Ultenic T10 Pro review: A mid-priced vacuum loaded with extras

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

When you can’t decide between a good price or full features, consider the Ultenic T10 Pro. It offers vacuuming, mopping, and a self-emptying bin, and the app is loaded with extras.

Price When Reviewed

$399.99

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Retailer Price

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Ultenic’s T10 Pro is an affordably priced robot vacuum that comes with vacuuming, mopping, and a self-emptying dust bin, all at a surprisingly low price point.

The T10 Pro’s area-specific cleaning routines and detailed scheduling offer an automated approach to cleaning every room. While the robot lacks voice-assistant capabilities, it’s just as easy to touch and tap within the Ultenic app for whatever you need.

Design

One of the benefits of the Ultenic T10 Pro is that it comes with extras of almost everything. Inside the rather large packaging, you’ll find the following:

Measuring 13.5 x 3.5 inches (WxH), the T10 Pro is a sleek-looking robot with a white exterior. Its charging base features bold orange details on white, which appear modern but may not match every home’s color scheme. The charging base/dust bin measures just over 10 inches high.

The charging base has a black platform for the robot to climb up on during downtime, and this base sticks out quite a bit. We call it the “landing strip” at our house, because it does take up a fair amount of room.

A helpful light display changes colors depending on vacuum status. Green signals things are going well, while red denotes an error. In addition to these visual cues, the vacuum will vocalize its status and what it’s commanded to do next.

Setup

This vacuum came with a rather sizable user manual and a quick start sheet, which both directed us to the app for initial setup. After setting the vacuum on the charging base, it powered on and talked us through connecting to Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz only).

The app gave us notifications as we progressed through the quick onboarding. A handy FAQ section addressed some of the more common questions about room partitioning and scheduling, and when we used new features, little tour-guide graphics popped up to show us around.

Questions not addressed in the app were found in the manual, which had a table of common issues with solutions.

Room mapping

This vacuum starts mapping on its first cleaning, which means you don’t have to set aside time to scan each room before you begin. Using LiDAR tech, it can see even into places you don’t want cleaned, so be sure to shut doors to areas you want off-limits.

Linsey Knerl/Foundry

The partitioning features helped us break up large areas into smaller ones, but it only created 90-degree angle squares and rectangles. If we wanted to keep the vacuum out of an area, it had to be partitioned with this shape. There was no option we could see to create a single line or tilt the line at an angle for irregular-shaped “no-go zones.”

The app lets you store 5 maps and divide up each map into rooms and areas. After creating a room or area, we could customize cleaning regimens for each, including how much water to use during the mopping phase and how much suction to use when vacuuming.

Features

The Ultenic has four suction levels and defaults to the one it chooses based on the flooring; the highest is 4,000 Pa.

The T10 Pro also mops, utilizing two rotating mop heads that spin individually and “buff” out the floor as it puts down small amounts of water from a specialized compartment in the dust bin. When switching between vacuuming and mopping, we inserted two small buffer heads into the bottom of the dust bin and filled the tank with water. (The instructions suggest using deionized or demineralized water to prevent calcium or lime scale buildup over time.)

After mopping, the mop heads must be removed before the device can be used as a vacuum alone. The heads have cloth pads attached with look-and-hook fasteners that can be taken off, rinsed, and allowed to air dry before mopping again. (The vacuum comes with two sets of pads, so you can get to work mopping again while the first pair is drying out.)

The T10 Pro comes with a self-emptying dust bin that holds a replaceable cloth dust bag and has a UV cleaning light to help reduce germs and bacteria. The app sends a notification when it’s time to replace the bag.

We found the smartphone app to be very detailed yet easy to use. One notable app feature is a maintenance plan (a “consumables record”) that lists each of the parts, such as the filter, side brush, roller brush, and sensor, along with how much use they have left before they need to be maintained. The filter, for example, showed 99 percent left after two cleanings, with a reminder that it would need to be replaced after 149 hours. (Since the vacuum comes with a backup of many items, you won’t be caught off guard when it’s time to act.)

The Ultenic T10 Pro doesn’t currently work with voice assistants, such as Alexa or Google Home.

Performance

We tested the T10 Pro on low-pile carpet tiles adjacent to a higher-pile rug. When going back and forth between the two surfaces, it adjusted suction accordingly. After finishing our 96-square-foot room, we noticed some missed areas and quite a bit of cat hair left behind. We went into the app and manually adjusted the suction to run on the highest setting, and ran the vacuum again.

This time, the vacuum under a few pieces of furniture it didn’t the first time around and went in circles a few times. With a slightly different room map, it took around 11 minutes. The app measured the room at 118-square-feet this time, given all the detours.

Did it clean better on max suction? Yes, and we found very few missed areas, as well. While the app makes no distinction between the needs of pet owners and those without pets, we made a note to keep max suction on for all surfaces to ensure we got the best result.

We ran two additional tests on the carpeted surface. The first involved us pouring a half-cup cup of “o’s” cereal in the middle of the floor. The vacuum did strikingly well at this task, leaving just two pieces of cereal untouched. It ran over a few of the pieces and had to circle back, but didn’t crush it further into the carpet as we feared it would.

