Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra

Design and features

• Multi-mop system to avoid cross-contamination
• Docking station carries a sizeable frame
• App is largely easy to use for newcomers

If you’re still gobsmacked by the Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra’s price then take a breath – the brand has made sure to cram as many features as possible into this thing to effectively take every conceivable cleaning task out of your hands, and you can tell as much by the sheer presence of the overall package.

The included docking station carries about the same size profile as a small fridge, at a height of 589mm, and a width/depth of 457mm/416mm. It’s far from unsubstantial, so you’ll have to allocate a decent amount of room for it to blend into the background. Unfortunately, my flat is short on space, which is why I had to place the dock underneath my desk, something I don’t recommend replicating unless you absolutely have to as it makes the process of accessing the internal components far more complicated than it needs to be.

Still, in spite of its housing, the robot vacuum itself isn’t quite as hefty, and the trim 89mm height meant that it could search for debris underneath chairs and footstools with ease. It’s also easy enough to pick up the vacuum if you need to move it or inspect the brush underneath, but its use of an anti-wrap design that allows hair to pass through into the bin means that it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to.

The Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra’s headline feature is its Multi-Mop system, which gives it the ability to swap between three pairs of mops when required. This happens when the vacuum is housed in the docking station as the mops are stored just within the door to the dock. The idea for this is that it avoids cross-contamination between rooms so you can have one pair intended for bathroom cleaning whilst another is meant for the living room. It’s all a great idea and one that makes a lot of sense, especially as you wouldn’t want a mess from the bathroom getting anywhere near your other floors. 

Alternatively, if you’d rather give you bathroom a manual clean then you can set it so that the vacuum swaps out for a new mop after a certain amount of time or space covered, but the best thing about it is that you don’t have to move a muscle for any element of this system to work, beyond initially loading in the mops during installation.

In fact, it’s the Matrix 10 Ultra’s approach to automation that, from my perspective as a busy dad with very little free time, is the best thing about it. The mops are swapped out and cleaned automatically, the dust and debris are emptied into a bag the moment the vacuum reaches the dock, and any dirty water is distributed to a separate container that’s easy to remove and pour down the sink. It really is the full package that you’d want from a robot vacuum, and in that regard I can’t fault it. 

What ties the whole experience together is the Dreamehome app which I hadn’t used prior to this review. Admittedly, the app’s various settings aren’t as clearly signposted as they should be, and it did take me a minute to find out how to customise the cleaning process, but after a few uses it started to come together. It’s easy enough to set no-go zones, which is essential in our flat as we have sensitive door stoppers which can lose their grip if nudged only slightly, and all of the floor types were correctly assessed and logged, which was helpful.

I do think that the mapping process could use a little work, as it was unable to pick up a decent chunk of our bedroom during the initial scan, and although the vacuum was able to clean the entire bedroom at a later date, the map wasn’t updated to reflect the area that it had previously missed. It would be great to see this added in to save having to redo the mapping process from scratch.

One new feature that I was unable to try out is Dreame’s ProLeap system which allows the vacuum to hoist itself over steps of up to 8cm for a dual threshold (4cm + 4cm). That should let it deal with a lot of transitions, and ProLeap can also be used to help the robot avoid sled-leg chairs.

Performance

• 30,000Pa suction power
• Mops can clean heavy-duty messes
• Unparalleled object detection

Even with all the bells and whistles that I’ve already mentioned, if the Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra wasn’t able to follow through with true top of the line cleaning performance then the whole thing would have been for nought. Thankfully, and certainly no surprise to existing fans of Dreame’s robot vacuums, the cleaning experience has been nothing short of excellent.

As we’ve had a small army of family and close friends coming to visit, I’ve set the Matrix 10 Ultra to work before each arrival and it’s made such a difference in ensuring that our floors look like they’ve been given proper care and attention as opposed to being considered an afterthought (which they largely were prior to each clean). In fact, what wowed me more than anything was the potency of the vacuum’s object detection.

As you can probably imagine, our floors are currently a mish-mash of loose charging cables, Amazon boxes, shopping bags and shoes but at every turn, the Matrix 10 Ultra has recognised them all and gone as close to them as possible without ever getting into a complication. It’s the type of technical wizardry that’s so impressive, I found myself just staring at the Matrix 10 Ultra in action as it went about its work. If you’ve been put off by the idea of buying a robot vacuum over concerns that you’d have to put things away beforehand, you don’t have to worry about any of that with this Dreame vacuum in tow.

In terms of raw power, you’re looking at 30,000Pa suction power, the same as what you’ll find on the similarly premium Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller Complete. Putting it to the test, I sprinkled a bit of flour and set the vacuum to clean it up at maximum power, hoping that I hadn’t just ruined the bedroom carpet.

Thankfully, the vast majority of the flour had disappeared after a single passover, and it was gone completely after a second run.

Moving things over to the living room’s vinyl floor, I sprinkled a bit more flour and also scattered a handful of loose brown rice. The flour didn’t stand a chance but the rice was a slightly trickier affair as the rotating arm brush sent some of the grains flying to other areas of the floor, which then needed to be tackled with a manual vacuum to make sure the job was done properly. Still, given that overall the vacuum performance is up to such a high level, this isn’t the worst thing.

Where the Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra really comes into its own is with mopping performance. To see exactly what these mops could handle, I set them against spills of soy sauce and ketchup in both small and large capacities.

On the smaller messes, I set the Matrix 10 Ultra on its default CleanGenius Vac & Mop mode which adapts to deliver the optimal clean depending on the situation at hand. After circling it for some time, somewhat unsure of what to do with it, the Matrix 10 Ultra did eventually make short work of the ketchup stain to the point where it was no longer visible.

The soy sauce on the hand was cleaned up quickly but there was a small bit left behind which could have easily been sorted with another passover (which is what I ended up instructing the robot to do in order to remedy the situation).

When kicking things up a notch to the big spills, I toggled the ‘Deep’ cleaning mode and increased the wetness of the pads via the app. The first passover was a mixed bag, as there was just a tiny amount of soy sauce remaining, whereas the more viscous elements of the ketchup stain were categorised as a pile of wires and subsequently avoided. The pads also made some of the mess worse by bringing it over to a nearby corner.

To the Matrix 10 Ultra’s credit, these were big spills, and the clean only involved a single passover. To set things right, I set the Matrix 10 Ultra to go over the spills two more times in the same run, keeping the ‘Deep’ cleaning mode going. At the end of this run, there wasn’t a spec of either mess, and aside from the faint smell of ketchup in the air, no one would have ever guessed that there was a mess to begin with.

The key takeaway from all of this is that the Dreame Matrix 10 Ultra is more than capable of tackling big messes, you just need to make sure that it’s instructed to go over them two or three times at one of the higher settings. Do that and you shouldn’t have any issues.

As a final point, Dreame says that the Matrix 10 Ultra can run for up to 260 minutes at a time, but I think that such a claim can only really be achieved under more conservative use. For context, after an 18-minute targeted vacuum and mop of the living room, which included scooping up the aforementioned small messes of flour, rice, ketchup and soy sauce, the battery depleted by about 18%. Still, that’s more than enough juice to get the vacuum through an entire home clean before needing to return to the dock.

Should you buy it?