Tackle and remove thick household stains on all kinds of hard floors, including sauces, paint and footprints with iLIFE Shinebot W400 Floor Washing Scrubbing Robot for Hard Floor. It has one 0.85L water tank to spray clean water and one 0.9L water tank to collect dirty water. This greatly improves the cleaning efficiency and properly collects the dirty water for easy disposal. iLife, a popular robot vacuum brand, recently came out with the W400 Shinebot Floor Washing Robot. It’s different from many mopping and sweeping robots because it scrubs the floors with clean water, and then it sucks up the dirty water. I tested the W400 for 80 hours to see how well it performs. Find more in iLIFE Shinebot W400 review.
iLIFE Shinebot W400 Floor Washing Scrubbing Robot for Hard Floor review
Design and size
- Dimensions: 11” W x 11.5” L x 4.6” H
- Weight: 7.3 pounds
- Warranty: 1-year limited
A sleek black body with silver accents houses a transparent panel on the bottom half that shows the microfiber roller and water tanks. A fold-down carry handle fits smoothly into the top. Three buttons on top allow you to select a cleaning mode, begin cleaning, and activate or deactivate the voice alert. There’s also a remote control with the same functions.
A multi-function panel on top of the robot includes controls for starting and stopping cleanings, switching between the four cleaning modes (more on that in a bit), and getting voice alerts on the robot’s status. A pair of indicator LEDs track battery and water levels. Mercifully, a retractable handle is included beneath the panel to make it less laborious toting the Shinebot W400 room to room. Reveal more in iLIFE Shinebot W400 Floor Washing Scrubbing Robot for Hard Floor review.
The Shinebot W400 uses a rapidly rotating microfiber brush and a scraper to scrub and remove dirt. Inside the robot, a pair of tanks with individual inlets and outlets keeps clean and dirty water separated. It’s worth noting that you cannot add detergent to this machine’s clean water tank. A dozen anti-collision and anti-drop sensors positioned around the robot enable it to safely navigate your household terrain.
The robot comes mostly assembled and ready to roll, along with several accessories. These include a charging dock and power cable, a remote control that includes most of the functions of the robot’s control panel, a replacement microfiber roller, and a cleaning tool.
How does iLIFE Shinebot W400 work?
The mostly round W400 measures around 4.5 inches high and 11.0 inches across, allowing it to easily navigate around furniture. Its design is more practical than aesthetically appealing, which is fine.
The mop has two tanks, one for clean water and another to collect dirty water. The clean water tank has a 0.85-liter capacity, almost tripling that of the iLife V8s. It dispenses clean water on your floor from the bottom, so you don’t have to worry about it spraying in front of where it rolls and potentially getting your furniture wet. Also on the bottom, there’s a microfiber roller that scrubs the floor, and a rubber scraper to wipe off residue. Dirty water is sucked back into the robot as it rolls along.
The W400 cleans with tap water, and iLife advises you against adding detergent or any other type of cleaning fluid. This is pretty standard for robot mops in this price range. In the age of COVID-19, however, cleaning with just water might seem futile. But if you don’t necessarily care about sanitizing your floors, and just want the dirt and smudges off of them, the W400 proves tap water works.
There are four cleaning modes, including Path mode for cleaning large spaces up to around 400 square feet, Area mode for cleaning smaller rooms up to 270 square feet, Spot mode for stubborn dirt, and Edge mode for borders and corners. In Path mode, the robot follows a methodical cleaning route. Once it reaches a wall, it rotates 90 degrees, moves forward a bit, rotates another 90 degrees, and keeps going, making straight lines like you would when cutting grass.
How to prepare for cleaning with iLIFE Shinebot W400?
Setting up the W400 is simple. You plug the charging dock into the wall, fill the clean water tank and click it into place, then set the robot on its charger. You have to put the charging dock on a flat surface, somewhere safe and away from water and exposed electrical sockets.
To prepare your space to be mopped, you need to move any fragile items or things that can get tangled up in the robot while it’s in motion. I made sure to remove my dog Bradley’s toys from the floor and pull the chairs away from my dining room table, like I do when running my robot vacuum. Also be sure to sweep the floor or otherwise clean it of debris before running the mop.
Before starting a cleaning job, you must take the robot off of its charger and place it where you want it to begin mopping. You can start cleaning by pressing the buttons on the top of the W400 or on the included remote. As mentioned, it doesn’t feature app support or voice control.
Cleaning
The W400 is ideal for tiled, wooden, or composite floors, and uses a four-step system to clean as it moves. First, it sprays down water on the floor, after which the fiber roller scrubs away to remove dirt and stains. A powerful vacuum then sucks up the dirty water off the floor, after which a squeegee scrapes away any residual water.
While we were skeptical at first of the W400’s cleaning capabilities with just using water, our doubts were soon put to rest once it started cleaning. Dried up ketchup stains, spilled coffee, and even dog slobber from a canine visitor earlier in the week were all easy to tackle by the W400. The device really does do a good job of actually getting the muck off your floors in a single pass.
As mentioned before, a full water tank will let you clean about 35 square meters of space. You can proceed to clean another space on the same battery charge, but the W400 will prompt you to clean out the tanks first before doing so.
