Review: Dyson’s $700 WashG1 Mop

Dyson’s WashG1 exceptionally mops and cleans up messes, but its ease of use ends when you need to clean it.

Courtesy of Dyson
Dyson WashG1. Courtesy of Dyson

I don’t know whether a $700 mop is more absurd than a $650 light, but Dyson will happily sell you either. They sound like a scam on the excessively rich, and you might expect them to arrive — encrusted with diamonds and gold — by chartered helicopter; but neither is so.

Instead, they’re an attempt at making the ultimate, no-compromises version of that product, price be damned. Last year, I tried that lamp, their SolarCycle Morph, and it’s an incredible thing, with a built-in wake-up light function, motion sensing, and light temperature natively adjusting to the light of your location. You can buy a $30 lamp, but it’s nothing like this. I can’t sincerely recommend buying a lamp like this unless you have the money to spare; but, then again, if I won a lottery ticket, I would fill my house with their lamps.

But what about their mop, the WashG1? Is it the ultimate version of a mop, and what does that even mean? And even if that’s so, if I won an unlikely parlay, would I buy it? Yes and no.

Dyson WashG1.
Dyson WashG1. Courtesy of Dyson

To start; calling it a ‘mop’ is to undersell what this is, as it’s closer to a wet vacuum cleaner. It puts down clean water as it moves along and simultaneously sucks up spilled mess and debris, separating solid pieces into a tray, which can be dumped in a bin, and dirty water into a second water reservoir. You can add a detergent to the water reservoir or use clean water, which is my preference. When you’re done, dump the dirty water down a drain, empty the solids tray into a bin, and refill the clean reservoir, and you’re ready to go.

Dyson’s demonstration involves pouring milky cereal onto the ground, and it handles this impressively. In a single pass, it disappears the breakfast mess with Hogwardian efficiency, and your floor is left sparkling. Repeated passes can remove more stubborn stains, and its 35-minute run-time and easy handling means I usually mop our entire flat whenever I spill something. It does a superb job in most circumstances, but don’t expect it to clean the grout of your bathroom tiles, and it’s disappointingly hard to get into corners or clean along edges.

Should it be able to achieve those things for the price they’re charging? Perhaps. After all, kitchen paper will clean up spilled cereal with similar ease and speed (albeit with more contact and less magic), so that shouldn’t be your selling point. But it does an incredible job at polishing up floors with minimal bother, and — as someone who despises mopping — the WashG1 is comparatively a joy to use. You press the on button, and it rolls forward, cleaning as it goes.

Dyson WashG1.
Dyson WashG1. Courtesy of Dyson

However, when cleaning the device itself, the WashG1 becomes a bit more cumbersome. The connective part of the two reservoirs is fiddly to use — and can leak water if you’re not careful — and the solids tray is a little more difficult to remove than I’d expect from Dyson.

On their vacuums, you press a button to remove the debris container, walk to your bin, and press a button on it to drop the contents into your bin. It’s frictionless and clean. By contrast, the WashG1 gathers its debris in a tray in the cleaning head, which you remove at the base — with a stiff press and pull — and then flip to put in a bin. This isn’t difficult, but it’s distinctly less pleasant, and a device that costs $700 should be pleasurable to use.

And once you’re done emptying it, you’re not actually done. You then need to set the device on a cleaning cycle, where it — somewhat loudly —runs water through itself to clean the workings, after which you empty the dirty reservoir and fill the clean one again. And you need to do this after every use. Skip it, and the G1 will become a mold farm.

If it were easier to empty the reservoirs and tray, and doing so wasn’t unpleasant, then I’d have no complaints about this convenient self-cleaning process. As it stands, the WashG1 may remove the chore of mopping, but it adds the chore of “maintaining the WashG1.”

It’s still the ultimate mop — it’s easy to use and cleans floors fantastically — but it’s not perfect, and I would advise any billionaire readers to wait before purchasing one. This is a Wash “G1,” and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a second-generation version fix the fiddly connection, improve edge cleaning, and replace the solids tray with a contained section. At that point, it might just be worth $700.


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