[REVIEW] Roborock S7 Max Ultra is probably the best robotic vacuum cleaner for year 2023

Not long ago, we introduced you on our site to the latest robot vacuum novelty, the flagship model Roborock S7 Max Ultra, on XiaomiPlanet.sk XiaomiPlanet.sk. Since we had the chance to test this novelty before it went on sale, we’re among the first in Europe to bring you an exclusive review.

In our detailed review, we’ll look at all the functions of this feature-packed robot vacuum, test the quality of vacuuming and mopping, and we won’t forget to test the battery life on a single charge.

Where to buy the Roborock S7 Max Ultra?

Our partner Geekbuying, which provided the vacuum for testing, is launching an exclusive sale of this feature-packed robot vacuum. The first 200 orders will also receive a gift: 8 pieces of accessories for free.

Buy Roborock S7 Max Ultra

Delivery from the Polish warehouse is free of any additional courier fees, right to your home. The seller Geekbuying offers a full 2-year warranty with service across Europe for Roborock-branded products.

Technical specifications

Precise packaging

The Roborock S7 Max Ultra was delivered by a DPD courier in a fairly large box measuring 51.5 x 51.5 x 44.5 cm and weighing 17.6 kg. As usual, Roborock packages its products very well. So you don’t need to worry about any damage.

In the upper part, there’s a short and easy-to-follow guide for the initial installation and use with illustrations, beneath which the vacuum itself is already stored. Just like all the other components, it’s also wrapped in a clear shrink film.

Under the vacuum, there’s a large charging station, which we’ll discuss in more detail later, as it’s very interesting. It contains three containers, and they are also protected with film.

There’s also a power cable, a detailed user manual in English, and we’ll even find a small extra bonus here in the form of one additional dust bag.

Build quality and vacuum design

We have the Roborock S7 Max Ultra available in white, but it’s also offered in black. The design doesn’t look unusual at first glance, but there are a few interesting details here.

On the top part you’ll find a LiDAR system and three buttons. Specifically, there are buttons for turning off / on, cleaning the current room, and returning to the charging station. Besides those, there’s also an opening cover under which there’s a dust container with a capacity of 350 ml. It also includes a washable filter.

Around the vacuum cleaner’s perimeter, we can spot several interesting parts. There are two connectors here for charging, a 3D camera behind the black cover on the front, and a water connection on the opposite side.

A red rubber rotating brush at the bottom collects dirt. It’s housed in a plastic component that can slightly adapt together with the brush to the floor being cleaned. Of course, there’s also a side brush, anti-drop sensors, wheels with a high-traction tread, and a mop.

Advanced RockDock Ultra docking station

The RockDock Ultra charging station is extremely interesting. It measures up to 422 x 504 x 420 mm, so it’s definitely not a compact charging station.

On the top part there are three containers – the first from the left is for dirty water, the second for clean water, and the third one contains a dust bag. The Roborock S7 Max Ultra can not only empty itself, but also wash the mop in the docking station and even dry it.

As for the water, it draws it from the docking station as well. We’ll break down this process in more detail in the mopping chapter.

The bottom side has another interesting feature. Here you’ll find a discreet brush that cleans the mop, because the Roborock S7 Max Ultra doesn’t have a classic mop. Most vacuums have a removable water tank with a mop cloth attached to it. In that case, you refill water into this small tank and clean the mop manually.

Roborock S7 Max Ultra will spare you these worries. It draws water on its own from the docking station, and you don’t have to remove the mop since it cleans itself using the aforementioned brush. And will it stay wet? No—the docking station also has a mop-drying system.

With Roborock, convenience moves to a higher level—you don’t have to worry about emptying the dust container or cleaning and drying the mop cloth. All of these tasks are handled automatically by the docking station together with the vacuum.

App and cleaning options

The new Roborock S7 Max Ultra works with the Roborock app or Xiaomi Home. We chose an app with the same name as the vacuum cleaner. Pairing itself went without any complications—simply, and quickly.

As soon as we logged into the Roborock app, the smartphone automatically found the vacuum near the phone. The pairing process involves connecting to the vacuum’s local WiFi network, which then links up with your home WiFi. The whole process took no more than a few minutes, and at the end, the app guided us through the basic settings as well.

Here we could choose whether we’d use the vacuum on multiple floors and whether we wanted to use certain intelligent features—which you can also find in the settings.

