Photo: Supplied
Amazon Prime Day deals:
- Dyson WashG1 2-in-1 hard floor cleaner, $999 at Amazon
- Dyson WashG1 2-in-1 hard floor cleaner AND Dyson V8 cordless vacuum cleaner bundle, $1798 at Amazon
Alternative vacuum mops on sale
- Dyson V15s Detect Submarine wet and dry vacuum cleaner, $1549 at Amazon
- Tineco iFLOOR 5 Cordless Wet Dry Vacuum Cleaner, $598.38 at Amazon
It’s awkward when someone sends you a fancy appliance to try and you, erm, don’t like it. But I lived the horror when the generous folks from Dyson sent over their new, beloved, much Instagrammed ‘WashG1 wet cleaner’, a $999 mop which promised to leave my floors sparking and even pick up spilled bowls of cereal without breaking a sweat.
When I heard about the Dyson WashG1, I was instantly intrigued. I’m not normally the kinda gal who gets excited by domestic labour, but this mop seemed like a very chic thing to add to my cleaning arsenal. No unsightly mop and bucket. No Cinderella-style scrubbing on the old hands and knees. Just a bunch of outstanding features that would leave my floors clean enough to eat off.
Here’s the pitch: imagine a mop and a vacuum had a beautifully designed baby. The main event is a cleaner head comprised of two microfibre rollers that spin in opposite directions to suck up food, pet hair and other debris off the floor.
There’s a clean water container which is used to add moisture to the mop – no bucket required – and a dirty container that collects the stinky water and any wet mess on your floor. After mopping, I was to simply empty the debris tray, tip out the soiled water, give it all a rinse and voilà. The mop also promised to have a ‘self-cleaning’ function which sounded excellent.
Fortunately for me, but perhaps unfortunately for Dyson’s marketing team, I don’t regularly drop bowls of cereal on the floor. My husband and I are firmly in our DINK era, and the worst our floors cop is the occasional splatter from a simmering pasta alla norma or a splash of gin martini. So when the time came to test out this bougie mop, I knew I needed to put it through its paces by splattering my floor with some seriously tough stuff.
I dug through my (wildly unglamourous) fridge to find three things I could mop off the floor and see if the product lived up to the hype. And…well…it did not. Here’s what happened.
Dyson’s WashG1 wet cleaner review verdict
- Our rating: 4 out of 10
- Why we rated it a 4/10: It solved a problem I didn’t have and created another, but it did manage to mop up some pretty serious spills with astonishing ferocity. I gave it three more points for trying.
Pros
- Picks large chunks of food off the floor with satisfying ease.
- Looks quite chic – for a mop.
- Leaves the floor clean and only slightly wet.
Cons
- I couldn’t find the instructions so it was fiddly to put together. Was I supposed to search for the instructions online? I didn’t.
- It’s quite bulky and tall, which means it isn’t able to fit easily into a cupboard or under the bed or couch.
- At $999 (the recommended retail price), it’s a significant investment.
- Took longer to clean the mop than it would have taken to clean up the food mess using a more traditional method.
What’s so special about the Dyson WashG1?
The Dyson WashG1 is something between a mop and a vacuum cleaner, sucking up both wet and dry food, pet hair and other spills off your floor and leaving it clean and fresh. Unlike other mops which utilise a bucket of water which you dip the mop head into, the Dyson WashG1 uses clean water only on your floors, sucking up the soiled water into a container which you then tip out. It also has a ‘self-cleaning’ function (apparently – more on this later) and around 35 minutes of battery life.
How to use the Dyson WashG1
Let me start with a confession: I used it wrong at first. But the reason I did was because I could not see/find any instructions, as they are printed on the inside of the box. User error? Possibly.
Fortunately, the machine told me I was using it wrong by making an unpleasant noise and failing to work properly, so all’s well that ends well. Anyway, here’s how to use it correctly.
- Unbox it and put it all together. I did this without instructions and managed not to break it.
- Fill up the clean water tank with water. Note: the clean water tank is the top one with the blue lid, not the bottom one with the red lid. I learned this the hard way.
- Put the water container chamber in place, press the ‘on’ button and activate the mop by bringing the handle down towards you. (This will make sense when you try it).
- Clean up messes in quite a magical fashion. Feel like Mary Poppins or perhaps a wizard.
- Begin the extremely labour-intensive process of cleaning the water container, the debris tray, the rollers etc.
Results from our test
If you’re using the Dyson WashG1 wet cleaner to polish lived-on-but-otherwise-unsoiled floors, it absolutely does the trick, and does it well.
But the point of difference over a regular old mop, which you can buy for under $50, was its ability to clean up chunky, wet and dry debris quickly and easily. So that’s what I wanted to test. I put this baby through its paces by asking it to clean three pretty delicious-but-gross things off my floor; vegan mayo, crushed tomatoes, and some seriously chunky Korean kimchi.
The vegan mayo
I could have wiped this up easily with a wet sponge, but it was extraordinarily satisfying to mop it up and see it disappear before my eyes. Expletives may have been exclaimed aloud as I was recording this disappearing act. 10/10, no notes. At this point I am obsessed.
The crushed tomatoes
These were leftover from a pretty amazing curry I made and I didn’t want to waste them, so it made total sense I would pour them onto the floor and clean them up with a funky mop. The Dyson WashG1 made quick work of the quite substantial blob of tomatoes, and I was extremely impressed.
