By Bryan Wall
Product Test Journalist | Kaipūrongo Whakamātautau Hautaonga
Priced just shy of $190, the Kmart Robotic Vacuum can vacuum and mop your floors and even has a smartphone app.
At that price, these vacs are likely to be flying off the shelves, plus their rating on Kmart’s website averages over 4 stars – so they must be pretty good, right?
Sadly, our test lab found otherwise…
Features
The Kmart robot vac is a hybrid mopping model, meaning it can both vacuum and mop your floors.
It will even mop your carpet for you, even though you probably don’t want it to!
The vac comes with a remote control, but it can also be controlled by the Tuya Smart App.
It has four cleaning modes and can be used with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
Kmart claims the vac has 1200–2200Pa of suction power and a 70-minute run time, combined with a 5-hour charge time.
But what does this mean in the real world?
How did it perform in the lab?
Sadly, it was rubbish.
Robot vacs tend to be pretty good at vacuuming hard floors, but the Kmart model is bottom of the pack, scoring only 58.
To put this in context, the average score for hard-floor cleaning for all the robot vac models we’ve tested is 91! The next worst model to Kmart’s managed a reasonable 71.
It’s also woeful on carpet.
Granted, most robot vacs struggle on carpet – they can’t maintain enough suction and move at the same time as they agitate the fibres to release dust. Our average carpet cleaning score is 31 for the robot vac models we tested, and the top score is only 49.
However, the Kmart robot vacuum only managed to score 9 for carpet cleaning. And it’s not very good at picking up pet hair, either.
There is very little intelligence with this Kmart bot. It just bumps around, running in a back and forth routine, with no regards to the shape of the room. It also misses large areas when cleaning, so it’s not surprising it scores so poorly.
What about mopping?
Guess what? The Kmart robot vac is pants at mopping too, scoring 20, the joint lowest in our test.
The mopping unit is a separate bin that needs to be installed first, but the robot doesn’t know when it’s installed, so will carry on its cleaning routine regardless, including mopping your carpets!
This highlights a big issue with the Kmart robot vacuum – it has no mapping function, so you can’t tell it where your carpets are and it can’t detect them, either. It also leaves a lot of water on the floor, especially on the highest setting.
The app
The Tuya Smart App that the Kmart Robot Vacuum uses is very basic, with only a few cleaning options. While the bot is cleaning, the app shows a map, but this is never saved or editable, so is pretty useless.
Should you buy the Kmart Robot Vacuum cleaner?
No.
