Dreame Aqua10 Ultra reviewed: clever and capable

Robots are beginning to come home, and while they won’t make your dinner (yet), they can keep your home clean. Is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra one of the best examples of this in action?

We don’t quite live in the world of The Jetson’s or other sci-fi, but some of the ideas are beginning to arrive at home in a positive way.

Video calls with friends and family, cars that can be charged from home and don’t need petrol, oh and an appliance to help out in the kitchen in nearly every conceivable way. We’re still not at the point where technology can make your menu in its entirety, but it’s getting closer, and robots may be one of the reasons why.

One area where robots are making tremendous strides at home, however, are with cleaning. Robotic cleaners can now help with the maintenance in a big way, allowing you to potentially reclaim time by having the floors swept and vac’d and mopped and cleaned with ease.

Of course, there are lots of players in the robotic vacuum and mop game in Australia, and new ones seemingly arriving all the time.

The latest is from one you mightn’t have heard of — Dreame — and like its namesake, it aims to be just that: a dream for your home. Is it a dream, or closer to a nightmare?

What is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra?

You mightn’t have heard the name “Dreame” before, but like so many other robotic vacuum brands new to Australia, Dreame is another purveyor of one of those. Or even lots of those.

Relatively new to the Australian market, alongside the rest of robotic vacuums in general, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra is one of the company’s latest automated vacuum and mopping systems, at least ahead of what the company has in store following CES.

In fairness to Dreame, the model is technically a 2025 robo-vac, ahead of what we’ll likely see this year. But it sets a standard for what you can expect to see, and does offer a slightly different take on the tech compared to everyone else.

The robotic vacuum includes a base station with compartments for a vacuum bag, for the various water tanks associated with the mopping capabilities, and it also includes a detergent tank, as well. Those floors won’t clean themselves with water alone, it appears.

It also comes with a combination of sensors, suction and high-temperature cleaning for the mop, plus an ability to push itself up over 4 centimetres to around 8 centimetres, handy if it needs to get over a step.

What does it do?

Like every other robotic vacuum these days, the point is running the machine as a form of maintenance. It’s probably not going to replace a dedicated stick vacuum, and you may still want one of those for the big messes, or even one of the fancy new combo vac-mop models that does both.

Rather, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra will run in the background and use a combination of sensors and AI to create the map of your home, tracking what’s there, and even reporting when something is in its way.

You can choose to simply vacuum or to simply mop, or you can choose to vacuum and mop, or vacuum and then mop. Or just let the AI sort things out for you, as well. There are definite choices.

The overall sum of things, however, is that when you run the Aqua10 Ultra robo-vac, it will clean the floor using a vacuum and a mop, and then make its way back to the dock and base station for self-cleaning using temperatures as high as 100º C.

The roller cleaning the floor is also cleaned using regular water as it rolls, cleaning the gunk and stains and grease from the mop, which is kept fluffy using another mechanism. Dreame keeps the water refreshed using a small tank, expels the dirty water it picks up into another tank, and then goes back home to the dock to empty the dirty and refill the clean.

A literal interpretation of rinse, repeat.

There’s even a guard to stop the mop from dragging its wet fluffy top all over carpets. Handy if you have rugs and floors that aren’t hardwood or shiny.

Does it do the job?

One of those gadgets you may not need to think about, the Aqua10 Ultra is really about helping, because that is what robotic vacuums are designed to do.

Let’s start with the mapping, because this is something robotic vacuums always start in, and are regularly hit and miss with. Often, you need to run mapping at least twice, and often as many as three or four times to make it work.

Not so in our experience with the Dreame Aqua10, which did it mostly right on the first go. It did seem to somehow connect a bit of a hallway with a room, but it was easy to edit and break apart using the app, and it meant we were good to go with one mapping.

That may be the best mapping outcome from any robotic vacuum we’ve tested yet!

Once your home is mapped, it’s time to send the robot on its way to actually clean. Throughout its travels, you can bet it’ll come into contact with things and objects and possibly a pet that can get in its way, and it reports that well.

We’d go so far as to say there’s excellent object avoidance in the Aqua10 Ultra, and the fact that the sensor system can flatten into the body almost makes it feel like a vacuum from the future.

It’s a clever combination that just really works.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra occurred rather when we weren’t expecting: it tried climbing over a step, and then realised that yes, it was a step, and therefore probably shouldn’t. It reared up, almost like it was on its hind legs a like an animal, and surveyed the area, deciding whether it should itself off like other robotic vacuums have done previously.

This time it did not, and the combination of ProLeap system and LiDAR sensors had apparently helped it realised it didn’t need to lean too far over the step to throw itself off and get caught. That stopped almost every robo-vac we’ve tested, and required at least a secondary map attempt. Not here.

The fact that ProLeap supports up to roughly 8 centimetres of height is cool and clever. It’s still not really going to climb stairs, and certainly won’t help the vacuum go down them, so don’t expect that. Dreame does have a development with a robo-vac that can climb stairs, but this isn’t it.

However, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra can apparently handle the minor steps and changes in your floor with relative easy, and you don’t have to worry about coming to its rescue for that.