It was at this point that I started to notice the smell. It was VERY tomatoey in here. So what’s a girl to do but add something even stinkier to the mix…
The kimchi
Look maybe this was a bad idea. Kimchi smells, erm, pungent at the best of times. But I really wanted to put down something that was both wet and chunky to trial this thing, and this was what I had on hand. I was skeptical that the WashG1 could pick up this cabbagy mess, but it did! Easily! I was floored. My floor was floored. She shone!
The clean-up
Now it was time to clean the debris tray, and this was where things started to go downhill, and fast. Mayo and tomato and kimchi, oh my! As I pulled the tray out, the smell hit me like a brick wall. It looked horrible, like vomit. It escaped the tray and blobbed onto the floor. The orange liquid seeped out of…everywhere.
I cleaned the drip tray and the water container, but I still had a smelly mess on my floor, so I prepared the Dyson WashG1 again and started mopping it up. Yay, easy.
I cleaned the debris tray again. The process of cleaning made more mess. I mopped again, cleaned again, dripped again. And repeat. There were dangly bits of cabbage caught up in the microfibre brushes. Gah! I cleaned them off with a bit of paper towel. But when I tipped the mop head up to get underneath, orange liquid seeped out of…somewhere. I cleaned it up again.
I don’t want to labour this point because, honestly, I’m tired from all the cleaning. But it was an overall frustrating experience. And yes, a couple days later it still stank so I definitely didn’t get all the goop off/out of it. Sorry Dyson, I really tried.
How to clean the Dyson WashG1 wet cleaner
Dyson recommends rinsing the water containers after each use, cleaning the rollers, brushes and charging dock once a week, and replacing the microfibre brushes every six months, all of which seems reasonable but also, well, excessive.
Overall, is the Dyson WashG1 worth it?
For me, sadly, it wasn’t. I am willing to accept I may have failed the IQ test of finding the instructions, filling up the correct water container and even choosing appropriate food to mop up. But at the end of the day, the Dyson Wash G1 wet cleaner solved a problem I do not have (regular chunky food on my floor) and created a problem I very much did have (an appliance that needed a LOT of cleaning and still stank at the end of the whole palaver).
But if you have small and messy kids or pets, or love to test out the latest cleaning gadgets, you might find it worth your while. It certainly makes excellent content for Instagram.
Meanwhile, I’ll be over here with some good, old-fashioned paper towel and a sponge.
Where to buy the Dyson WashG1
Alternatives to the Dyson WashG1
While we only tested this Dyson, there are a few other options if you’re in the market for this type of cleaning appliance.
Shark Hydrovac Cordless in Charcoal Grey
$368 at Amazon
This floor cleaner vacuums and mops, with a self-cleaning feature and odour-neutralising technology that sounds very handy if you happen to spill vegan mayo, tinned tomatoes and kimchi in one go. It’s got an average of 4.6-stars from over 76 customers at Myer, too.
“Love this vacuum/mop combo. Love how clean my floors look and feel after using this. Dries quickly and minimal effort to clean it when finished using,” one customer shared in a 5-star review. But we did find a few recent 4-star reviews that mentioned long hair getting stuck. So if you have pets (or you’re Rapunzel), you might need to be a bit more hands-on with cleaning after using it.
Key features:
- Vacuums, mops and self-cleans
- Odour neutralising technology
- Includes 355ml of cleaning product
Also available at:
- $499, Myer
- $399.99, Shark
- from $369, The Good Guys
Dyson V15s Detect Submarine wet and dry vacuum cleaner
$1549 at Amazon
If you love the idea of the WashG1 but have carpeted areas, the Dyson V15s Detect Submarine is the perfect versatile cleaning solution that can handle both vacuuming and mopping across various floor types. Its advanced features make it ideal for comprehensive home cleaning, including a HEPA Filtration to capture fine dust and allergens, as well as up to 60-minutes of battery life. This model comes with three heads for different cleaning situations: the Optic Fluffy cleaner head, Digital Motorbar cleaner head and the Submarine wet roller head. It also automatically adjusts suction power based on the amount of dirt in a particular area, counts particles, and shows the data on an LCD screen, which is handy if you want to measure changes in cleanliness after using it.
Key features:
- Vacuums and mops hard floors, with self-cleaning features
- 750ml clean water tank capacity and a 580ml dirty water tank capacity
- Includes 236ml sample of Hard Floor Sanitise formula and 236ml sample of 236ml sample of Multi-Surface Pet Formula
- Up to 60-minutes battery life
Also available at:
- $1075 (usually $1649), Dyson
Tineco iFLOOR 5 Cordless Wet Dry Vacuum Cleaner
$598.38 at Amazon
Tineco’s iFloor 5 is equipped with an innovative flat scraper to clear away debris and squeeze out dirty water inside the machine so that the brush roller and your floors are clean. As well as a self-cleaning system, it automatically dries the roller afterwards, which would help reduce smells (and potential mould).
“The machine does not disappoint,” one Australian customer shared in a 5-star review on Amazon, where it has a 4.4-star average from over 170 global ratings.
“Battery lasts long enough for a double-storey house of 4 bedrooms. I do have to refill and chuck dirty water a few times,” they added, also helpfully noting “hairs and sticky dirt get picked up from bathroom floors with no issue.”
Key features:
- Vacuums and mops hard floors, with self-cleaning and drying features
- Two modes for different levels of mess
- Flat scraper keeps brush clean for more effective floor cleaning
