Dreame D10 Plus robot vacuum & mop: improvements over D9 but still with its quirks

If you’ve been shopping for a robot vacuum lately you know there’s literally dozens of choices. While bigger name brands seem to get all the press, there’s many smaller manufacturers out there, but how do you know their bots are capable, and potentially worth it? I recently had the chance to try out a new robot vacuum and mop from Dreame. The Dreame D10 Plus is a dual vacuum and mop with an Auto Empty Base.

Dreame D10 robot vacuum & mop review

In this review I’ll look at how well it cleans both vacuuming and mopping, if it has any special features, and what you need to know before you buy. A couple of years ago I reviewed the Dreame D9 and had a very mixed experience; while it cleaned well, it struggled to map my home and got stuck on a lot of flooring transitions. I brought it to my aunt’s home and there it worked a lot better for her… so all that’s to say that I’m looking forward to seeing if the Dreame D10 Plus is an improvement. Let’s take a look at the Dreame D10. This robot floor cleaner is a combo unit; it will vacuum your home but with the addition of a special mopping pad it will also do a light damp mop. Interestingly the water tank for the mop is part of the mopping pad itself, and odd but effective use of space.

Super long battery & runtime

The D10 has a large 5,200mAh battery. Dreame says this means the bot can clean up to 270m2 (2,906ft2) without needing to recharge. I can confirm that in my testing, the bot was able to clean all 1000 square feet of my home on a single outing.

What’s in the box?

What’s in the box: on top is the accessory pack with an extra vacuum bag for the base station, the corner brush which just needs to be clicked into place, power cord and the mopping plate which also hold a thin water tank. The robot itself is next up and its clean, white design will blend in to a lot of homes. The bot does have its own onboard dustbin which will be able to empty itself into the Base station… which is the last and largest thing in the package. It also already has a dustbag inside. The dustbag holds about 2.5L bag, and Dreame says you’ll likely only need to empty it about 8 times a year. As I only spend about 4 weeks with it and it didn’t need to be emptied, I’ll take Dream’s word for this for now. To get it set up plug in the base station and get it charging. You need a space with enough room for the bot to get in and out easily and with access to a plug. Meantime download the MiHome app which will be where you control your bot’s mapping and navigation. Click add robot and follow the onscreen instructions to connect it to Wi-Fi and in a minute you’ll be ready to roll.

Fast Mapping: best in class

A handy option when you first install the bot is to use Fast Mapping. Fast Mapping will let the bot roam around your home without vacuuming to create an accelerated virtual map. The virtual map is going to be key to making the most of you bot so I highly recommend you use it. Unlike my experience with the D9, after one pass the Dreame D10 had a detailed and accurate map of my home. Amazingly it was done mapping in less than 10 minutes—easily the fastest and most accurate mapping I’ve seen in a robot vacuum to date. I was then able to go into the map and refine the rooms and rename them so that I can use voice control (if you have a Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa device). The interface to do this was easy and hassle free. With your map made you can do scheduled cleaning or room specific cleans. The scheduling feature is easy to use and let you set a regular daily or weekly clean. Or just choose a room in the app and send the bot there only any time.

Adjustable suction power & water flow

The Dreame D10 has a max 4,000 pA of suction, meaning it can be quite powerful. It also has adjustable vacuum suction; essentially there’s low, medium and high power, so you can not only dial in the kind of clean you need, doing so adjusts the noise level. So you can run a low power clean and still take that Zoom call. Speaking of adjustments you can also dial up the saturation level on the mopping pad from low to high, and you can choose your cleaning mode: there’s vacuum only mode, mopping only and dual vac-mop. You will need to turn this on inside the app’s Settings menu, but the Dreame D10 has a power boost mode for carpets. With this setting enabled, the vacuum mop is supposed to automatically recognize carpet and turn on maximum suction. In my testing, I was not able to get this to work; the suction power never increased on carpets.

Mopping tests: quite effective!

On the subject of how well this robot cleans, it’s worth watching the review video (above). You can see for yourself exactly what I experienced. Let’s get to the mopping prowess. The mop has a washable and reusable mopping pad that sticks to the mop’s water tank. The whole unit slides onto the bottom of the robot. Conveniently the pads on the bot are washable and reusable; just toss them in the laundry or rinse them in the sink. The mopping on this bot should come with a disclaimer; this is not a mop in the same way you’d do a wet mop. It’s definitely not as thorough since it uses only a little water (tank volume is 270ml) and a moist cloth, and it’s really best for doing a light dusting, not for an actual mopping scrub, since there is no scrubbing. Helpfully, you can adjust the water flow for a moister or drier mop, by using the app. The max area it will mop on one tank is about 2000 square feet, which is pretty impressive, but again at most it’s doing a light wipe. I’d definitely say in my 1000 square foot space I got about two full mops to a tank. In my mopping tests, I let the mop tackle things like muddy dog paw prints, and spilled and dried coffee. The mop was quite good at getting wet spills and was very thorough. When it comes to the drier spills, it takes a couple of passes, but the Dreame D10 did an excellent job wiping up dried coffee, getting about 90-95% of the stain off the floor during a cleaning.

‘Water tank empty’ alerts would be nice

I will add one small note; the Dreame D10 doesn’t seem to have the ability to tell you when the mopping tank’s water is empty. So I sent it our one day to clean and it wasn’t doing very well. It took me a few minutes before I checked the tank and sure enough it was on empty. It would be nice to get alerts about this so the mop isn’t going out and being ineffective.

What happens with carpet when mopping?