It’s not necessarily as quiet as the Roborock Qrevo Edge, but it’s also not as loud as the Mova Z50 Ultra, achieving this sort of middle ground for robotic vacuums.

The mopping is also highly capable thanks in part to settings on the app that let you decide how much scrubbing the system does.

It’s not quite the automatically ardent assistant that the Narwal Flow is, not on its default settings anyway. But you can push it that little bit more using the app.

But one of the handy features worth talking about is the self-cleaning system, which runs at 100 degrees Celsius to self clean, and provides that little bit of peace of mind to let you know some bacteria should have been cleaned off using heat.

Your floors will also get some detergent, too, which is one of our favourite aspects.

What do we love?

Ever since mops became part of the tech review circuit, we’ve question why hot water was being used to simply clean when disinfectant and cleaning products had been the default go-to for years.

For some robotic vacuums, it’s just about hot water. For others, it means using cleaning product. Generally you can choose between models, but one of the better aspects of the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra is just how much of a choice you’re given, here in the relatively friendly base station for the vacuum and mop.

In the Dreame, it’s a fairly sleek and professional base station, with a top compartment that’s flat, and even allows you to leave something on it.

Inside that base station, just like every other brand we’ve tested, there’s a compartment for the vacuum bag where all the gunk and debris goes, the clean water bucket, and also the one for the dirty water that you’ll want to pour out as often as you can. Easy.

But then there’s also a section at the front for detergent, and not just any detergent, but refillable detergent. That makes a difference, because from this point, you’re not forced to waste money and plastic on cleaning product replacements like we’ve seen from other brands. It also takes care of the cleaning product dispersion for you, doing something else distinct to other brands.

Even more interesting is the fact that this compartment holds not one, but two cleaning solutions, largely made for different things, with 400ml for general cleaning and 200ml if you have pets for something more specific.

Adding to this, Dreame has largely figured the best way to deal with cleaning product is to give you a bottle of cleaning solution, and to have you fill it yourself.

And that is surprisingly one of the things we love, because it’s easier, less pricey, and surprisingly more environmentally switched on than simply saying “buy yet another consumable”.

A litre of Dreame’s multi-surface floor cleaner is $39, so you still need to pony up for some consumables over time, much like the extra $30 to $60 for a pack of cleaning bags you’ll eventually need. That being said, over the course of a month with the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra, we didn’t need to replace its product at all, so while it will depend on how often you run the mop, it doesn’t seem to churn through it.

What does it need?

But it also does feel like it needs a little less in the nag department, with Dreame very insistent that you subscribe to its newsletter, with the app continually reminding you until you do. Even if you click the “x” numerous times, it’ll keep popping up.

That’s not even our chief complaint. Rather, it’s with tangles and clusters of hair, which are a definite problem for the Aqua10 Ultra, roughly to the tune of getting regularly stuck.

While the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra technically has a brush designed to deal with hair, something it calls the DuoBrush, we found hair jammed the brush and the roller wheels almost too easily, spinning it into a clump and getting stuck further.

It is entirely possible that Daisy the Golden Retriever is just too much of a test for vacuums, literally shedding all the time and providing a reason for the vacuum to run constantly and consistently.

But more than normal, we found the Aqua10 Ultra would be jammed and stop at least once on one of every four times running, largely because it had inadvertently clumped so much hair together, it had become a knot and stalled the system.

Essentially, the hair we wanted the vacuum to clean was becoming the very thing stopping the vacuum from running.

The good news is the fix is easy: pick the Aqua10 Ultra robotic vacuum off the floor, pull the hair out of the cog, and put it back down. Easy.

The problem is this happened more with the Aqua10 Ultra than any other vacuum, and suspect it has to do with how the brush works. It basically happened at least once on every vacuum, which makes it more difficult to run the vacuum while you’re out and about. You basically need to be home to keep it going.

That’s an issue, because if you do happen to run a robo-vac to keep the place tidy and can handle it doing its thing remotely (which this can), you almost need to be perpetually nearby to make sure it doesn’t get stuck, because it almost definitely will.

Is it worth your money?

Priced at $2999 in Australia, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra isn’t an inexpensive robotic vacuum by a long shot, sitting up there with some of the pricier models.

But it does feel like the whole package, and it does everything rather well.

For the price, we’d have liked to see at least one extra consumable in the box — you’re paying near $3K for the privilege — but at least you know you’re landing on relative quality.

Yay or nay?

Like so many new arrivals to the robotic vacuum market in Australia, the name Dreame wasn’t immediately familiar to this journalist, and it probably won’t be to you, either. There are a lot of these brands popping up, from Ecovacs to Roborock to Narwal to Mova, as Dyson joins with updated models, and now Dreame, too.

More competition and more choice is always a good thing, though, and what Dreame delivers will make you stop and consider a brand you’ve possibly never heard of before. That’s good.

The hardware is solid, the cleaning capability is mostly great, and provided you also don’t have a golden retriever or other supplier of massive hair to clog the hardware, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra should perform almost as well as its namesake.

Clever and capable, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra is already one of this reviewer’s favourites. Highly recommended.