Tineco Floor One S5 Extreme review

The increasing popularity of hard flooring inevitably prompted the question of how to keep it immaculate.

Part of new breed of hard floor cleaners, Tineco’s Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash offers something several don’t: vacuuming up dust and debris as it washes, as well as voice guidance to let you know what mode it’s in or what needs filling or emptying.

However, it’s the self-cleaning function that will appeal the most: rinsing out dirty channels inside as well as its brush roller, so you start every session with a squeaky-clean machine.

Design & Build

• 35 minute battery life
• Heavy at 4.5kg/10lbs
• Digital display

Aesthetically, the Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash seeks to be sleek where other hard floor cleaners can be more utilitarian. Rather than bright colours, it’s finished in grey and dark blue glossy plastic, is slim, with few buttons and flourishes, and a digital display.

For all its trim appearance (H110 x W27.5 x D25cm), it can be weighty to push around or carry to another floor when required, as it’s 4.5kg before a tank of cleaning solution is added.

While its trio of buttons are on the handle (self-cleaning, on/off and mode) the digital display sits on top of the body of the cleaner. It’s not the easiest to decipher at first. A long bar denotes how much suction power the machine is using, but could easily be mistaken for remaining battery power.

Battery power is actually indicated by the largest part of the display, as a percentage in figures, which feels like a lot of space for something you probably don’t need to know most of the time while cleaning: in auto mode, you can clean for around 35 minutes on a full charge.

One of its standout features is an illuminated ring around the edge of the display. It changes colour from blue to red (or the opposite when cleaning only with water) when the machine has detected dirt and is working especially hard.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

Performance & Features

• Cleans with cleaning solution or plain water
• No steam cleaning
• Voice guidance useful for telling you which mode you’re in

In contrast to some hard floor cleaners, the Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash offers choice over how you clean your floors. There are three modes: suction only for spills or drying wet floors, auto, which ramps up the power when it finds dirt, and max, which delivers full power (but trims the runtime to 28 minutes, leaving you charging 4-5 hours to full).

You can also switch between cleaning your floors with the supplied cleaning solution, or plain water – although it’s not clear how hygienic this is as it doesn’t use steam.

Its instructions could benefit from a quick start guide. For example, they have a tendency to abbreviate (CWT for clean water tank), can overwhelm with information, and tend not to run in the right order for setting up the cleaner. We found that it was easier to learn about the machine by using it.

The clean water tank sits at the back; unlike the dirty water tank, there’s no handle for it once removed from the cleaner. If there are any drips down the side, the tank is slippery and prone to being dropped when trying to fit it in place. It’s also quite tall: those with low taps will struggle to fill it directly and need to decant water with a jug (not supplied).

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

There’s also a disparity between the tank sizes: while the clean water is 800ml, the dirty is only 700ml. In practice, we found that when cleaning up wet mess, the dirty tank had to be emptied when the clean tank was still half full. Over the course of a few days, we filled the clean tank twice but emptied the dirty one three-and-a-half times.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

While it appears gimmicky at first, the voice guidance could come in handy. Rather than squinting at the tiny icons on the digital display, the cleaner will tell you which mode you’ve selected. However, some prompts are hard to hear while you’re cleaning in higher powered modes.

For example, we struggled to hear clearly what it said when it told us the dirty water tank needed emptying or the clean tank refilling – until we stopped cleaning. It also narrates its self-cleaning mode to no clear purpose. For those who dislike the voice prompts, they can be disabled.

Usability aside, it cleans fresh spills well. We tested it with brown sauce, seeded jam and mustard on a hard floor. While it tended to smear these as it went through the patches, both auto and max mode left visible edges where the brush roller had cleaned.

We had less success with dried mess – several passes didn’t lift it. This suggests that the Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash is better for regular cleaning rather than periodic cleans.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

In terms of vacuuming up debris, it performed well overall: dust and smaller particles of mud were picked up. However, it struggled with pet hair, ejecting wet clumps onto the floor, and long hair: this often became tangled on its way to the dirty water tank and had to be untangled from the brush roller or pipes.

The Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash is Wi-Fi-enabled, so that it can connect to an app, but this offers little benefit at present. Other than showing you the same information you can see on the machine’s display, and being able to change modes while you’re cleaning, there’s a report about how often and long you’re using it to clean.

Far better is the Floor One S5 Extreme’s self-cleaning mode, which utilises the charging base to give itself a rinse. You’ll still have to fish out debris from the dirty water tank if you’re emptying down the sink, but the included tool brush comes in handy. Also included are spare brush rollers and a holder, plus a replacement dry filter and holder.

Rachel Ogden / Foundry

Price & Availability

If you’re in the US, the Floor One S5 Extreme is priced at £499.99, making it the most expensive of the S5 Series. You can see all the models at Tineco and there are cheaper variants that offer steam cleaning. It’s available from Walmart or Best Buy but there’s no price advantage from buying at either retailer.

In the UK, it’s available from £399.99, on offer from Tineco. This makes it better value but it’s still not as well priced as the S3, which has many of the same features, and which is available from Amazon for £319 at the time of writing. You can read our review to find out it it’s a better fit for you.

There are several S5 models, by the way, so make sure you pick up the right one.

Should you buy the Tineco Floor One S5 Extreme?

Tineco’s Floor One S5 Extreme Smart Cordless Vacuum & Wash excels in many areas: it’s convenient, eliminates the need to vacuum before cleaning a hard floor, cleans itself, and the voice guidance could genuinely be useful if you have impaired sight or don’t want to keep looking at the display.

And while it will be more practical for those who have several hard floors, even those who have a couple can reap the benefits. However, there’s room for improvement: a larger dirty water tank, a handle for the clean one, a more useful display and an app that provided a tangible advantage would all go some way to justifying its price tag.