Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai robot vacuum review

Dyson knows how to make a great vacuum cleaner. I've got two in my house, purely because I love them both for different reasons. So when Dyson announced its new Spot+Scrub Ai robot vacuum, I was first in line to test it.

After a couple of weeks of daily use, I'm pretty charmed by the brand's first wet and dry robot vacuum. It does the job — it actually does it rather well — but it's by no means got the 'wow' factor that you'd expect from the brand behind the AirWrap, PencilVac and iconic cooling fans.

Will the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai become a major competitor in a crowded market of $1,000+ robots? Maybe not. But what it lacks in forward-thinking features it makes up for in its low-maintenance, user-friendly design, and I'm pretty happy with its day-to-day performance.

Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot Vacuum: Specs

Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot Vacuum: Design

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai is so gargantuan, I'm tempted to charge it rent. Admittedly, I live in a small apartment in London, where floor space is at a premium and every square foot is accounted for.

That's one of the reasons I've clung onto Dyson's neat little 360 VisNav for so long — it's one of the few options that will slot underneath the cabinets in my living room. If you're fortunate enough to live in a home that's larger than an overpriced shoebox, you might not find Spot+Scrub Ai's bulky design so egregious.

With this in mind, I set up the Spot+Scrub Ai in my kitchen for a couple of weeks, where its hefty docking station could sit unencumbered next to my dining table. Size aside, I think it's a handsome machine, with a self-emptying bin (complete with signature Dyson aesthetics) and a tank for clean and dirty water. A bagless design (which means no ongoing cost — huzzah), it does have an unusual transparent design that will lay all your crumbs, hair and dust out in full view. So maybe don't put it next to the TV, unless you enjoy looking at trash.

This is a wet and dry cleaner, and the Spot+Scrub Ai uses a heated cleaning system to keep the roller clean and hygienic. It uses 140°F (60°C) water to clean, and dries it with a 113°F (45°C) hot air cycle to prevent odors. In practice, I found this cycle a little noisy. It's not disruptive, but because it runs for hours after your vacuum has finished mopping, it's a bit annoying and would put me off placing the vacuum in a room where I spend a lot of time.

The vacuum itself is sleek, black and circular, in a shift from the D-shaped design of the 360 VisNav. The unit is pretty tall at 4.3 inches — taller than many other robot vacuums — and it's 14.7 inches wide, which sadly meant it couldn't fit between my dining chair legs.

Alongside that familiar-looking dustbin, Dyson has also added its Fluffy Optic tech to the robot's front bumper. It uses green LED light to illuminate dust and crumbs on the floor ahead as it cleans, and that includes the crumbs underneath the dining chairs, which the vacuum is too wide to clean around. Brb, grabbing my PencilVac.

To its credit, the Spot+Scrub Ai has a shifting brush bar that slides from one side to the other of the vacuum, in theory ensuring that no corners are missed as the vacuum cleans the sides of the room. I found this worked very well, intuitively shifting to sweep alongside table legs and underneath kitchen counters.

Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai Robot Vacuum: Performance

Setup

Dyson always makes a good first impression. Setting up robot vacuums can be a complete pain, but thankfully, I already have the Dyson app and the parts slotted together very intuitively, so setup was seamless.

Once paired to the app, the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai ran a software update and then set about mapping my room. I was impressed that it got a very accurate map simply from scanning the length and breadth of the kitchen in a matter of minutes. It clearly had used its in-built 'vision' to get a spot-on depiction of my floorplan.

From there, I was able to set up any no-go areas or add in furniture to my app, as well as create a custom schedule and edit the cleaning routine (vacuum only, mop only, mop and vacuum, vacuum then mop, for example) used.

I added in my dining table, which looked mammoth in the map of the room. I couldn't see a way to edit the size of the furniture, so I ended up leaving it, taking up a substantially larger portion of the floorplan than it actually does in real life. I couldn't quite tell what difference it made adding in your furniture, as the vacuum successfully cleaned rooms where I had added furniture, and where I'd neglected to.

Vacuuming

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai methodically carved out a path through my kitchen, first tracing the outline of the room and using its side-sweeping brushes to push dirt in its path, and then tracing back and forth in clean lines along the room.

I enjoyed how strategically it approached the clean, and when I gave it full rein of the lower level of my home, it also comfortably tackled each room one by one, automatically detecting rug and carpeting and even identifying areas of high debris and flagging them on the end-of-clean report.

