ILIFE Shinebot W450 Vacuum Mop Robot Cleaner, Wet Mopping, Floor Washing and Scrubbing, Smart Mapping, Wi-Fi Connected, Works with Alexa，XL Water Tank, Zig-Zag Cleaning Path, for Hard Floors only

I have owned the Shinebot W450 for just over a year. It is a very cleverly designed product. I like that the mop has a clean water / dirty water tank and actually sprays water/detergent and sucks it back up.The bot can be programmed to make multiple passes and remembers where it starts so that it will mop only in front of the start position. I use this to clean without having to shut the door to trap the robot. I like to set the mop for "three times clean" and one drying pass. I enjoy emptying the dirty water out of the tank and seeing how much dirt came up off my floor. This mop works well. I use it on hard wood floors and on tile.The application which controls the mop has a nice map feature and extra programming. This is where you can add a drying pass after cleaning passes.I have two problems with my mop.First, the clean water tank sensor gets wet and the mop will stop with a water tank problem. The solution is to put a piece of plastic bag over the sensor contacts when installing the tank. This stops the mop from the false alarm and as long as you watch the water level, the mopping continues.Second, the black/white front wheel has fallen apart. The black rubber bits just crumbled and fell off. I've put black tape in place of the rubber but the mop stops from time to time with a wheel error. ILIFE is unresponsive. I e-mailed the support contact on August 1st of 2023 (almost 4 months ago) and have had no response. I can not find a replacement for the wheel. This makes my mop hard to depend on.Lastly, here are two things I learned.1. If you can not get the ILIFE cleaning solution. Bissel hard floor cleaner (Walmart) works well.2. If you leave the mop on charge for too long, it will turn off and lose its charge and not be ready when you need it. Press the power button the night before you use it and it'll have the charge needed the next day.UPDATE: The day I posted this review I also put in a support request on the Ilife web site about the wheel that failed. I had an e-mail response the same day and a replacement part arrived within a week. That was good service.

Wow, this turned out to be a bit of a novel. Hope it helps...To paint this picture, I've had a few Roombas and a Scooba a while back before they gave up their ghosts and IRobot discontinued the best robot mopper made. I have a Roborock S6 MaxV (always makes me think of Daft Punk), and frankly didn't think it was close to Scooba's mopping capability. IMO, if your mopper doesn't pick up the dirty water, it's just a glorified paper towel distributing your dirtiness as evenly as possible over your whole floor surface. Hard pass, but the S6 is still really good as a vacuum.After getting two boarder collie mixes for a house with a back yard that's far too small for them, they reduced the grass to just dirt, and now my climate's wet winter has turned the hard floors to an awful tragedy of muddy paw prints. To dry my wife's tears over swiffering daily (I help by vacuuming manually first), I got this thing. I picked the W450 over the 400 because 3rd party reviews said the extra features were worth it. The feature that sold me was wifi connectability (meaning app) that exposed more controls to make it work better, like maps. More on that later, but spoiler, it was worth it.Now to the robot. Setup wasn't too bad. The paper manual was sort of informative, but contained less than 50% of the info I expected, which after using the robot a few times, I kind of know my expectations were a little high (there's more than a few signs this product could use more development time). It took me a few passes at getting the robot connected to my network, but that was on me, I didn't read the instructions very closely (only supports 2.4 GHz).The charger is not one the robot can drive to dock on. It's part charger, part drip pan. Ok, I guess. I got it for mopping, which with all the manual steps of filling and draining and cleaning, I can get passed picking it up to put in the rooms I want to clean.Watching it drive is a little painful to the eyes. It's like watching a drunken zamboni driver, except much more adorably miniature. Setting the thing to drive straight on it's zigzag mode is something I haven't mastered yet. Crooked to the room, it seems, is the default. It also does not drive in particularly parallel lines. I've noticed this simultaneously double covers and misses 2-3 ft lengths of the floor. Luckily with the app, you can set the robot to do up to 3 passes, provided your room isn't too big for the clean water tank, or the battery (as I've learned).The first cleaning was... underwhelming. Technically, the floor was cleaner. I did get full coverage in a non-rectangular room with a pool table, foosball table, and other things along the perimeter. I saw a lot of dry spots where no water was released, wheel scuffs, and a lot of dried diagonal pattern from the brush. Part of it I can blame on myself. The floor is LVP ("luxurious" vinyl plank) and it's particularly dark for a grey wood design. This shows the slightest bit of dirt and scratches. (Oof on that choice.) My first mistake was setting the zigzag perpendicular to the planks. All follow up tries have been in parallel, which has been far superior in showing less of the robot’s... artifacts.Things also got dramatically better once I monkeyed with the settings in the app. I've seen reviews that say those settings are available from the remote, but the app is FAR more intuitive and fine grained. With the app, you can control the robot's drive speed, amount of water... squirt, and brush rotation speed. With no documentation about how best to optimize the three, I'm still dialing in the performance. What I have learned is, slowing down the robot helps immensely. Setting it to its slowest speed means more water can be piddled out, curing dry spots, and the brush rotation per square inch can be maxed out, curing the dried brush pattern. This affects water to full room pass ratio (I had to dump and refill before the room was done), as well as battery usage (only got 2 passes on my biggest room where I did get 3 before). However, a higher quality room pass means fewer passes needed. I’ll figure out what settings can do the whole room in one tank, and leave it looking the least like a lazy robot did it in a hurry.Other notes, that room I mentioned is reported in the app as approx 425 SF of driven surface area. Because the zigzag only starts as a 12 foot length, then turns around, it has a little gap in coverage between the next 12 foot zigzag area it starts after. That room has 3 zigzag zones if started in the corner. To prevent "burn in" in the same parts of the floor, I set the robot in a different place, which produced 2 full zigzag zones and 2 partials, using more battery in driving around to do the same job. I finally noticed, after the first room pass, it appears the map borders have been defined and that 12 foot limitation seemed to go away. You can tell the LIDAR and edge finding algorithms of smarter robots really raises the quality of navigation in those devices. This robot isn’t as random and bumpy as the first gen IRobots, but it’s not as good as the other $300 robots either.I find it hard to believe the zone drawing capability works well if the app doesn’t save the maps. I’m lucky that I don’t have actual no go zones and my floor was installed to be completely one level flat. To contain the robot to the rooms I want cleaned, I use one inch thick curtain rods I can adjust to my doorways, or just use the items I have to move out of the room anyway to block the doorways. It’s a workaround that doesn’t diminish my experience with the robot, but doesn’t improve it either.When watching the robot turn when next to table legs makes me think the programming was borrowed from a different robot that was completely round. This robot has flared out sides so that the brush can be wider. I don’t mind that, but when it does its 3 point turn in reverse maneuver, the robot rubs the flared part of its body like a teenager trying to parallel park, scraping other parked cars. I suspect that deviates the robot’s perceived location in the map its always recreating.Last nit, you can’t see what percent the battery is. This bugs me. Seems like a table stakes feature for any 21tt century device that can recharge.Other reviews say this works better for small rooms. It certainly couldn’t do a whole house in one try, and do a very good job. This mopper robot shouldn’t be compared that way, its strength is in pulling up the dirty water and leaving a cleaner floor without you putting your back into it. If you can deal with the literal hand holding this mopping robot requires, can be bothered with fine tuning its behavior, and the lady’s voice with a Chinese accent doesn’t trigger you for whatever reason, this is a really good mopper robot. I believe if the next model can iron out the kinks and the user experience gets raised to what you can buy at Best Buy, it could be the next Scooba.