Roborock Saros 20 review: can a robot hoover cope with a 1930s semi?

On day three Pauline started calling it Hilda. It mutters to itself when it climbs, she said, exactly like her Auntie Hilda going upstairs. By the end of the first week the whole family was using the name, including Alfie, who is six and now thinks all robot hoovers are called Hilda.

I didn't expect to get fond of a robot. For 19 years I repaired hoovers across South Yorkshire, and the robot ones that came my way had mostly been "retired" by their owners after a month of being rescued from doorways. Old houses beat them. Ours is a 1934 stone semi with five different thresholds, a step down into a quarry-tiled kitchen and a springer spaniel called Bramble who moults all year round, with enthusiasm.

The Roborock Saros 20 is Roborock's flagship for 2026. It launched in the UK at £1,299 and has since come down to around £999 to £1,099 on Amazon.co.uk and Roborock's own shop. I ran it for 44 days, logged every clean and measured every threshold with callipers before it was allowed near them.

Three things that set it apart

Every robot at this price picks up crumbs. Where the Saros 20 stood out was the awkward stuff, in three ways I noticed inside a week.

Legs, more or less. When it meets a sill, the body hitches itself up on its wheels and steps over. Roborock quotes 8.8 cm for two stacked thresholds. I don't have one of those. What I have is a lot of single ones.

A flat top. Most robots wear a little round laser tower. This one keeps its sensor inside the shell, so the whole robot is about 8 cm tall. Our settee has 9 cm of clearance. It was the first time anything other than Bramble's ball had been under there in years.

Pull. The quoted suction is 36,000 Pa. I've learnt to distrust big numbers on boxes. This time the carpet backed it up.

The spec sheet

Five thresholds, measured to the millimetre

Each threshold got the callipers first. Then I followed the robot round for its first six full cleans with a notepad, marking every pause, every retry and every time I had to step in. The full robot checklist is on our how we test page, but in a house like ours this is the table that counts.

The kitchen doorway is the one that had beaten a borrowed robot last winter. It would climb the saddle, tip nose-first onto the tiles and sit there spinning until someone came. The Saros 20 rolled over it like it wasn't there.

The utility step was the one I'd bet against. It reversed, hoisted itself up and went at it again, and on the second or third go it was over, sounding like somebody pull-starting a strimmer. Nobody would call it graceful. But it managed every single time, and it was never left stranded.

"I spent years telling people that robot hoovers and old Sheffield houses don't mix. I'll have to find something else to be right about." Clive, day 14

Carpet, tiles and a spaniel's worth of hair

First, grit. I worked 50 g of kiln-dried sand into the front room carpet with my heel, sent the robot round that one room on its strongest setting, then weighed what came back: 43.6 g. The stick I've been testing in the same house, the Dyson V16 Piston Animal, managed 46.8 g with three passes by hand. For a robot to finish within about 7% of a top cordless on carpet is a proper result.

Hair was the part I watched closest. Every Sunday Hilda went upside down on the kitchen table for an inspection. By day 44 the main roller was still clean. There were a few strands of Bramble tucked in at each end, which came free with a pinch. The little spinning side brush picked up more, as they all do, and needed thirty seconds with my fingers once a week.

Where it falls short is the dust box on board. It doesn't hold much, and in early September, when Bramble sheds his summer coat, it broke off halfway round the downstairs to go and empty itself. Nothing got skipped, it just took longer. Our downstairs is about 58 square metres, and a full hoover and mop took 71 minutes on average and used 49% of the battery.

Mopping old quarry tiles

I've never trusted robot mops. Too many of them are a wet flannel on wheels. This one pushes down on two rotating pads, and the right-hand pad reaches outwards to get in along the kitchen units and the skirting.

Quarry tiles are a hard test. They're porous, uneven and the grout lines sit low. Bramble comes back from the Rivelin valley with half of it on his feet, and the back door is where it lands. The paw prints were gone after every run. A dried ring from my tea mug, left from breakfast until four in the afternoon, took one normal run and one "deep" run on just that room. Gravy under Alfie's chair after Sunday dinner came up in one pass.

No robot scrubs grout, mind. Ours came up cleaner, not the colour it was in 1934. That's still a job for a stiff brush and a podcast.