My main gripe with the vacuuming performance is that the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai seemingly cuts entire areas out of its cleaning path without reason. The vacuum may have struggled to reach under my dining table, but in my weeks of using it, it didn't seem to try very hard to get there.

However, where it did decide to clean, it did a great job. I can't fault the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai for suction or pickup. Its first clean was on a Monday, after a very prolonged meal prepping session that involved panko breadcrumbs, couscous and those little scraps of garlic skin that end up absolutely everywhere.

It did a really good job of flicking crumbs and debris into its path as it circled the room, and illuminated dust and debris I didn't even know was there — outing my lazy closing shift the day before. Thanks, Dyson.

When it came to the classic Tom's Guide oats test, it picked up almost every oat I had sprinkled both on my hard floor and carpeting, but on the hard floors its sweeping brushes did flick a few out of its path.

Mopping

I had really high hopes for the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai's mopping performance. I love that it's got a roller brush as opposed to mopping pads, meaning the brush is only mopping with a clean and continuous stream of fresh, warm water.

Dyson didn't include any of its 02PROBIOTIC hard floor cleaning solution with the vacuum — in fact, it would appear that it's completely out of stock, which is annoying when you're meant to use it with Dyson products — so I opted for a different brand's dilutable wet floor cleaner to get the job done.

I'd love to pretend that I'd pre-stained my floorboards in preparation for this test. In reality, I'd been lazily taking teabags to the trash can across the kitchen floor, and dripping tea as I went, for a few weeks while I had builders in the house.

In addition to these tea stains, I squirted some sriracha sauce across the width of the floor. If not thoroughly mopped, this leaves a red streak in its path and can easily settle between boards.

The Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai decided it didn't want to clean a patch of the sriracha halfway through mopping my floor. I'm not sure why, because it even flagged that it had identified a stain on the map it generates after cleaning. "Hey, Millie, FYI there's some sriracha on your floor. Did I clean it? No, I thought I'd best get back to my dock."

I sent it out on a second mopping mission after this mishap, and it did a great job of picking up the remaining sauce. In fact, in the weeks that have passed since that initial test, it's not missed a spot, so I'm almost tempted to mark the first issue as a fluke.

Even this morning, the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai continues to do a great job of picking up all the marks on the floor, including my dried-on tea stains. And it vigilantly monitors its water levels and self-cleans its mop roller mid-wash, meaning you won't need to worry about it smearing dirt around your floors.

According to Dyson, this robot vacuum scans its path seven times per second. It's equipped by a dToF (Direct Time of Flight) system, which has greater accuracy in long-range LiDAR measurements and makes both mapping and object detection seamless.

In my tests, I found that the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai had no trouble detecting and navigating around multiple obstructions, including a sock and a wire I left in its path deliberately, and more than a few accidental obstructions left by the builders who were working on my house at the time I was testing! It also flagged these obstructions and any high-debris areas it wasn't able to reach once it had finished its cleaning.

Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai: Comparison

The world of robot vacuums moves fast, but the Spot+Scrub does feature some of the more impressive innovations we've seen in recent months. For one, its mop roller is supplied with a constant stream of clean water, as opposed to alternatives with spinning pads which will continue to clean with an already-dirty mop. The always-fresh roller is a feature you'll also find in the new Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller Complete, although we've not tested that yet, so I can't compare the two models on performance, but pricing is comparable across the two vacs.

If you're on a budget, our top pick for the best robot vacuums is the Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum and Mop, which retails for roughly half the price of the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai and also features wet and dry cleaning. We also loved its app, which is one area where many find the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai to be lacking.

The PowerDetect doesn't feature the same smart mopping system you'll find with Dyson. However, Shark recently rolled out the PowerDetect UV Reveal robot vacuum, which performed nearly perfectly on our tests.

Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai: Verdict

In an ideal world, you'll never have to deal with your robot vacuum. It won't miss spots of debris or spread mess around your home. It won't gobble up wires or forget where its dock is. And it'll clean and dry its own mop, and empty its own bin. For such smart tech, it doesn't take more than a slight mishap for me to feel that my robot vac is really rather dumb. So while the Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai is expensive and bulky, I've been impressed by just how little I've had to deal with it in the past few weeks.

Did it blow me away with impeccable, 100% accuracy? Not every time, no. It missed some staining in one of my first tests (although hasn't missed this spot since) and flicked a few oats and crumbs out of its own path as it made its way around my lounge. But the most important thing to me is that this vacuum never needed rescuing, and didn't cause any dramas in my house. If you want a low-maintenance, trustworthy robot vac, it's one to consider, though not our first choice.