Real Life Reviews: Dyson’s New Wet Floor Cleaner Will Make You Want to Retire Your Old-School Mop

In May, we reported that Dyson had dropped its first mop. The arrival of Dyson’s wet floor cleaner was hugely exciting, so when we were offered the chance to review the unit, we jumped at the opportunity. After a few weeks of living with the Dyson Wash G1 mop, I have some thoughts on the dedicated hard floor cleaner and whether it’s worth the $999 price tag.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

Real Life Reviews: The Dyson WashG1 mop

Before we get into the meat of this review, let’s go over the key stats you need to know about the Dyson WashG1 mop.

• Clean water tank: 1L
• Dirty water tank 0.8L
• Height: 1140mm
• Length: 225mm
• Width: 300mm
• Weight: When empty 4.9kg
• Washes with clean water only
• Designed to reach low under furniture and into awkward spaces
• 35 minutes of run time
• Covers up to 290sqm
• Three cleaning modes let you set hydration level
• Separates dirty water and dry debris for disposal
• Self-clean cycle flushes the system before your next use
• Price: $999

What’s good?

When I say I was thrilled by the idea of being able to review Dyson’s new WashG1 mop, I’m not even slightly exaggerating. My apartment is completely made up of hard floors (tiles and floorboards), and although I treat those babies to a vacuum regularly, mopping is quite possibly the cleaning task I enjoy least, so I avoid it as much as I can.

The whole process of filling a bucket and dragging it around with you as you slap a wet mop on the floor isn’t really my idea of a fun afternoon. But a zippy little stick vacuum that does the mopping for you – that’s something I can get behind.

This baby takes minutes to set up – it’s basically a matter of finding a home (a power outlet) for the mop’s charging doc, screwing the handle in and adding water to the tank. When it comes to preparing the WashG1 for mopping, you simply need to fill the clean water tank (in the top half – I mixed this up a couple of times) with warm water and the floor cleaner of your choice. It can be a little fiddly to remove, unscrew, fill, re-screw and click in the water tanks, but as a whole, it’s incredibly easy to prepare.

Once that’s sorted, you simply press a button and off you go. While it’s not without its faults, maneuvering the Dyson WashG1 is relatively easy. You can get into most corners, and driving that baby around my apartment makes mopping/vacuuming feel like a pretty effortless task. There’s no back-breaking scrubbing needed, here. Your body will thank you.

It’s kind of noisy, but it can attack most of the debris you’ll find on your floors (hair might take a few swipes before it works), and everyday marks on the floorboards or tiles are handled with ease. I did have one experience where a stain didn’t come off completely, but in 99 per cent of cases, I was chuffed.

One point to keep in mind is it’s actually not recommended that you use boiling water for this mop. The WashG1’s two dense, counter-rotating, microfibre rollers and 26 pulse-modulated hydration points are intended to help give you a better clean on your floors and allow you to tackle stains and trickier spills, so boiling water is not really needed. Also, water at that temperature may fog up your water tank – which is no fun. I always used warm water with floor cleaner and felt super satisfied with the results.

With one tank of water and a fully charged battery, I am easily able to clean my entire apartment (three bedrooms, kitchen, living space, laundry and two bathrooms), with water and juice to spare. Each time I’ve used the Dyson WashG1, my floors look and feel super clean, and they aren’t left so wet that it takes three days for them to dry again.

After you’ve cleaned your floors, you can remove debris by pulling out a tray from the base of the mop, tossing the contents, and rinsing the entire thing. Similarly, with the water, you just need to remove the whole tank from the mop, unscrew the cap from the dirty water tank, pour out the grey muck, rinse it out, and reconnect it all. It’s certainly easier than pouring a whole bucket of dirty water down the drain when mopping the old-school way.

Once you’ve done all that, pop her on her little stand, and she should cycle through a self-clean. Clever.

What’s not so good?

Although I found the Dyson WashG1 mop to be a hugely practical cleaning device, there were some things I didn’t love about it.

First of all, it is heavy. At 4.9kg while empty, you’re talking about close to 6kg of weight in your hands. While you’re maneuvering the mop across floors, the weight is not a major problem, but if you need to lift it to move around — or up or down stairs — you’re going to feel it. It can, at times, feel like you’re dragging a bit of a beast around, so keep that in mind.

If you’re looking to clean a larger home, remember that a full battery and tank of water will last you about 35 minutes and can cover up to 290sqm. While this will likely suit most homes fine, it doesn’t give you much room for going over spaces more than once. Between this and the weight of the mop, folks who live in larger homes may find themselves a little frustrated by the Dyson WashG1. It seems perhaps a little more suited to apartment living – for now, at least.

Another pain point I had with this hard floor cleaner is that because of its size, it doesn’t fit under all furniture pieces. For the most part, I was able to clean under my furniture easily, but in a couple of cases, the WashG1 was a little too thick to get in there.

I also didn’t love the fact that the max fill line on the dirty water tank is much larger and easier to spot than that of the clean water tank. It may sound inconsequential, but the design choice meant I kept accidentally filling the wrong water tank with clean water. If I need to manually fill one side of the tank with water, make that the max fill line that yells for my attention, please.

Oh, and the sound. As I touched on before, the mop is a little loud. But it’s doing a lot, so I’ll forgive the noise.

Dyson WashG1 mop review: The verdict

The Dyson WashG1 mop has been a welcome addition to my collection of cleaning devices because it offers the ease of a two-in-one solution to ‘doing the floors’. Because it has the ability to both mop and vacuum, I could, in theory, retire my regular vacuum and simply take the WashG1 over my floors whenever they’re looking a little worse for wear.

And while I have been testing the device, I haven’t reached for my regular vacuum – it seems much easier to just use the mop. While there are a few design elements I would like to see improved on in future models of the hard floor cleaner, I stand by my initial statement that this mop is, indeed, a game-changer. And, although $999 is certainly not cheap, if it means you can avoid buying both a separate mop and vacuum, then it could very well be worth the investment for you.

You can buy the Wash G1 mop now on the Dyson website for $999.

Lead Image Credit: Lifehacker Australia/Stephanie Nuzzo