Ryobi’s One+ Wet and Dry Floor Cleaner reviewed

With an interchangeable battery system and a design built to separate clean water from the dirty, the Ryobi One+ Wet and Dry Floor Cleaner has a lot going for it. The fact that it’s less expensive than the Dyson equivalent could be the cherry on top.

What is the Ryobi One+ Wet Dry Hard Floor Cleaner?

Some gadgets have imaginative names and others have complex model numbers and sequences that give nothing away. Ryobi’s One+ Brushless Wet Dry Hard Floor Cleaner has neither, practically screaming what it does on the box: it cleans hard floors using wet and dry mechanisms without a brush, opting to do so with soft rollers and an option of water instead.

It’s essentially a vacuum cleaner with two water tanks, allowing you to suck up gunk while mopping the floor, separating the clean water from the dirty water, and showing you just how filthy your floor was in the first place.

What does it do?

A little like Dyson’s take on the mop, Ryobi’s floor cleaner is built to clean floors using both vacuum suction and wet handling, so you can kill two birds with the one stone.

There’s a little tray that acts as a home, complete with a little foot pedal button to help you quickly initiate a self-cleaning mode, as well.

In short, this gadget can be used to clean your house, though not in an automated sense the way robotic vacuums and mops do things. No, this one is all manual, as you guide it over your floors the way you’ve probably done so for years.

Ryobi’s technology does come with one extra, though, and it’s handy if you already have other Ryobi devices, like a lawnmower or drill: the battery is compatible with the rest of the Ryobi One+ system. That means if you happen to have other gadgets sporting Ryobi’s fluoro yellow look, the battery will likely be compatible, and even better, interchangeable.

All of a sudden, you get a second battery, compatible with a sander, a drill, a leaf blower, a lawnmower, and so on. It’s a compelling reason to stick with Ryobi even if this end up being your first gadget with the brand, simply because batteries aren’t cheap, and if you all of a sudden need pruning saw, telescopic or otherwise, the battery is the same.

Does it do the job?

Back to the floors where the Wet and Dry Floor Cleaner works, you’ll find a bit of cleaning product solution in the box to help you get to the cleaning, and it’s a handy inclusion because virtually no other cleaning gadget bothers to include it.

Dyson’s Wash G1 can be used with a cleaning product, but it doesn’t come with one, at least not when we spoke to the company. Robotic mops can support it, but none we’ve seen arrive with cleaning product, making it an optional extra.

Ryobi’s does, however, arriving with a solution you mix with water to properly clean your floors with more than just water, which seems to be the go for every other brand these days.

To make it work, load the solution with water in the clean water tank, slot in the battery, lock the battery cover, and you’re pretty much ready to go, turning on the cleaner and mopping your floor.

As you guide the Ryobi One+ Floor Cleaner over your floor, the dirty water tank gives you results you can visibly see. The tank goes from being empty to being brown and gross, as clean water runs over the roller pads, cleans the floor, and lands in the dirty tank. It’s gross, sure, but it’s fulfilling; there’s obvious evidence that you are actively cleaning the floor.

Moving it across both the hard wood floors around the house and the tiles of the bathroom, cleaning is almost fun. Little LED lights shine against the surface almost like headlights on a car, and while they’re not the green lights that highlight all the dust and grime Dyson uses, it helps you to see vaguely what you’re doing.

It’ll also pick up on small debris, much like any vacuum cleaner would. This isn’t just an electric mop, but an electric mop with a vacuum built inside.

What does it need?

But the Ryobi is mostly an electric mop, because of just how small the vacuum tank is. It’s not even really a tank, and more just a filter to prevent debris from clogging up the dirty water tank.

That means it doesn’t take long before you may need to empty the dirty water and clean out the filter, some we had to do barely minutes into using the Ryobi One+ Wet and Dry Floor Cleaner. We’re blaming Daisy the Golden Retriever and her endless dropping of fur for that, but it does cite an important fact about this gadget: it’s not really a great vacuum.

You’ll still need a proper vacuum in your life, be it a stick or otherwise. While Ryobi is sucking up gunk as it mops, this is no replacement for a vacuum, even if it technically could have been.

Aside for that remarkably small debris catching system, you can’t use the Ryobi to clean any mess that uses big chunks and particles, at least not in the way you can with other vacuums.

It would be handy if the Ryobi Floor Cleaner was built as a transformer of sorts, allowing you to pull the main vacuum chamber and unit from the body, and use the thing as a complex stick vac with other accessories. If you didn’t need to use the mop, it would be nice if you didn’t have to, rather like Dyson’s Submarine, which was mostly vacuum with a bit of the mop.

This is the opposite. The Ryobi Floor Cleaner is mostly a mop with a bit of the vacuum, and it won’t be for all messes. It ends up being yet another tool in your floor cleaning arsenal, even if it’s not the be-all, end-all.

Is it worth your money?

While it’s not quite a vacuum, at $699, the price is more attractive than you may expect. Electric mops are still a relatively new thing, particularly those that combine the idea of mopping with vacuuming and separate clean from dirty water.

At some $300 less than the Dyson equivalent and arriving with battery compatibility for Ryobi’s other household gadgets, there’s a clear motivation for folks already in that ecosystem to consider what Ryobi has made.

Yay or nay?

Could it have minor improvements like a better and longer-running vacuum? Sure. Would it be nice if you could some how detach the vacuum unit and use the gadget as a stick vac, too, so you don’t need another vacuum around the house? Yeah, that would be nice.

This isn’t quite a transformative appliance, so to speak. But it’s a start.

There are ideas here that work and provide an extra tool that helps clean the house efficiently and easily. There’s basically no excuse not to have clean floors anymore. There’s no excuse not to mop.

This almost makes mopping fun. It makes cleaning a breeze. A tweak or two and Ryobi’s take on the wet floor cleaner could be transformative and dare we say it perfect.