Roborock Saros 20 Flow Review: Hope You Like Spending Money

Last month, Roborock released the Saros 20 Flow. It’s a hideously expensive $1,700 robot vacuum that comes with boastful claims about its powerful suction, slim build, and self-maintaining features. And if everything about that appears to describe every other high-end robot vacuum you’ve read about lately, that’s because it often does. The Saros 20 Flow is a redux of the Saros 20 with one key improvement: it uses a roller mop instead of a pair of spinning pads. In my experience, roller mops are just better at handling stuck-on crud and heavier liquid messes, and that’s proven true during my testing of the 20 Flow over the last week. That comes with a bit of a compromise, as the 20 Flow stands 3.5 inches tall, compared to its predecessor’s 3.13 inches. It’s about three-quarters of an inch taller if you factor in its LiDAR sensor disc, though that lowers into its body as needed to fit under short furniture. The two floor bots look noticeably different as a result of these changes but otherwise are nearly identical when you pull them up in Roborock’s specs comparison tool. In many areas, the Saros 20 Flow is one of the best robot vacuums I’ve used. It’s great at cleaning hair and dirt out of carpet, it mops with the best of them, it gets around without any major issues, and its dock is mercifully quiet when emptying the robovac’s dustbin. It also supports local control via the Roborock app when the internet goes down. Nevertheless, I’m not convinced most people should bother siphoning off most of the cost of a 14-inch MacBook Pro from their bank accounts to own one. Roborock Saros 20 Flow A great mopping, sweeping robovac that lacks many of the issues I have with the category, except for its price. Excellent vacuum and mop performance Quiet self-emptying dock Washes its own mop Can climb short steps Offline control supported So, so expensive Buggy zone cleaning Noisy when vacuuming Won’t clean the area around its dock Might eat your cables Like other robovacs, but better It’s difficult to discern the Saros 20 Flow from some competing products, particularly the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller, which has a nearly identical set of features, down to the roller mop and little robotic legs for boosting it over up to 1.77-inch transitions. The Aqua10 is a bit taller, at nearly four inches with its LiDAR disc retracted. And it only offers 30,000Pa suction, whereas the Saros 20 Flow matches its predecessor at 36,000Pa. (Don’t take those numbers too seriously—they’re among the highest you’ll find in a robovac, but even assuming both companies are measuring the same way, suction isn’t everything.) © Wes Davis / Gizmodo I had a nicer time setting up the Saros 20 Flow than I’ve had with many of its peers, which often come with a ton of trash to throw away, like foam inserts in crevices and plastic that you have to peel off the robot and the dock itself. The 20 Flow came with a bit of that—the robot and its dock were packed in bags and thick molded pulp, with a bit of tape holding the dock’s water tanks in place. But once I’d dealt with all that, I just plugged the dock in, snapped a little ramp onto the front, filled the water tanks, and slid the bot into its lower cavity. I then added the device to the Roborock app, which just involved holding down the home and power buttons on top of the robot to get it into pairing mode, tapping the “+” button in the upper right corner of the app’s home screen, scanning a QR code under a cover on top of the device, and entering my Wi-Fi information to get it on the network. Then the app prompted me to start mapping. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo I did this initial run—which took eight minutes for about 450 square feet—and most of my targeted testing at my partner’s house. After mapping, I performed the usual ritual of adjusting the map by dividing and combining and renaming rooms that the app tried to automatically separate and identify. I appreciate the effort, but the Roborock app was about as good as any other robovac software at this—which is to say, it only got about half of it right and otherwise did things like combining the hallway and bathroom into one big, weirdly shaped bathroom. © Screenshots by Wes Davis / Gizmodo In the Roborock app, the Saros 20 Flow follows most of the conventions of other robovac apps from Dreame, Ecovacs, and Anker. You start on a main screen with a map and controls that allow you to start a job and set the parameters of your clean. For example, you could instruct the device to vacuum two rooms but mop only one. As