Next came the initial room scanning, when the vacuum quickly moved through our apartment to discover the individual areas. After that, the app displayed a map divided into separate rooms.

Cleaning and mopping levels

We have the settings for the different cleaning and mopping levels right from the main screen, where you’ll also find a map. You can clean the entire apartment, selected rooms, or a zone that you mark on the map. For rooms and zones, you can also choose the number of repetitions from 1 to 3.

As for the individual options, you have cleaning together with mopping, separate mopping, separate vacuuming, or a custom mode. In custom mode, the user selects from the modes mentioned above separately for each room.

This is how the Roborock S7 Max Ultra, for example, can vacuum the living room, mop in the kitchen, and vacuum with simultaneous mopping in the kids’ room.

Let’s take a look at the individual mopping and vacuuming levels in the mentioned modes. When vacuuming and mopping at the same time, you can choose 4 vacuuming levels: quiet, balanced, turbo, and max.

There are three mopping levels: low, medium, and intense. They differ in the amount of water the vacuum uses. You’ll also find two cleaning routes here: Quick and Standard. In the Quick route, the vacuum doesn’t clean along the perimeter of the rooms, so this mode is faster, but mopping and vacuuming are less effective.

In mopping mode, you can choose from the three mopping levels we mentioned above, but you also get an expanded route option: Fast, Standard, Deep, and Deep+. With the Deep and Deep+ levels, the vacuum goes over every spot twice. In Deep+, it also slows down and mops more quietly.

In the standalone vacuuming mode, there’s also an additional level called MAX+, which is the strongest one.

Vacuuming speed, mopping speed, and runtime on a single charge

Because we have quite a wide range of settings for the individual levels, we compared at least some of them so you, our readers, have a rough idea of the mop and vacuuming speed. At the same time, we also tested the runtime on a single charge, which is handled by a 5200 mAh battery.

We cleaned an apartment in which the open floor area is roughly 32 m². In the combined vacuuming and mopping mode, with suction power set to Turbo and mopping at the medium level on the Standard route, it took the vacuum 34 minutes. The battery dropped by 33%.

With the same mopping and vacuuming levels, but on an accelerated route, the total time dropped to 21 minutes and the battery capacity decreased by only 14 %.

Standalone vacuuming on the balanced level took 32 minutes and consumed 16 % of the battery. In the highest MAX+ mode, it was also 32 minutes and the battery capacity dropped by 29 %.

Classic mopping takes about the same time as vacuuming. As for battery usage, at the mid mopping level with a standard route, 14 % was used per mopping session. For comparison, at the maximum mopping level with the Deep+ route, it took up to 52 minutes and the battery capacity dropped by 26 %.

When the battery capacity drops to 19 %, the vacuum returns to the docking station. If it hasn’t finished vacuuming or mopping, after charging it continues its work from where it left off. Charging from 19 % to 100 % takes approximately 3 hours.

Vacuuming performance

High suction power up to 5500 Pa promises great cleaning. Of course, we checked it in our home while writing this review. We spilled oats, cocoa, flour, and red lentils on the kitchen floor, and we were curious how the vacuum would handle them.

We selected the highest vacuuming level, Max+, with the Standard route. In the photo below, you can see what the floor looked like before vacuuming.

After the first vacuuming, only a few bits of dirt remained on the floor. Mostly it was the debris that the side brush shot onto areas that had already been vacuumed. After the second vacuuming, all dirt was gone.

As for vacuuming quality, we have to say we don’t see a significant difference between the vacuum with suction power around 4000 Pa (e.g. Roborock Q7 Max+) and the newest Roborock with 5500 Pa.

Let’s not forget that after the vacuuming finishes, the vacuum returns to the docking station, which automatically empties the dust container contents into a bag in the docking station.

Thoughtful mopping

Mopping is especially interesting on this vacuum model. As we already mentioned in the introduction, the docking station includes multiple components that the vacuum uses during mopping. Specifically, it has containers for clean and dirty water, a mop-cleaning system, and a mop-drying system.

After mopping starts, the vacuum leaves the docking station to turn around and back up. That’s because the water inlet connection is on the opposite side—using it, the docking station dispenses clean water into the vacuum. At the same time, the vacuum also wets the mop cloth there, so it starts moving with a pre-wetted cloth.