Rugs stay dry, because it raises the pads when it rolls onto one. The front room carpet gets special treatment: Hilda parks the pads at the dock, does the carpet dry, then goes back to clip them on before tackling the tiles. Pauline watched this the first time and said it was like a man taking his boots off at the door. Six weeks in, not one rug had a wet patch.

Obstacles: socks, Lego and Bramble

Every robot box promises it will steer round your clutter, so I made some clutter. Three times I set out the same six things on the kitchen floor: a sock, a phone charger cable, Bramble's rope toy, a rubber dog mess from the joke shop, one of Alfie's Lego bricks and a hair bobble.

Out of 18 chances, it dodged 15. The Lego brick got bulldozed under the sideboard on two runs, and on one run the hair bobble got sucked up and ended up wound round the side brush. The rubber dog mess, it gave a wide berth every single time. In a house with a dog, nothing else on that list matters half as much.

Bramble was a different kind of obstacle. Springers are bred to flush things out, and for the first week he followed the robot from room to room, dropping his tennis ball in front of it as if it might finally play properly. On day 19 the app told me a mop pad was missing. I found it in Bramble's bed, slightly chewed, next to a very pleased spaniel. A spare pad came from Amazon.co.uk two days later, and the dock now lives behind a door he can't open.

The dock, and the cupboard under the stairs

You're paying for the dock as much as the robot. It sucks the dirt out of Hilda into a bag, scrubs her mop pads in water close to boiling, blows them dry and doses the cleaning fluid itself. The last robot we had through the house had a dock that smelled of wet spaniel by the third week. This one never did.

It's also big: about 49 cm high and nearly half a metre deep. In a 1930s semi the obvious home is the cupboard under the stairs. The ironing board and the old upright moved out, and the dock fits with room to spare. You do need about half a metre clear in front so the robot can line up, so the cupboard door stays open when it's due to clean.

When the dock empties the robot, it roars: 77 dB from a metre. Thankfully it's over in about ten seconds. Out cleaning on the middle setting, Hilda herself measured 56 dB, roughly two people chatting quietly. Running every day, the clean tank wanted filling and the dirty one emptying every three or four days.

Running costs, and what a repair man watches

Then there are the bits you keep buying: bags, pads, filters, the odd brush, and cleaning fluid if you use Roborock's. Going by how quickly our bag filled and the state of the pads at day 44, I'd budget £60 to £90 a year with a dog in the house. That's my guess from living with it, not something Roborock publishes, and a pet-free home will spend less.

I also put the dock on our plug-in energy monitor for a week. Heating wash water and drying pads is not free: 2.9 kWh for seven days of daily runs, about 73p at 25p per kWh. Not a lot, but more than people expect from a "charging station".

As a repair man, I like how it comes apart. The roller lifts out by hand, the side brush is held by a single screw, and the tray at the bottom of the dock slides out for a rinse. What I'd keep an eye on over the years is the climbing mechanism. Every threshold puts a jolt through those moving parts. After 44 days and, by my rough count, 260 climbs, it still sounded and felt tight.

Will it suit your home?

Alternatives worth a look

Roborock Saros 10R. Its predecessor. Same low shape with no tower, a similar hot-wash dock, less suction and a lower climbing limit. Prices dropped hard once the Saros 20 came out, and in a house without big steps it's the one I'd point a friend to.

Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Pro. Further down the range but it still hitches itself over ordinary sills, and the dock is good. It stands taller, so the lowest furniture is off limits, and the battery gives out sooner. For a typical semi with no stone steps, it's plenty.

A good stick for the weekend. Hilda can't do stairs, the car or the dog's bed, so the Dyson V16 still comes out on a Saturday. You'll find every score we've given in our reviews.

After 44 days

Hilda cleaned on 41 of 44 scheduled days. The three misses were the chewed mop pad, one day when I'd left the cupboard door shut, and one when Alfie had built a Lego wall across the hall on purpose, as a test. She got over every threshold we have and stayed on top of a dog who treats moulting as a career.

Pauline, who never liked robot hoovers, now taps the app on her way out to choir every Tuesday, so the floors are done by the time she's back. It's still a lot to pay for something that hoovers. But if robots have given up on your house before, this is the one that didn't give up on ours.

Your Roborock Saros 20 questions, answered