didn’t cover a lot of things in the article. For things like wiping, how to vacuum, whether to fall down the stairs, and such. I didn’t cover them because these basic things are essentially perfect, there’s not much to look at them.

The suction force of 4000 Pa is good, object recognition is also good, the pumped water tank is also to be welcomed, although there are so many negatives in this connection that tap water should be avoided as much as possible so that the tiny pump does not calcify.

Navigation, object recognition, dynamic route planning that handles and responds to changes in the environment in real time are not only good, but have taken the machine (and the little salt, the Bot L10 Pro) to the next level.

However, in the case of the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro, there is already a dust bag dock with its blower, exhaust system, which is why for me, the automatic dust container emptying has also taken a step forward in development.

As I described in the introduction, and I referred to it several times in the article, the Dreame Bot L10 Pro was also a great machine, but despite all its knowledge and ability, I didn’t feel like I had to replace my VIOMI V3. Back then, I thought I would wait at least another generation. Of course, I didn’t know I had to wait barely two months for the next generation.

And the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro ran in. I already know the capabilities of the vacuum cleaner, the benefits of the dual laser unit, the incredible and exaggerated knowledge of fantastic artificial intelligence because of the L10 Pro. However, I also got the imaginative and efficient dust bag dock for this, and these innovations pushed me to see the point of replacement.

So the VIOMI V3 went, and here’s the new ETALON, the new benchmark, the best robotic vacuum cleaner I know, the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro.

In the end, the price of a vacuum cleaner. Now comes the black soup. Well, it’s not so black, it just seems like it at first, but as I say, it’s all just a matter of comparison.

So, you have to pay 151 thousand forints for the machine in the introductory campaign. That's a lot, but… If we look at the famously cheap VIOMI, the VIOMI S9 UV with similar capabilities (but I think less good) for 195 thousand forints, or if we look at the docked iRobot, the Roomba i7 + 280 thousand HUF, or ECOVACS Deboot T9 + 336 thousand HUF, or Samsung's self-emptying cheapness 220 thousand HUF, then you can already understand what it means that it is a matter of all comparisons.

So far, we knew that if someone wanted the premium category, the best, they had to reach deep into their pockets, it just didn’t matter how deep. And in the case of the Dreame vacuum cleaner, this depth is not so deep, moreover, I claim that perhaps the best of the machines listed, equipped with the most serious knowledge, is the Dreame Bot Z10 Pro.

Okay, if you liked it, you have to do the following. First, click on the link at the end of the article. On the page that opens, click on Get coupons below the price to request the coupons. You get up to all three and then you automatically get the best discount on the cart.

If you are done with this, you can come to the Buy Now button, then on the page that opens, copy the OURDREAME coupon code into the Promo Code field and press the Apply button. This way you get a double discount, and that's how you get the above-mentioned price of 151 thousand forints.

It is important information that the machine is delivered from a Polish warehouse, and the price also includes VAT, so on the one hand, if we buy it, we can use it within a week, on the other hand, there are no additional costs or complications.

The introductory action usually only lasts 2-3 days, so you won’t have much time to think, but like I said, if you want the best, there’s really nothing to think about.

Buy here:

Dreame Bot Z10 Pro self-emptying robot vacuum cleaner

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