iLife V5S Pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping review

If you’re looking for an economic robotic floor and carpet cleaner, the ILIFE V5s Pro robot vacuum cleaner packs a good deal of power, functionality and advanced features. The best value for the price is its 2-in-1 cleaning function. Yes, the V5s Pro is both a vacuum and a wet mop. Its four cleaning modes come in handy for customized cleaning.Get more in iLife V5S Pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping review. Here’s how:

• Auto Cleaning Mode – This mode is for when you want an entire room cleaned. It even changes its cleaning intensity as it goes along depending on the dirt, dust, etc., it encounters.
• Edge Cleaning Mode – The robot focuses on cleaning along corners and edges of walls.
• Spot Cleaning Mode – You can direct it to clean a particular spot.
• Schedule Cleaning Mode – You can schedule a time in the day when you want the robot to start cleaning.

What makes this robot floor cleaner a good value for the price, though, is its design and advanced features. They allow it to clean both floors and thin carpets.

In the box

Specifications – iLife V5S Pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping review

iLife v5s pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping review

Design

Without a doubt, the iLife V5s Pro is the cutest of all the robot vacuums we tested. It’s part of iLife’s “Beetles” series and features a subtle, iPhone-Gold-esque plastic lid surrounded by white and black casing and bumpers. I didn’t fully appreciate the “Beetle” moniker until the V5s Pro was roaming around my house.

Two small blue lights on either side of the Clean button give the vac an impression of a whimsical, round bug running around and tidying up the house. We couldn’t help but feel that the V5s Pro had more of a personality than the other robots we tested – surely due to its glowing “eyes.” Though the white-lidded iLife V3s Pro shares the same design, the V5s Pro still struck us as being more whimsical-looking.

The iLife V5s Pro differs from similarly priced robot vacuums like the Shark Ion R85 and the Eufy RoboVac 11s in what it’s missing – a roller brush. Instead, the V5s Pro has two three-pronged brushes and a 3-inch wide suction hole that funnels dirt into the dustbin in the center of the vac. The side brushes sit near the front edges, just as they do on the RoboVac 11s.

At 3 inches high and with a raised lip on the front bumper, the iLife V5s Pro was just a little too tall to fit under the back of our low clearance couch – a feat easily achieved by the 2.85-inch high Eufy RoboVac 11s – but it did find its way underneath on the marginally higher side of the couch. The V5s Pro’s 11.8-inch diameter was almost an inch smaller than RoboVac 11s, which gave it a slight advantage snaking around chair legs and corners.

Cleaning modes

The iLife V5s Pro comes with several cleaning modes that you can activate using the included remote control or using the buttons on the robot.

Here are the cleaning modes:

• AUTO CLEANINGThis is the default operation mode. The robot chooses the best settings and mode depending on the type of floor it’s cleaning. It uses smart sensors to select an optimal cleaning path and avoid obstacles.
• SPOT CLEANINGThe robot moves in a spiral pattern around one area. This mode is ideal for cleaning areas of concentrated dirt.
• EDGE CLEANINGThe robot checks whether there are a wall and moves alongside it to clean the edge.

Navigation

Roombas come with advanced navigational capabilities that scan the size and shape of the room and memorize them for fast and efficient cleaning. The iLife V5s Pro is not as advanced. It doesn’t have smart room mapping sensors. Instead, it mostly relies on random movement to cover the entire floor, which means going over the same areas more than once.

As a result, it takes longer to finish cleaning compared with smarter robot vacuums. Thankfully, the battery is up to the task: it lasts up to 2 hours. When the battery gets low, you won’t have to bother taking the robot back to the charging base. It’ll find its way back automatically. Because it doesn’t exactly have the best navigation smarts, it may wander around for a few minutes before finding the charging dock.

The V5s Pro has an easy time getting over door thresholds and moving across different types of floors thanks to the large rover wheels. The robot rarely gets stuck; and when it does, it can usually wiggle its way out.

But keep an eye out when the robot is mopping. The wet floor reduces traction and can cause the robot to get stuck.

Some owners also complain that the robot tends to bump a bit too hard into furniture. But it usually doesn’t leave any marks thanks to the soft front bumper -although I’d recommend getting anything extra-delicate out of the way.

Also make sure toys, cables, clothing are cleared from the floor before the V5s Pro cleans. It can quickly get caught on small items.

Note that this robot vacuum + mop doesn’t use cleaning boundaries (walls, beacons, etc.). You will need to use a physical barrier or close the door if you want to confine it to a specific area.

But you don’t have to worry about the stairs. The V5s Pro has cliff sensors to prevent it from tumbling down the staircase.

Automation and scheduling

The iLife V5s Pro doesn’t have much in the way of automation. Its lack of WiFi means you can’t control it from your phone or using an Amazon Echo smart speaker.

But if you don’t need these smart features, the V5s Pro is an excellent choice. You still get automatic recharge and a convenient auto-clean schedule.

