Dyson WashG1 review: Dyson swaps air for water in its first hard floor mop

The Dyson WashG1 is the innovative British vacuum company’s first foray into a dedicated hard floor cleaner. We’ve seen the Dyson V15 Detect Submarine, which added a mopping attachment to a slightly modified cordless stick vacuum cleaner. However, this is a different proposition altogether, offering no standard carpet vacuuming function at all, a much larger water capacity and improved cleaning power.

Despite being new ground for Dyson, it’s a floor cleaning sector that already has plenty of competition – I’ll compare it to the best models from Shark and Eufy in this review to decide whether the WashG1 is really worth your money.

Dyson WashG1 review: What do you get for the money?

Let’s start off with the bad news, though you’re probably already braced for it – the Dyson WashG1 is not cheap. At £599 it isn’t the most expensive hard floor cleaner I’ve tested – that prize goes to the Eufy Clean Mach V1 Ultra, which launched at £749. However, the Dyson looks positively stripped back in terms of headline features compared to the Mach V1, which includes steam cleaning and ozone sanitising.

From the ankle upwards, the Dyson is a simpler machine. It has two water containers, one with an 0.8l capacity to hold clean water and another 1l container for dirty water. These don’t do anything special – you fill the clean one with cold tap water and empty the dirty one when you’ve finished the job.

The floor head is slightly different, however. It has two fluffy rollers, one at the front and the other at the back. These spin in opposite directions, drawing dirt into the space between them. Two brush bars then flick any solid debris that’s picked up into a collection tray, while dirty water is filtered into the waste water tank.

At the handle end there’s a screen and three buttons. The screen is colour and similar to those you’ll find on Dyson’s cordless stick vacuums. It has a single button for cycling through the unit’s three main hydration levels. You can also push it when the device is not in use to see how much charge it has, which is also displayed on screen while it’s being used.

The other thing that comes with the device is its charging station. This plugs into a wall socket for charging but more importantly provides a surface for your cleaner to stand on, so it doesn’t drip on the floor below. The Dyson isn’t as drippy as other models I’ve tested but there is still some water that escapes during its automatic cleaning cycle and tends to linger in the tray.

Dyson WashG1 review: What’s it like to use?

Given that the Dyson WashG1 has two rollers, I was expecting it to float around the room like the company’s Omni-glide dual roller hard floor cleaner. The reality is that this is a lot larger and heavier, weighing 4.9kg, making it less manoeuvrable. When switched off it really needs carrying around, though the rotation of its fluffy rollers give it some lift and make it easier to push once the motor has started.

I found that filling the cold water tank was straightforward. Push a button on the top and the assembly that holds both water tanks pops off the front. Remove the clean tank from the connecting unit, screw off the lid and you can fill the container nearly to the top.

Once you press the on button, Dyson suggests you wait about 15 seconds for the rollers to charge with water. I found it started doing a good job of wetting the floor sooner than that, but it’s worth knowing that it won’t be at its peak cleaning ability straight away.

In my tests, the battery lasted for around 34 minutes and the clean water tank needed refilling once during that time. Dyson claims the water tank will cover 290m2 but that will be reduced if you increase the water flow.

When cleaning is complete, you can place the device back on its stand for charging. Dyson suggests you empty the dirty water and the dirt collection tray, refill the clean water, then start the device’s own self cleaning process. This is as much of a faff as it sounds.

The dirt tray slides out from underneath and holds the kind of detritus that can be trapped by the filter. As with most hard floor cleaners, clearing it out isn’t a particularly pleasant job but I found that it could be mostly done by tapping into a bin and rinsing the apparatus. It’s arguably slightly less messy to empty than the debris traps in the Shark HydroVac WD210UK and Eufy Mach V1 Ultra because there’s less finger work involved. However, it’s still far from pleasant and the added moisture makes it a muckier job than emptying a vacuum cleaner.

Dyson’s marketing suggests that you can skip the vacuuming and go straight to this mop on your hard floors. In practice, I’d recommend vacuuming first, otherwise you’re likely to be dealing with more damp muck in the debris tray.

Dyson WashG1 review: How well does it clean?

When it comes to mopping dirt and mess off the floor, the Dyson WashG1 performed very well. To test it, I created controlled spillages of my usual trio of dirty splodges – mud from the garden, concentrated blackcurrant cordial and tomato ketchup. All three were left to dry for several hours to make the job more challenging. 

Both the mud and the squash were cleaned away in a single forward and backward pass of the WashG1. With mud, this is the same performance as we’ve seen on both the Eufy Mach V1 Ultra and the Shark HydroVac WD210UK. It’s the kind of substance that, even when dry, can be quickly lifted by a damp roller.

However, both the Shark and the Eufy took three passes to remove the squash. Here the middle of the spill tends to be cleaned first but the dry edges can take a couple of swipes. The Dyson, however, lifted the whole stain in one go. The dual rollers, operating in different directions, almost certainly give it an advantage.

Ketchup is tougher and it took the Dyson 10 passes to completely clear the dried up edges. However, that’s a lot faster than the Shark and Eufy, which took at least twice as many passes to do the same job.

Because Dyson’s marketing also suggests you can skip the vacuuming, I also tested it with small samples of our vacuum test materials: Cheerios, flour and loose dog hair. It collected all three, though suffered some roller clogging from the Cheerios before they made it to the tray. The hair was partially caught by the internal brush rollers, so they needed manually cleaning afterwards. Flour passed through reasonably well, though some of it got damp and stuck to the filter tray, which is again more cleaning than I would have liked.

Dyson WashG1 review: Should I buy it?

Anyone who lives in a property with a lot of hard floor is going to find their life improved by the Dyson WashG1. You’ll still want to keep a vacuum cleaner to hand and you probably won’t want to throw away your mop and bucket right away. Nonetheless, for everyday cleaning this device is capable of giving your floors a significantly better clean than using a regular mop or indeed using any of its rivals.

However, let’s not pretend that it’s cheap or even affordable for most people. The more hard floor you have and the more time you spend mopping it, the more value this will have. However, you still need to push it around and, to a certain extent, it’s more of a hassle to keep clean than a mop and bucket that you can simply rinse and throw in a cupboard.