Finally, Dyson Made a Floor Cleaner That’s Better Than a Mop
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Those who visit my home know I’m particularly neurotic about the cleanliness of my floors: If my socks accumulate any dirt inside, I know it’s time to clean again. I typically mop the floors at least once per week — plus a maintenance run with arobot vacuum-mop and occasional spot-cleans for dog-related messes. But as much as I love spotless floors, I must admit that I’d love to spend less time tending to them to achieve that, and I’d like to not worry that I’m just spreading dirty mop water everywhere (which is what even the most fastidious manual mopping always feels like). My trusty robot mops are good for touch-ups, but the technology is still not quite to the point where I’d trust them as my go-to cleaning method.
But two months ago, I got my hands on Dyson’s WashG1, the brand’s cordless upright wet cleaner, and quickly learned that it is the solution I’ve been looking for. Since I started testing it, my floors are the cleanest they’ve ever been, and I’ve cut down on my mopping time by a third.
It’s more than a mop
The WashG1, Dyson’s first dedicated wet floor cleaner, boasts a utilitarian design similar to its cordless stick vacuums with the addition of clean- and dirty-water tanks and a large cleaning base. The top of the handle has a small display that shows you how much water your mop is using or indicates when it’s in self-cleaning mode.
Before every cleaning session, I remove the WashG1’s water tanks — which is as simple as pressing a large button — and fill the clean tank with 90 percent water and 10 percent of a cleaning solution. When you turn it on, the cleaning head immediately starts rotating the brushes, both spraying water across the floor and sucking dirty water into the dirty tank as well as picking up any stray bits your vacuum or broom didn’t catch. It’s loud enough to hear it through your headphones but not as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
The base has two large brushes for cleaning hard surfaces. The brushes, which reach to the edges of the mopping base, are covered in microfiber and rotate in opposite directions to ensure as much dirt and debris are picked up as possible. Between those two brushes, there’s a tray to hold stray debris you may have missed while sweeping or vacuuming.
That’s the real magic of the WashG1: In addition to being a great mop, it has a simplified version of Dyson’s killer vacuuming tech to ensure your floors are spotless by the end of your cleaning routine. It isn’t meant to replace your stand-alone (or robot) vacuum, but it does help with picking up things your vacuum may have missed, like bits of cereal your kids may have dropped or clumps of pet hair. Every time I run the G1, it finds things to pick up, even if I’ve just finished vacuuming.
But it’s a pretty great mop, too
As for the mopping itself, I’m a huge fan, and it couldn’t have come at a better time in my life. There are four dogs in my house, and they’re currently in a turf war over my tile floors. At least four nights out of the week, I end up having to clean up my living-room floors from that day’s mess. It’s gross and I’ve had to use a lot of paper towels.
The WashG1 has been a godsend in reducing my stress every time I see another puddle of pee. Instead of running to grab a bundle of paper towels and a bottle of cleaning spray, I just have to yank the Dyson off its docking station, select the water level I want to use — there are three options — and run it over the puddle. If the clean tank doesn’t have any leftover water from my last cleaning run, I’ll refill it before getting started. It works as well as doing it by hand, and I don’t have to worry about washing my hands afterward.
For more regular mopping, I run the Dyson across my floors (my home is about 3,000 square feet), which takes anywhere from 26 to 40 minutes depending on how dirty the floors were to start. The WashG1’s battery can last up to 35 minutes, according to Dyson, and I find that popping the cleaner back on the charger for ten to 15 minutes is enough to finish up a longer job. When I mop by hand, it takes a little over an hour. I find with the WashG1 that I don’t have to go over the same spot as many times or with any pressure at all. I use anon-foaming cleaning solutionin addition to regular water because I like my floors extremely clean, but the WashG1 is designed to clean your floors without the addition of any extra fluids. Even without the cleaning solution, the WashG1 is surprisingly effective at scrubbing floors of caked-on dirt; I’ve never finished a mopping run without a full dirty-water tank; that’s including a run immediately following an old-fashioned manual mopping.
Best of all, it mostly cleans itself
Once you’re done mopping, Dyson recommends using the WashG1’s self-cleaning functions to remove any residual dirt from the roller brushes. It’s fairly quick — it finishes in only a few minutes — but it’s also quite loud. In my two-story house, I was able to hear it from upstairs while it ran downstairs, so I recommend doing this when nobody’s home or while you’re wearing a good pair ofnoise-canceling headphones.
Not all the maintenance is hands-off, though. After every mopping job, I remove the tanks from the WashG1 and empty the dirty-water tank into the sink. I could wait until the next time I clean, but I’ve found that the longer the dirty water lingers in the tank, the more it stinks (this is true of robot mops, too). After rinsing them out, I let them dry overnight to air them out.
Emptying the tray that holds all the vacuumed-up particles is simple — all you have to do is hold a button and slide it out — but it’s easily the grossest part of cleaning the WashG1. If the mop picks up pieces of cereal or clumps of hair, it all gets soggy, and sometimes shaking the tray into the trash can doesn’t remove everything, so I have to sweep it off by hand (which I prefer to do with a paper towel). It’s still better than having to thoroughly vacuum or sweep first before mopping by hand or having to deal with any debris that ends up in a mop bucket or stuck to a mop.
It’s the best and quickest way to get clean floors
For those who like extremely clean floors, the WashG1 is an easy sell. It’s faster than mopping by hand, it picks up more dirt, and its vacuuming function saves you the frustration of having to pause your mopping to sweep up some crumbs or small specks of dirt. If you mop your floors only once or twice per month, it may not be worth the $700 price tag. But if you’re spending more time cleaning up your messy floors than you’d like, the WashG1’s thorough mopping and convenient self-cleaning provide the most effective mopping I’ve tried to date; my floors have never been cleaner, and I never reach for my old mop.
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