Dreame X40 Ultra Complete

It seemed to be a good time for an upgrade after almost 7 years with a non-smart vacuum cleaner. So in the end we bought an expensive - still with some Black Friday discount - robot vacuum cleaner. We didn’t actually plan for but got an offer from a friend to test his smart cleaning robot with floor mapping and such, last week after he upgraded to a new more intelligent version.
So after an evening of testing a Xiaomi Mi Vacuum Cleaner with a more or less good smartphone app, we followed the advice from a couple of colleagues and went full in with the Dreametech X40 Ultra Complete package. These naming schemes these days, crazy.
The X40 Ultra-Complete comes in a huge box. It contains the base station which is quite high, the robot, of course, and a big box of extras. Those from the complete set. Extra bottle of cleaning detergent, 10 extra cleaning mobs and spare side brushes.
The features itself are quite nice:
- Extendable and Liftable Side Brush
- Hands-Free Base Station
- Smart Mop & Washboard Cleaning
- MopExtend™ RoboSwing Technology
- 12,000Pa Vormax™ Suction
- OmniDirt Detection Technology
- Removable Mop for Carpet Cleaning
- Precision Mopping Strategy
Installation
The installation or setup was pretty straightforward. After unpacking all the parts, place the base station in an easy-to-reach position, plug in power, fill the water tank with fresh water and install the ramp in front of the base station. Next, we placed the robot in front of the base station and installed the application on the smartphone (Unfortunately, there is no dedicated app for a tablet as the smartphone app is just enlarged on the bigger screen). After installation was finished, you start the app and either login or create an account to set up the robot.
First Run
When finished with the initial onboarding process it is time for the first mapping and let the robot do its work. It was quite fascinating where the robot went and to see how the floor map in the app was growing. The robot is clever enough to detect obstacles, carpets and other things. But not everything goes right in the first run. On the carpet in the kitchen area the robot identified a lot of cables where no cables were. I hope this will go away in next runs. But as a colleauge of mine said, the robot is learning and is getting better and better over time.
A big advise is to make the floor robot save by removing as many obstacles as possible and just leaving the tables, chairs, sofas and such in place. By doing so a highly detailed map can be created and later the robot will navigate around new obstacles, but knows that there is something he has to clean when space is free again.