You might be wondering how the bot handles mopping in homes with carpet. Good question and the answer is, it doesn’t. It will mop your carpets too… supposedly unless you set mopping no-go zones. These zones are created inside the app and let you draw boxes around rugs or carpeted areas where it won’t send the bot with the mop attached. Again, in my review of the D9 these zones just didn’t prevent the bot from getting onto carpets, but with the D10 I’m happy to say the carpet avoidance is quite effective. Even before I set these up, when the bot did venture onto carpets with the mopping plate installed, it wasn’t soaking them, it’s more lightly damp, and I actually didn’t think it was a problem and any residual dampness did dry quickly, so for the most part I left the mopping plate on and let it do its thing.

Vacuum testing

Let’s get to the Vacuum testing…I put all my vacuums through the same tests; I get them to clean things like finer flour, bigger bits like rice or oatmeal and larger cracker crumbs. In my testing the Dreame D10 was great at things like rice and also larger cracker bits, inhaling probably 99 percent of those spills. It wasn’t as great at finer spills like flour on carpets, though it was marginally better at getting it from floors… The vacuum was great at getting pet hair and even with the bin full, it was easily able to empty itself. Overall I’d score it an 8 or a 9 on vacuuming. When it returns to the base station after a clean, the D10 will automatically empty it’s dust bin. You can actually turn this feature off if you want… But I don’t know why you’d want to do that. It’s a much better plan and leads too much better cleaning, and less dust been clogging if it empties every time it cleans. Unlike another bot I was testing at the same time which was having a boatload of trouble emptying its onboard dustbin, the Dreame D10 is very effective at emptying, meaning lots of room for more dust when it heads out next.

Does Dreame D10 get stuck?

In my previous testing with the D9, the robot got stuck almost every time it went out, and I would have to rescue it, or return it to the base station if the battery had run down. I’m happy to report that with this version of the robot it’s much better at navigating difficult areas, and I found it was much better able to free itself and far less likely to get stuck than last time I tested it. You’ll notice I said less likley… this bot still get stuck more than some other brands, and that’s probably because it’s not great at object avoidance; Instead of avoiding potential problems, it pushes them around. Another issue I had with the D9 version was that the robot had difficulty finding its way back to its base station constantly, but in the newest iteration, the D10 has no such problems.

Voice control with Google or Alexa: a work in progress?

Dreame D10 will work with Google or Alexa, or so the company says. You need to link the MiHome app with either Google Home or the Alexa app. While I was able to link my accounts, I had great difficulty getting results. You need to use very specific language or you won’t get a result.

What language do I need to use for Google/Alexa with Dreame robots?

Dreame’s team shared this list with me: 【Alexa】 Alexa supports only the start and end commands currently , examples of which are as follows: 1. “Alexa, turn on the Dreame bot D10 Plus” 2. “Alexa, turn off the Dreame bot D10 Plus” 【Google Assistant】 Examples of supported voice commands are as follows: 1. Start the Dreame bot D10 Plus 2. Stop the Dreame bot D10 Plus 3. Pause the Dreame bot D10 Plus 4. Resume the Dreame bot D10 Plus 5. Dock/Charge the Dreame bot D10 Plus I got it to work with Alexa eventually. But with Google, even when I used language provided to me by Dream’s team, I couldn’t get it to work. Bottom line; if you’re counting on voice control, you may end up disappointed.

How to set up Voice Control

The manual doesn’t tell you how to do it; so here’s how. Go to the Alexa app and go to the Skills section. Search for Mi Home and then click Enable to Use. You’ll have to log into your Xiaomi Home app and link your Alexa account, then you’ll connect to your bot. I got mine connected right away but was not able to use Alexa to control the bot with my voice. I’d ask for the bot to clean using the exact language Dreame suggests, but I’d just get a puzzled sound from Alexa. This was the same story when I tried my last Dream robot, so it’s a bit disappointing the service still doesn’t work properly. I also tried to connect Google Assistant by going into the Google Home app, searching fro Dreame. I found it and link the accounts but had the same issue where Google would just not execute any commands.

Overall review: Dreame D10 vacuum & mopping robot

Overall I can say the Dreame D10 is a major improvement over the D9, and you can see my original review below, as well as check out what happened when I took that bot to a new house. It cleans well, both on floors and carpet and when its mopping or vacuuming. All the software troubles I found I had on the previous version have been resolved. The runtime is huge and it can clean my whole home on a single charge. The Self empty station is effective at cleaning out the onboard dustbin too, and you can dial your vacuum power and mopping up or down. Downsides? I couldn’t get voice control working despite following Dream’s instructions to the letter. The damp mopping plate will get dragged over your carpets unless you set a mopping no-go zone… but the no-go areas are quite effective. There’s also no ‘water tank empty’ alerts. The other downside is the vacuum wasn’t perfect at getting down into the grout lines with some finer dust. I suppose the other downside of this bot is just the attendance you’ll need to pay to which floors you’re cleaning; if you want a thorough vacuum, you’ll need to remove the mopping plate and set it to vacuum. If you want things mopped you’d need to reinstall it, and set it to mop, but ensure your carpets are marked as no-mop zones. Like I said earlier, the mop doesn’t swamp carpets so it’s also possible to just leave the plate on. While this bot is an effective cleaner, it does have some other considerations which you might not mind, or they may be dealbreakers for you. It’s definitely an improvement over the D9, but it may not be the robot vacuum of your dreams. Dreame D10 sells for about $499US. **A note about Affiliate Links: TechGadgetsCanada is supported by our readers. Occasionally I will include affiliate links in my reviews. I do this partly for convenience of the reader (since I’ll almost always include a link to the company website or similar anyway) in case you want to read more or purchase, but I also may get a small commission from the click, which helps me keep the blog running. If you choose to use this link I thank you greatly for supporting the blog. There’s no obligation or cost to you for using these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.