Note that it only has auto-recharge – there is no auto-resume. That is, it will not automatically resume cleaning where it left off after recharging. So if it hasn’t finished cleaning, you’ll have to restart it manually.

The scheduling feature is handy if you are not at home. Just set the robot to clean at a particular time every day using the remote.

The V5s Pro is quieter than most robot vacuums so you can schedule it to clean at night without worrying about it making too much noise.

Setup

Setting up the iLife V5s Pro to vacuum was remarkably easy. The plug that comes with the vacuum works with both the base and the vacuum. Should tragedy befall the base, you’re not left with a useless puck.

The V5s Pro is controlled via remote control, though the singular Clean button on the vacuum will start and pause a cleaning run. The button will also cycle through the different cleaning modes: spot, edge and whole floor.

iLife V5S Pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping performance review

The iLife V5s Pro turned in one of the best cleaning performances we’ve seen, but it’s also on the slow side. The overall cleaning score of 94.8 edged out our favorite overall robot vacuum, the Shark Ion R85 (94), owing mainly to the iLife’s ability to pick up dog hair. However, the iLife V3s Pro was an even more thorough cleaner, at 97%. In our lab tests, the V5s Pro vacuumed up 97.3% of all pet hair on hardwood and carpet, much better than the R85 (88%) and the RoboVac 11s (67.5%). However, the faster and less expensive iLife V3s Pro was the best overall performer, picking up an average of 99.5% of pet hair on both surfaces.

One disadvantage of the design of the iLife V5s Pro is that some of the debris it sucked up didn’t fully enter the dustbin. We sprinkled a thick line of bread crumbs along our floor; although the V5s eventually picked up most of them, the robot vac spit them back out the next two times we used it. We didn’t have this issue with its sibling, the iLife V3s Pro.

This bore out in our lab testing, too, where the iLife V5s Pro faltered when it came to picking up kitty litter. The vacuum picked up an average of 88.2% of kitty litter granules on hardwood and carpet, slightly less than the iLife V3s Pro’s 91.75% pickup average and much less than the Shark Ion R85’s average of 94%.

Aside from the kitty litter, the iLife V5s Pro performed admirably, picking up an average of 95.7% of the debris on hardwood, besting both the Shark Ion R85 (90.8%) and the Eufy RoboVac 11s (85%), but not the iLife V3s Pro’s near-perfect score of 99.8%. The V5s Pro was equally impressive on carpet, with a 94% average pickup rate, 7.3 points better than the RoboVac 11s, but slightly below the Ion R85’s 97.2% average. The V3s Pro narrowly edged out its sibling, picking up 94.2% of debris on carpet.

The iLife V5s Pro is certainly an eager, though exceedingly gentle, cleaner. Much like the Shark Ion R85, the robot was determined in its mission as it left the dock to speed around our floors. The sensors in the V5s Pro performed like those we’ve seen in robot vac that cost twice as much. The bot would approach a wall quickly, only to put the breaks on just before impact, which was most noticeable when the V5s Pro was avoiding our feet.

The robot vac routinely slowed and made a slight turn to avoid touching a foot with a bumper; it never once ran into us. Unfortunately, the sensors only seemed to be cautious around larger obstacles – the vac frequently bumped into the furry legs of our 55-pound dog. Our only complaint was that the V5s Pro appeared to fixate on certain areas, while only making just one or two passes in others.

As with many budget robot vacuums, one of biggest trade-offs is cleaning speed. The iLife V5s Pro was one of the slowest vacuums we tested, taking an average of 1 hour and 40 minutes to complete our lab tests. The average cleaning time of all the robot vacuums we’ve tested is 1 hour and 50 seconds.

The iLife V5s Pro was one of the quieter vacuums we tested, measuring 59.9 decibels. That’s nearly identical to the Shark Ion R85, and lower than the 11s (62.5 decibels). The device was noticeably quieter than the iLife V3s Pro’s 64.1 decibels. It was easy to have a dinner conversation while the V5s Pro wandered around the house; there was no need to raise one’s voice over the sound of the vacuum.

Mopping performance – iLife V5S Pro 2-in-1 robotic vacuum cleaner and mopping review

Though the iLife V5s Pro is touted as a robot that both cleans and mops, we wouldn’t purchase it for its mopping prowess. The vac comes with a half-moon, microfiber pad that sticks onto a thin piece of plastic, which has posts for inserting the pad on the underside of the vacuum.

Attaching the piece was easier than it was to affix the mopping attachment to the Roborock S5. This was also true of filling the water reservoir; on the V5s Pro, the water reservoir replaces the dustbin, the concept bein that the water will weep out of small holes and onto the microfiber pad. Our gripe with this system is the same one that we had with the Roborock S5: The pad never really got wet enough to make more than a few half-hearted damp streaks on our wood floors. Plus, there’s only so much cleaning benefit to tap water.

The iLife V5s Pro manual states that vacuum suction will stop when the water reservoir is inserted. We didn’t fully trust this magic and preferred Roborock’s mopping mechanism, which had a separate mopping setting.

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