The rice test, which had us pour a third of a cup of uncooked white grains on the floor, also gave us great results. One reason the vacuum did so well was how it controlled its spinning side brush. When running along the edge of a wall, it increased brush speed to flick particles away from the wall. When sucking up rice in the middle of the room, it slowed the brush speed down to not fling the rice outside of its path. This thoughtful feature helped it pick up big particles instead of scattering them around on smoother surfaces.

Linsey Knerl/Foundry

The vacuum performed just as well on tile floor.

Mopping was a somewhat multi-step process, as you must first attach the mop heads with pads and fill the water tank. Since this vacuum doesn’t lift up the mopping pads in response to carpet, you have to set up “no go zones” to prevent it from taking the mop over areas you don’t want to get wet. It also performs a light vacuuming while mopping, but we didn’t see much debris in the dry dust bin after each mop, so I’m not sure how much of this is really happening during a mop cycle.

The manufacturer doesn’t share the speed or pressure of the mop heads, but after watching it work, it’s obvious that it pressed down quite hard on the floor’s surface. The floor looked shiny and barely damp after running it on all the water settings. With a floor that had little staining or surface debris, it made a quick water-only mop a very simple process.

It’s when we had some dirt (and in our testing, jelly) that things got sticky–literally. The vacuum almost completely wiped up a small smear of jelly on the floor during its first run, but we noticed a sticky film along a large section of the tile floor afterward (the jelly.) Since the mop came with another set of mop heads, we just replaced them and tried again.

This time, almost all of the jelly was removed, but the bottom of the robot, including the wheels and spinning brush, had hair and jelly on them. It took a manual cleaning to deal with the jelly. We likely would only use this device for light surface cleaning and no major spills, food particles, or pet incidents.

Linsey Knerl/Foundry

Remote

While using the remote isn’t something you may do often, this gadget has both an app-based and physical remote control option to choose from. We did use this more than we thought we would. The remote function did have some lag, and it’s not super-precise. But in the case of the rice and cereal tests, it was rather convenient to be able to send the robot out to scoop up a stray particle or two and not have it go through an entire run.

The manual remote made it easy to scoop up the few stray pieces of cereal or rice without having to do an entire second run. The remote function did have some delay, but once we got the hang of it, we were happy to have the freedom to send the robot out to a small area. This remote is essential for those who need their robot vacuum to be their only vacuum.

Noise

The Ultenic T10 Pro had one of the quieter motors of the vacuums we tested. However, the volume of the voice interface and musical chimes are rather loud at their default settings. We quickly adjusted these to the lowest setting from the app.

The loudest vacuum feature is the emptying of the dust bin which had a similar sound to a shop-vac or industrial fan. If you have scared pets or sleeping babies, turn off the automatic emptying after each cleaning and instead use the button from within the app to do it when it’s most convenient for you.

Dust bin

The self-emptying dust bin didn’t work well the first time we used it, likely because it sucked up so much pet hair on its initial run. It was to the point of overflowing, which made it difficult to make contact with the dust-bin opening.

After cleaning the dust bin manually, it had a much easier time after that. If we were to do a very large or dirty room again, we might break it up into smaller sections before trying to use the self-emptying feature. It also notified us that the dustbin was full during the first few tries, even though we had barely filled the bag. This error stopped after we opened the bin and removed the bag, then put it on again.

Obstacle avoidance

The LiDAR tech on this vacuum is impressive and has much less of the “bump-and-go” experience we’ve come to expect from vacuums. It rarely touched walls or pieces of furniture, even on its first run of a room.

It did find itself in a corner a few times, working so hard to avoid things that it moved in circles. While this is better than having a destroyed phone charger, it also made it difficult to have tables with odd-shaped bases or office chairs in the way. It wanted to go around and around the chair legs and seemed disoriented at random times on room maps it had handled previously with no problems.

The vacuum easily avoided our cats, a sock, and multiple pieces of furniture. When it got too close to a blanket hanging off the edge of a sofa, it sensed this and went around it.

This vacuum did go further under cupboards than we expected, getting a lot of the dirt that other vacuums wouldn’t tackle. However, when one of the cupboard doors was only slightly ajar, it moved out from under the cupboards completely, even with the door being well above the top of the LiDAR sensor. When choosing between caution and thoroughness, caution won out every time.

Battery life

The vacuum states a 4-hour, 10-minute run time, but we didn’t use it for more than 30-40 minutes at a time. The longest we let it run on the same charge was when mopping, which took longer than a typical vacuum session. We always used the vacuum on the highest suction setting and found it stayed above a 60-percent charge with no problems. We made sure to have it go back to the base after no more than three rooms at a time, as it charges fully in less than 6 hours.

Specifications

Should you buy the Ultenic T10 Pro vacuum?

The Ultenic T10 Pro is a mid-priced vacuum with plenty of bells and whistles, including wet mopping and a self-emptying dust bin. These high-end extras on their own make it a great value, and it’s fairly easy to set up and maintain this full-featured vacuum.

Of course, the T10 Pro’s surprisingly affordable price tag does entail some compromises, including the middling suction power (which, as noted earlier, caps out at 4,000 Pa), while the mopping will be iffy when it comes to big, gooey messes.

But assuming you use it for daily maintenance mopping and not as a replacement for cleaning up big messes, the Ultenic T10 Pro should fit 80 percent of your cleaning needs.