with most robot vacuums, there is no mop-only option. You can set the 20 Flow on your whole home, specify particular rooms or just custom portions of your home (i.e., “zones” that you define by drawing a rectangle on the map where you want it to work), or carry out routine cleanings you define in the app. Pop into the robot’s settings, and you’ll be able to tweak things like whether it cleans carpets in separate passes from hard floors, does it all at once, or ignores carpeted areas entirely. You can turn its sensor cluster on or off and control movements such as its swinging side brush and sliding mop roller. It uses AI for object detection, and you can turn that off as well. Local, internet-free control (for once) I was surprised to find that the Saros 20 Flow can be fully controlled (and its settings tweaked) using its app even when I disconnected my router from the internet. That’s very unusual and great if you’re security- or privacy-conscious and have the know-how to keep a device on your network but closed off from the wider internet. All of the other robovacs I’ve tested, apart from the Matic, require an active internet connection if you want to do anything at all in their dedicated apps. Shut off the internet, and the apps basically shrug and say they can’t find your robot. Some floor bots, such as the Roborock Qrevo 2 Pro and Eufy Omni E35, do support the universal smart home protocol Matter and can be connected to third-party platforms like Apple Home or Google Home. The Saros 20 Flow also has this support. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo In both theory and practice—for the bots I’ve tested in Apple Home, anyway—that means you can take advantage of local control through your smart home app when your internet is out, but you won’t be able to do much more than send the robot to clean specific rooms or return it to its dock, nor will you get notifications when said dock is out of clean water. That’s good enough for daily use, but Roborock still deserves some praise for enabling local control in its own app. Every robot vacuum maker should, and the vast majority simply do not. Great performance, but there are bugs The Saros 20 Flow doesn’t suffer from many of the same issues that have plagued pricey robovacs I’ve tested in the past. It didn’t dump out dirt and dust when transitioning between floor types like the Ecovacs Deebot X12 Omnicyclone, nor poop out balled-up hair like the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller, and I never found it inexplicably scouring one area for too long or repeatedly bumping the same spot on a wall the way the Dreame X60 Max Ultra Complete (I swear, these names) did. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo Rugs and hard flooring mostly looked meticulously swept and vacuumed (including in corners, where the Roborock’s side brush stretched out to sweep) where the Saros 20 Flow went, although it didn’t always pick up flat objects like scraps of paper. It also left floors spic and span where it mopped, and its mop even cleaned up part of a mysterious black stripe on a faux-wood laminate floor—perhaps a bit of shoe rubber rubbed off by a child?—that I’d purposefully avoided manually removing to see if any robot vacuums could actually deal with it. The 20 Flow likewise excelled at targeted tests. It got more dumped-out rice than any other vacuum I’ve run my usual rice-collecting test on. I only found five grains that it had flung away with its side brush and not managed to collect; the Omni E35 came in at 10 grains, while others I’ve tested have left too many to bother counting. And it did just as well as the Roomba Max 775, Matic, and Omni E35 at clearing ketchup I’d squirted on the floor, without leaving behind a sticky residue like every mop pad-equipped bot I’ve tested, or depositing the stuff elsewhere, as the Eufy Omni E28 did. The Saros 20 Flow is also pretty good at navigation and object avoidance, and it never got stuck or slammed into walls or furniture during testing, but it wasn’t without issues. It tended to roll over cables and either suck them up or drag them across the floor. And it had a hard time finding its dock in my partner’s house, where the only open space left it with just two to three feet of clearance. It always got there eventually but sometimes took as long as 12 minutes to figure out the right approach angle. In fairness, Roborock recommends leaving four feet of space in front of the dock, which is pretty standard for robot vacuums, but I tested it anyway, because not everyone has a room with such generous space. So far, only the Matic has handled that same spot without issue. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo Battery life and cleaning time were about on par with those of Roborock’s Qrevo 2 Pro, which I tested over the summer. The 20 Flow vacuumed then mopped my 750-square-foot apartment in just over two hours, ending the job with 48% of its battery remaining. The Qrevo 2 Pro did the same job in exactly two hours with 52% remaining. Other robots I’ve timed with the same conditions took longer: the Roomba Max 775 ended the job with 36% battery after about two-and-a-half hours, and the Narwal Freo Z10 Turbo took two hours and 49 minutes to finish with 40% battery. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo The Saros 20 Flow is a bit loud when it’s vacuuming, especially on carpets, where it boosts its suction to compensate and is raucous enough that you’d have to raise your voice to talk over it. Most similar bots I’ve tested are quieter—sometimes very much so. The Ecovacs Deebot X12 OmniCyclone, for instance, is so quiet that I sometimes found myself checking to make sure it was actually doing something when I tested it. The 20 Flow’s noise while mopping is about the same as that of other roller mop models I’ve tested, which is to say that you can hear its roller mop motor turning but can talk over it just fine. What does make up for the Roborock’s noise is how quiet its auto-emptying dock is compared to those of other robot vacuums. In fact, when emptying the 20 Flow’s dustbin, it’s among the quietest docks that I’ve ever tested, even quieter than that of the Omni E35. However, in an otherwise silent room, I found the fan that dries the Saros 20 Flow’s mop roller uncomfortable to listen to after a while, though I didn’t realize that until the fan stopped and sudden relief washed over me. I’m not sure why I disliked the noise so much; maybe it was just humming at a frequency my ears aren’t used to. Thankfully, you can tweak how noisy it is by switching on “Eco” drying mode in the dock’s settings menu. Eco drying takes longer and isn’t ideal in a humid environment, but it’s nearly inaudible. © Wes Davis / Gizmodo I had only one truly big annoyance with the Saros 20 Flow’s cleaning abilities. As with most other robot vacuums, you can send Roborock’s device to clean specific areas of a room that you define by drawing a rectangle on the app’s map. But for some reason, the Saros just refused to vacuum rugs in this mode. It would sweep and mop hard floors within the zone but ignore carpeted areas, and when I drew the rectangle entirely inside of a rug, it would leave its dock, announce “cleaning path abnormal” from its speaker, and re-dock. I asked Roborock about this behavior and will update this review when it responds. Great robovac, but who cares when it’s $1,700? The Roborock Saros 20 Flow is just about as good as multifunction sweeping and mopping disc-shaped robovacs get. It did an excellent job pulling dirt, hair, and dust out of my carpets, never tried to eat clothing, and didn’t smack into any furniture or walls. And despite not having manually defined carpeted areas, I never caught it mopping my rugs. Like the Saros 20 it follows, it’s a great all-around floor bot. The 20 Flow isn’t perfect, though. There was that whole thing where it wouldn’t touch carpets inside custom zones. It’s also fairly noisy when vacuuming, which I’m willing to forgive given its overall good performance, but it might bother folks who are especially sensitive to sound. Those issues are small potatoes compared to the problems I’ve experienced with most other similar robot vacuums, though. The real problem is that $1,700 price tag. Look, I like the idea of not having to mop or vacuum my own floors as much as the next person, but you can get something this good for a lot less money elsewhere. Roborock’s own Qrevo 2 Pro, for example, does nearly as well in almost every way, except for object avoidance—the 2 Pro isn’t designed for small objects like cables and such, so it will eat them—for nearly $1,000 less. I’d rather tidy up a little before a clean, thank you. But even if you don’t mind spending that kind of money, you’ll get better object avoidance from the $1,300 Eufy Omni E35 or the $1,500 Matic. Those have their own trade-offs, of course—the Omni E35 is about an inch taller and still bumped walls and furniture regularly when I tested it, and the Matic’s boxy, seven-inch-high form factor excludes it from cleaning under things like beds and couches. Of course, all of that costs a lot more money than your average stick vacuum and a Swiffer, but hey, some folks have money to burn, and it is nice not to have to clean your floors yourself.