The Roborock H6 is designed for use across carpets and hard floors, and I've been testing it out over the past couple of weeks in my busy suburban home to get an idea of what it's good for, and where it could use some improvement.
The key thing you want out of any of this class of vacuum is the ability to clean your carpets, and the Roborock H6 handles this quite well. By default, it spins up its motor into what it calls "Carpet Boost" mode if it detects it's running over carpet, giving it a little extra oomph to pick up dust, hair and any other particles residing within your carpets. You can really pick when it's detected carpet because the noise level also rises just a little.
Like many of its competitors, the Roborock H6 also features a more intense mode, called MAX in this case, that fires up the turbine as fast as it can go for maximum cleaning. It's generally tempting to use this all the time except on delicate surfaces because who wouldn't want cleaner carpets faster? The price you pay for this is in battery life – more on that shortly – but it does do a generally good job of picking up even more dust and debris from even quite old and worn carpets or carpet-style surfaces.
I've tested it across standard hardwood floors, some standard indoor carpeting, rugs and even carpet tiles with few complaints about its ability to do its primary job of cleaning up my house. With three kids and three cats, there's usually something that needs vacuuming, and there's little doubt that the utility of a stick vacuum is quite welcome in these circumstances!
Controls on the Roborock H6 are relatively intuitive, with a standard trigger that you can use for short burst vacuuming. If you're using it across a wider area, there's a power button on the side that switches the Roborock H6 into "sustain" mode – or in other words, "always on" mode. The OLED display makes it simple enough to work out your current performance mode and whether it's locked on or not. It's a nice inclusion for those who don't want to always have to hold down a trigger to get their vacuuming done. The light weight of the Roborock H6 is also quite welcome, making it easy to hold for a fair amount of time without fatigue.
There are some downsides. The flex tool only has a short neck, and because it works only with the dusting brush and crevice tool, you end up somewhat curled up down near the floor in order to reach those tricky areas, which isn't always ideal if you have creaky knees or a bad back.
MAX power mode does what its name suggests, but it's also quite noisy, which isn't great if you don't want to freak out your cats and have them go and hide behind your collection of retro games consoles. OK, maybe that last bit is just specific to me, but the point remains that at full power, this is a fairly loud device.
The other side of any vacuum cleaner is how you deal with the debris it collects, and here I was distinctly less impressed. There's an easy-to-access release catch that drops the bottom of the dust compartment so you can in theory drop waste into a bin. However, the thin nature of the entire body doesn't give it a lot of capacity, and what often happened in my experience is that I'd end up with sections of hair and other debris effectively "stuck" up the sides.
At first, I used a pencil to gently nudge out the excess matter before realising that there's also a release catch for the whole bin at the bottom of the vacuum body. That does work because you can then tip out the entire contents, and clean the dust tray while you're at it if you're keen. However, it's more work than I'd like to do at the end of a vacuuming cycle and easily the one thing I hope Roborock works on for future models.