Cleaning the tank is simple: just open the discharge spout to pour out the dirty water, rinse both tanks with clean water, and you can fill it up again for another cleaning cycle.
The W400 isn’t something you’d want to turn on and walk away from, though. At one point during testing it tried to go under a kitchen storage unit and got stuck, and in other instance it bumped into a laundry stand and got one of its wheels stuck. Because there’s no app support, you won’t get alerts if the W400 runs into an issue with cleaning if you’ve set it off as you leave your house, so it’s best to quickly run this when you’ve got a spare bit of time on the weekend.
Overall the W400 cleans quite quietly, with just a gentle humming noise that’s easy to drown out with a pair of headphones or even just the sound coming from your TV.
The only sticking point with the W400 – which runs true to most floor mopping robots – is that you can’t use detergent with the water tanks. iLife strongly advises against adding any kind of cleaner to the water tanks, as this can build up residue inside and damage the water outlets.
It’s a real shame, because for most of us, mopping the floors involves using some sort of floor cleaner or anti-bacterial agent. Mopping your floors with water may clean them up, but they certainly won’t be free from bacteria. A suggestion might be to spray a mild floor cleaner or anti-bacterial solution on the floors prior to letting the W400 mop it all up, but again we’re not sure what this might do to the W400’s internals.
The other point to note is the W400’s size – it might not be able to get under certain kitchen cabinets, and definitely can’t manoeuvre the tight spaces near a toilet, so you’re still going to top up these areas manually with a mop. Another area to address is that the W400 doesn’t properly hit corners when cleaning, so again if you find dirt accumulating here, you’re going to have to bust out the mop.
The lack of any kind of app support also means that you can’t let the W400 run around in mixed spaces that have carpet for example. You’re again going to have to manually mop these areas yourself or remember to move everything out of the way before the W400 starts cleaning.
iLIFE Shinebot W400 Floor Washing Scrubbing Robot for Hard Floor performance review
In testing, the W400 cleaned for up to 130 minutes on a charge. That’s a solid result, beating the Ecovacs Deebot R95 and the iLife V8s, both of which clocked 90 minutes, but falling short of the Braava Jet m6, the Roborock S5, and the iRobot Braava 380t, all of which lasted 150 minutes or more. After running out of juice, the mop takes about 3.5 hours to fully recharge.
The W400 is fairly quiet and didn’t disturb me much. It’s around the same volume as a microwave. You can still have a conversation or watch TV while it’s cleaning.
As it goes along, it leaves wet spots on the floor, more so on tile than on completely flat surfaces like laminate. On tile, the wet spots are more like small puddles, and not a uniform coating as if you mopped by hand.
When it reaches a rug, the W400 usually turns in the other direction. It did roll over a low-pile doormat and get it a bit wet, but it didn’t roll over my living room rug.
Several times in testing, the robot got caught in the transition strip where my tiled kitchen floor meets the laminate in my dining and living room. In some instances, it was able to traverse the transition strip on its own, but left a puddle in its wake.
I tend to helicopter parent robot vacuums and mops, and want to help them out of every pickle. That’s a personal issue I’m working on. If I sit back and let the robot do its thing, it can usually get itself unstuck, as is the case with the W400.
One time, though, it spent a fair amount of time stuck in the aforementioned spot between my kitchen and dining room, and I felt that was wasting battery, so I decided to help it out. If it really needs your help getting out of a jam, the robot will beep, as it did another time when it was stuck in the same spot.
After getting stuck on a test run, the W400 said “cleaning finished” after just 22 minutes into the job, when it was nowhere near done. I repositioned it in an area it hadn’t yet covered, pressed the start button, and it got back to work.
Around 75 minutes later, it told me to check the clean water tank, which turned out to be empty. As I went to refill the clean water tank, I noticed how brown the water in the dirty tank was, and was genuinely impressed by just how much dirt it cleaned that I was otherwise unable to see.
The olive-gray tile in my kitchen masks dirt a lot better than the lighter laminate flooring in my dining room and living room, so I was eager to see how the robot would perform on the latter. When I inspected its work on the laminate, I was very impressed. After one cleaning session, both the laminate and tile looked and felt notably cleaner.
Down side
The downside is that the W400 might not be able to clean all areas of your home, due to its simple pathfinding and obstacle avoidance skills, so you shouldn’t throw out your mop just yet. The inability to use any kind of floor cleaner is also an important point, since there are plenty of households who wouldn’t want to mop their floors with just water.
If you’re after a no-frills robot floor cleaner that’s good for large open spaces, then the iLife W400 will be more than happy to mop up all of your messes.
Price and availability
The iLife W400 retails for $249.99 (around £200, AUD$355) and is available via Amazon. That’s quite a bit cheaper than say the iRobot Braava Jet M6, which retails for around $499.99 (around £400, AUD$711).
If you’re ordering outside the US, you’ll want to go through AliExpress, which ships from various suppliers in the EU and Asia (you’ll want to ship from Spain for UK delivery). The Amazon UK listing is around double the price at £419.