The sales pitch for a base station is that you stop touching the dirt. True, and incomplete. The base is
now the part you maintain, and it maintains itself out of something you buy.
That is why this page sorts on durability rather than suction. Over one floor these four are hard to tell
apart. Over three years they diverge on bags, pads, mineral scale and who answers when something breaks.
Two kinds of consumable, and they are not equivalent
A bag is a scheduled purchase with a part number. A pad is a washable item that degrades slowly and gets
replaced when you notice it has gone hard. The bagged machines here cost money on a calendar; the pad
machines cost attention, which is easier to defer and easier to get wrong.
The Shark is the odd one out. Its base empties into a bin rather than a bag, so nothing gets reordered,
and the mop pad is not automated at all. You fit it, you cook a floor with it, you take it off and wash
it. That is a real chore added back in exchange for a running cost of zero.
Water is a consumable too
Anything that washes pads has a clean tank, a dirty tank, a float and a heater. In hard water all four
scale. The Ecovacs and the iRobot both hide this behind an automatic cycle, which works until the level
sensor reads through a crust and the dock decides the tank is full when it is not.
The repair route is the spec nobody prints
iRobot, Shark and Samsung all sell parts into US channels, and Samsung will take the machine at a service
center. Ecovacs is a shipping label and a wait. Given that these machines are mostly dock, and the dock
holds the pumps and the heater, that difference decides the fourth year more than any pascal figure does.
Questions people ask
- Do self-emptying docks have to use the manufacturer's own bags?
- For the bagged stations, effectively yes. The bag seats on a molded collar with a sliding shutter, and third-party bags that fit the collar often miss the shutter geometry, which leaks fine dust back into the base. Treat the bag as part of the machine's running cost and check that the size is still listed before buying, because a discontinued collar ends the station rather than the robot. Bagless bases sidestep the question entirely and hand you a bin to empty instead.
- How often does a mop-washing dock need its water tank cleaned?
- More often than the manual suggests if your water is hard. The clean-water tank grows scale on the float and the level sensor, and the dirty-water tank builds a film that smells within a week in a warm room. Rinse both when you refill, run a descaling cycle if the machine offers one, and pull the tray under the pads out monthly. A dock that washes and dries pads is a small appliance with standing water in it, and it wants the same attention a kettle does.
- Is a bagless self-emptying base better than a bagged one?
- It is cheaper to keep and messier to use, which is the whole trade. A bagless base drops debris into a bin you tip out yourself, so you meet the dust again at emptying time and there is nothing to reorder. A bagged base seals it away and asks for a part number several times a year. Choose bagless if the running cost matters or if allergies are not the reason you bought the machine, and bagged if the point of the purchase was never handling the dirt.