Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner

Introduction

The Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner is a standard manual hard floor cleaner, designed to tackle very tough stains and reach areas that others can’t.

It’s more than just a regular floor cleaner, as it has a clever robotic arm that automatically lifts and lowers to improve suction power without risking pushing stains and objects around.

Design and Features

• Smart app
• Robotic Arm moves up and down to improve suction
• Works with detergent

A combination vacuum and hard floor cleaner, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner looks much like the competition, such as the GTech Orca or Shark HydroVac Cordless Hard Floor Cleaner WD210UK.

An upright cordless, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner sits at home in its deep charging dock. This dock is much bigger than I’ve seen before and is down to the hot air cleaning. On the Fast mode, the dock uses 90°C, which can clean the brush roll in just five minutes; at 85°C, it’s 30 minutes.

In either case, the fast drying helps prevent odour build-up and bacteria from growing on the brush roll. Hot air drying is quite loud, with the fan constantly running. I’d tuck this cleaner away in a cupboard to dampen the noise it makes.

This hard floor cleaner operates much like others that I’ve reviewed. There’s a 780ml water tank that sits on top of the floor head, which is an unusual place to put it. This can be topped up with Dreame multi-surface floor cleaner.

A full size bottle is included in the box, with 500ml replacements costing £11.99. As a capful of detergent is 10ml, each cleaning solution should last for 50 cleans, so it’s not too expensive to buy. Dreame only recommends that you use its solution.

It is a shame that there’s not a separate tank for solution, with the cleaner mixing with water automatically. This saves on detergent use, and was an option with previous Dreame hard floor cleaners.

The floor head contains a brush roller that can be removed for cleaning, with a spare provided in the box.

Rather than just moistening the brush roll as it runs over the floor, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner has a couple of sophisticated systems.

First, as the brush roll is moistened and you push the unit forwards, the Robotic Arm at the front lifts, so that the floor head can pass over bigger bits of debris. As you pull back, the Arm drops to the floor within 0.2ms, sealing the floor cleaner to the floor to improve suction.

There’s just a gentle mechanical whir as this happens, with the floor cleaner lifting and dropping the arm on demand. I found that it made it easy to push the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner forwards, without the risk of pushing bigger bits of mess around.

Overall, this hard floor cleaner is really easy to push around. It’s really handy that you can lay it flat on the floor, too, to get under sofas and the like.

With Dreame’s Intelligent wheel drive, the back wheels help propel the cleaner forward automatically, which makes this cleaner really easy to move around.

Secondly, the brush roll moves clockwise and then anti-clockwise, helping it first pick up wet debris, and secondly push hair against the comb to remove it and prevent it from getting wrapped around the floor head.

Dirt is then sucked up into the 700ml water tank, which has a pull out solids separator and a filter on top. Dreame thoughtfully provides a spare filter in the box, so you can wash one and install the spare to keep cleaning.

Just be aware that if you lie the cleaner flat on the floor, the dirty tank’s effective capacity is reduced to under 480ml. If you can, start by cleaning under furniture, and then go upright to get the full dirty tank capacity.

With the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner turned on, it defaults to Smart mode, which adjusts suction automatically based on the level of dirt detected. There’s also a max power Turbo mode, a suction-only mode and a low-power quiet mode.

The screen shows the remaining battery life percentage, while the bar at the back shows dirt level: green is clean; orange is dirty. It’s not particularly reactive in my experience: the bar stayed green while I vacuumed up a wet ketchup stain, and only occasionally turned orange.

That’s not such an issue, as it’s generally easy to see when you’ve cleaned a hard floor properly.

Connect the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner to the app, and there’s an option to replace Quiet mode with a Personalized mode, where I could adjust suction power and water level. That could be handy if you’ve got an area that needs a special clean, such as a hallway that regularly gets dirty because of pets.

There’s also a choice to turn on Return to Automatic Wash & Dry, which will start the self-clean mode automatically when the cleaner is put in the dock. That’s well worth turning on, as you’re realistically going to want to clean the brush roll after dealing with hard floors.

It’s hear that you can set the self-cleaning mode, choosing from Standard, Deep-clean or Auto-Adjust, and then choosing the 5-minute Super-Speed drying or 30-minute High-Speed one.

Performance

• Powerful and fast cleaning
• Quiet in use
• The brush bar doesn’t quite reach the edge

I put a mixture of stains onto a hard floor, and leave them to dry on before tackling them with a hard floor cleaner. I started the test with the easier dried-on-coffee stain.

In Auto mode, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner didn’t need much time, and a couple of passes backwards and forwards, being careful to make sure the robotic arm came down, was all that was required.

My red wine stain was lifted incredibly fast; faster than with any other cordless cleaner that I’ve reviewed, leaving no trace of the mess behind.

I then moved on to the dried-on ketchup stain. This time, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner needed many swipes backwards and forwards, but it still tackled the mess with relative ease.

I’ve only seen plug-in hard-floor cleaners that use steam do better, such as the Shark SteamPickUp Hard Floor Cleaner SD200UK.

My mud stain was easily tackled, too. Here, just a couple of sweeps were required, with both the stain lifted and the harder debris picked up.

For edge cleaning, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner’s brush roll doesn’t quite reach the edge of the floor head, so there will be some manual clean-up to do. To be fair, most hard floor cleaners can’t get right to the edge.

With a wet ketchup spill right up to the kitchen plinth, the arm sealing suction allowed the entire mess to be collected.

I also tried some solid mess. A rice spill was collected with ease. The important thing is to pass over the mess entirely with a forward sweep, so that the arm can come down for collection.

I also put human hair down, which was collected and didn’t get wrapped around the brush roll at all.

Pulling the dirty tank apart, most of the solids made it onto the separator, so I could tap them out into the bin. It’s good, but the Dyson WashG1 is better at separation and cleaner to deal with at the end.

The hair, however, got stuck at the top the inlet tube, and I had to rinse this out. I’m not a fan of cleaning hair with a hard floor cleaner, as the mess is horrible. So, yes, the Dreame H15 Pro Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner can collect hair, but I’d vacuum dry messes first and use this for stains.

I measured sound at 62.8dB, which is reasonable: quieter than a cordless vacuum cleaner and in line with the other hard floor cleaners that I have reviewed.

Battery life is quoted at 60 minutes on the Quiet setting. Change to the Auto setting, and you’ll get closer to the 30-minute mark. That’s enough to clean a typical floor of a UK home in one charge, or to really deep-clean an area, such as your average kitchen.

Should you buy it?