During mopping, it returns several times to the docking station, where a brush at the bottom cleans the mop pad of dirt. You can set how often it should return for pad cleaning in the settings in the range of 10 to 50 minutes in 5-minute steps (10, 15, 20, …). The second option is mop cleaning by room, to prevent carrying dirt between rooms.

To top it off, during operation the mop vibrates up to 3000 movements per minute thanks to the VibraRise technology. Surprisingly, these vibrations are quite noticeable. After mopping is finished, the mop cloth is cleaned again. This cleaning is fairly thorough, since it takes a total of approximately 3 minutes.

Finally, the docking station starts the drying process. During drying, you can hear a slight hum, but it isn’t anything significant or distracting. Drying time can be 2, 3, or 4 hours. After three hours, the mop was mostly completely dry.

The docking station also has a discreet filter at the bottom. It’s located all the way to the right under the brush. It’s recommended to clean it regularly under running water.

As for the amount of water that the vacuum uses, it managed to use the entire water tank for 13 cleaning of the mop cloth across seven mopping sessions in our apartment. The water tank capacity is approximately 3 L.

Mopping quality

Since mopping with this vacuum is really well thought-out and fully automatic, we had high expectations. We spilled cocoa, green food coloring, and syrup on the kitchen floor and started separate mopping with the maximum Deep+ level.

This is what it looked like before mopping:

Usually, when testing robot vacuums on this site, we attach photos after the first, second, and sometimes even the third mopping. However, the Roborock S7 Max Ultra is the first robot vacuum in our test that managed to wipe up all dried dirt in one go! The mopping quality is therefore perfect.

A few small stains still remained in the gaps between the tiles, but these stains are hard to clean even by hand—never mind with any kind of mop.

Map customization

As for the map, it’s fully customizable, just like with other Roborock vacuums. There’s no groundbreaking new feature here, so let’s briefly mention what options you have when adjusting the map.

We can rotate the map in steps of always 90° in both directions and change individual rooms. We can name them with our own custom names, including with diacritics, or group/split them according to our preferences.

There are also so-called no-go zones that the vacuum should skip, as well as virtual walls. You can also set the type and direction of the floor pattern so the vacuum can clean in the same direction the flooring is laid.

There’s also 3D map display, where we can add furniture. Other options include, for example, customizing the order of vacuuming individual rooms, where we also find a choice for automatic order—when the vacuum determines the order of the rooms by itself.

More settings

With the settings, you can plan vacuuming or mopping in detail for a specific day and time, with optional repetition. You can also turn advanced obstacle-avoidance on or off—which, by the way, works very well. The vacuum bumps into obstacles only minimally.

There’s a separate category in the settings for the docking station, where you’ll find the previously mentioned setting for the mop pad cleaning frequency, or also the cleaning level among three options: Light, Balanced, and Deep. These levels are differentiated by the intensity of pad cleaning and, at the same time, by how long this process takes.

Similar levels are available for automatic emptying as well. Specifically, it’s Smart, Light, Balanced, and Max. You can also set the language of voice announcements, but you’ll be looking in vain for Slovak or Czech here.

Also available are charging during night power, Do Not Disturb mode, and the child lock. There’s no shortage of spot cleaning or remote control for movement.

Every vacuuming or mopping session is saved to history, which is always available also in the settings. At the same time, you can see the status of individual components here, such as the filter, rotating brush, side brush, sensors, mop, water filter, the brush in the docking station, and the dust bag. The bag capacity is 1.8 L, and it should last 1 to 2 months, but its fill level isn’t monitored.

Roborock S7 Max Ultra: Final assessment

Roborock S7 Max Ultra is a very interesting model with the multi-purpose RockDock Ultra docking station. It impresses right away with its size, but its most interesting features are hidden inside. It has separate containers for clean water, dirty water, and a dust bag.

Besides that, you’ll also find a well-thought-out system for dispensing water into the vacuum, cleaning the mop cloth with a brush, and drying the mop. That means the vacuum takes care of everything on its own—automatically—without your involvement.

Buy Roborock S7 Max Ultra

It also boasts high suction power of 5500 Pa, but what really caught our attention was its high-quality, vibrating mop. Thanks to it, it clearly ranks among the best robot vacuum mops, as it can actually clean up even dried dirt in one go.

The only minor downsides are probably just the size of the docking station and slightly increased noise during vibration mopping.