Tested: Tapo RV30 Plus | The robot that washes honestly, but at a high price

It will never replace a good cleaning done by a motivated human, its programming is sometimes capricious, but the Tapo RV30 Plus smart vacuum cleaner and mop will make your home cleaner than ever without much effort.

WE love

The Tapo RV30 Plus robot, from the manufacturer TP-Link, is a vacuum cleaner in the shape of a large black and white washer, with a diameter of 341 mm and 95 mm in height. At the front, a small rotating brush that protrudes allows it to extend its reach and bring dust and small debris back to its main brush.

A compartment at the back can contain 300 ml of water, which soaks a fabric fixed with Velcro that must be cleaned after each use. This set adds a mop function to the Tapo RV30 Plus. The charging station to which the robot automatically returns also allows it to empty. It takes months of daily cleaning – 70 days, according to the manufacturer – before you have to change your 4-litre bag.

Now let’s talk about his intelligence.

After downloading the app tapo, configured its account and added the RV30 Plus, the robot performs a first mapping of its new playground. Nice surprise, it is silent, barely 55 dB, less than a microwave. This robot is equipped with a Lidar which allows it to have better precision, even in the dark.

You can thus create three maps, one per floor, for example, which you can then edit with the names of the rooms. It will then be possible to launch a cleaning for a single room or for the entire floor. “Virtual walls” and “no-go zones” can be added to the map if the robot risks getting stuck in a jumble of cables or getting stuck somewhere.

So what is he worth as a domestic helper? In our first experiences, it constantly got stuck in two places and could not cross two thresholds, those giving access to the entrance and to the kitchen on the ground floor. It was therefore necessary to prohibit him from these areas in the maps. It is also necessary to remove from its path all the bags, shoes and boxes lying around. Once these preliminaries were settled, we had the great pleasure of seeing him prowl everywhere, slipping between the legs of chairs and under the sofa to do a very respectable cleaning. It can be tracked on the mobile application, which shows in a pale area the places where the robot has passed.

It goes into turbo mode when it passes over a carpet and has cleaned 95% of the space adequately. It’s no mystery he can’t go anywhere that doesn’t have at least 35cm of space. The plain water wash does an honest job, but not as flawlessly as a mop, human arms, and some detergent.

In theory, several operations can be triggered with the voice assistants Alexa and Google Assistant. We managed to start and stop it (by making it return to its base) this way, and that’s it.

We love less

Programming the RV30 Plus gave us some trouble. For example, he decided after half a dozen passages to no longer clean a quarter of the dining room. We had to erase the map and ask him to rediscover the whole ground floor.

Our main floor with its two steps and its three pieces caused a lot of headaches for our robot, which had to be helped to cross.

Our RV30 Plus repeatedly got stuck under a piece of furniture that barely allowed it to pass through, and fell down a flight of stairs after catching the rollers in a towel on the floor. A virtual wall solved the problem.

At $899.99 exclusively at Best Buy, the RV30 Plus is expensive. However, it is in the good average price of robot mops, some models of which retail for up to $2,000. Note that the RV10 Plus, a little smaller with the same functions, sells for a more reasonable price of $599.99.

One buys ?

We can debate for a long time the relevance of paying so much for a food processor. Some find them useless, others love them. Despite some bugs and its limitations, our test overall was rather appealing to us: it’s a well-designed device that gave us a cleaner ground floor than ever. It takes a good learning curve to set it up, make sure there are no obstacles in the way, but it does its job well.