Dreame X50 Ultra Robot Vacuum Review

The Dreame X50 Ultra feels impressively well-built. Its body is made from thick, premium plastic. Transparent plastic covers the array of front sensors and lights, and the retractable top LIDAR sensor holding the controls and three microphone ports is finished in a premium-looking rose gold brushed metal. The entire vacuum feels very sturdy and well-balanced, including the dustbin, which has a lot of reinforcement ribbing. The top cover of the robot vacuum is held on by magnets and is removed without tools for easy access to interior components.

The Dreame X50 has a lot of parts that need cleaning, but they're easy to access. The brushrolls are simple to remove, and any hair can be quickly removed by hand since hair doesn't get tightly tangled up in the brushrolls. The docking station does a very good job of keeping the dirt compartment clean, but it's easy to remove the small amount of remaining material and tap dust out of the connected filter into a garbage bag. The side brush requires a screwdriver to remove it, although it's easy to remove the small amount of hair it retains by hand. You should use a prying tool to remove the omnidirectional wheel rather than a screwdriver to avoid marring the finish, though the wheel doesn't gather much hair. The docking station keeps the mop pads clean, but removing them from the mounting plates is a bit difficult because they're attached using Velcro.

The docking station's dirt bag is straightforward to replace and seals tightly, keeping in the dust. It's very simple to refill the clean water tank, and the tank's scale inhibitor is easy to change when needed. The dirty water tank should be emptied after every mopping session and can be cleaned with the included brush. The easily removable mop pad washboard is self-cleaning, but you can use the brush to clean its filter.

See the user manual for more detailed maintenance information.

The Dreame X50 Ultra has high recurring costs and many parts must be replaced frequently. The app and manual make different recommendations regarding replacement intervals, with the manual being more definite.

• Docking station dust bag: You should replace this every two to four months. You can buy these in packs of three from Dreame's website. These are the same bags used with the Dreame X Ultra and L Ultra series, if you're upgrading from an earlier model.
• Filter: This filters the exhaust air from the dirt compartment. It should be cleaned every two weeks and replaced every three to six months. It's available on Dreame's website.
• Brushrolls: These should be cleaned every two weeks and replaced every six to 12 months. They're available as a pair.
• Side brush: This should be checked every two weeks and replaced every three to six months. It's available from Dreame's website.
• Mop pads: The pair of mop pads should be replaced every one to three months. You can get them in sets of four.

Dreame sells optional multi-surface cleaning solution, which you can use with this vacuum. There's a scale inhibitor cartridge in the docking station's clean water tank; you should replace it every 18-32 months (1.5-3 years), but it currently isn't available on Dreame's website.

You can buy most of these parts as an Accessory Kit, which includes:

• Brushroll (pair)
• 2x side brushes
• 2x filters
• 2x dust bags
• 3x mop pad pairs
• 1L multi-surface cleaning solution

The Dreame X50 Ultra's height is given with the top LIDAR sensor retracted—its position when the robot vacuum is recharging in the dock or powered off. With the robot vacuum powered on and the LIDAR sensor extended, the vacuum's height is 11.1 cm (4.4").

The dirt compartment is decently sized for a robot vacuum. Although the dirt compartment has no fill indicator, the companion app will remind you to empty it manually after a while if you've deactivated the auto-empty function.

This full-featured docking station has a large storage capacity, which means you don't have to maintain it as frequently. It has a large 3.2L dust bag, a 4.5L clean water tank, and a 4L dirty water tank, which stores the dirty water from mop washing.

To clean and sanitize the mop pads, the wash water can be heated up to 176 °F (80 °C), which is hotter than most flagship robot vacuums.

Documentation:

• Quick Start Guide
• Warranty card
• Scale inhibitor information label
• User manual

For the docking station:

• Power cable
• Auto-Detergent tank
• Cleaning solution, 200 ml (6.8 fl oz)
• Clean water tank
• Dirty water tank
• Washboard filter
• Docking station ramp extension plate
• 2x dust bags
• Docking station cover
• Cleaning brush

For the robot vacuum:

• Top cover plate
• Dust bin
• Dust bin filter
• Brushroll set
• Brush guard
• 2x mop pad holders
• 2x mop pads
• Side brush

The battery life is remarkable, well in keeping with the Dreame X50's flagship status. But it's only a little better than the Dreame L40 Ultra in Max suction mode and worse in Quiet mode. The dual brushroll, geared climbing system, increased processing power, and more powerful suction motor all contribute to the increased power draw. It returns to the dock for recharging once the battery reaches 15%.

The Dreame X50 Ultra is extremely feature-rich. The top-mounted control panel keeps things simple; most of the features are controlled using the app. There are physical buttons for performing basic tasks, and an LED ring around the LIDAR sensor changes color or flashes to show the robot vacuum's state. Dreame's AI solution, CleanGenius, can decide all the settings for you, based on the input it receives from the vacuum's sensors.

If you'd rather control everything, there are a multitude of settings offering fine-grained control of cleaning and mopping. You can set the vacuum's cleaning mode to Vacuum, Mop, Vac & Mop, or Mop After Vac, and the suction power from Quiet, Balance, Turbo, Max, and Max+, which is only available in Vacuum mode. There are 32 wetness settings for the mop function. You can choose Quick or Standard routing and one to three cycles for each cleaning task.

The robot vacuum will detach its mopping pads and leave them at the docking station if you select Mop-Detach or raise them to avoid dragging wet mops over carpet with the Mop-Raise setting. Some functions control carpet cleaning, like Clean Carpets First, Carpet Boost, for higher suction on carpets, and Intensive Carpet Cleaning, which cleans carpets more slowly. You can also decide whether the Side Brush Rotates on Carpet.

You can control all aspects of the retractable LIDAR sensor, deciding how much clearance it will provide in low-clearance areas, and toggle Collision-Avoidance Mode. Auto-Recleaning sets the robot vacuum to conduct extra passes, and Dynamic Obstacle Area Cleaning makes the vacuum revisit and clean any areas it missed earlier due to avoiding obstacles. It can perform Cleaning Along Floor Direction to avoid scraping across floor seams. You can control Stain Recognition to mop more intensively if stains are detected, and Large Particle Boost increases suction power if large particles are detected.

The side brush and mop pads can be extended into wall edges and corners. You can also decide if the mop will be extended to clean gaps underneath objects with Mop Extension for Gap Cleaning or mop more around furniture legs with Intensive Cleaning for Furniture Legs. You decide when to deploy the side brush and mop cleaning extension features: every seven days with Standard frequency, adaptive with Intelligence, or High Frequency, where the robot vacuum uses these features every time.

You can control how the X50 crosses thresholds with Hurdle Style Obstacle Crossing, which walks the extendable legs over the obstacle one after the other for complex thresholds like sliding door tracks, or with Synchronized Obstacle Crossing, where both legs propel the vacuum over an obstacle all at once.

The Dreame X50 Ultra offers passable hard floor pickup performance. It does pick up medium and large material, but it travels too quickly to spend enough time to pick up all fine debris in one pass. A second pass results in better cleaning, although some material is still left at the edges.

Despite featuring an extendable side arm, it doesn't pick up fine and medium material in edges and corners very well. This is because it doesn't extend its side brush in these locations where it would help.

The robot vacuum delivers decent high-pile carpet pickup performance. It picks up medium and large debris but struggles with fine debris in corners and along edges.

The vacuum misidentified the area with the debris as a non-carpeted area on the first pass and reduced its suction power, resulting in worse cleaning performance. We manually set the whole area as carpet and performed a second pass.

The robot vacuum cleans up most medium and large debris out of low-pile carpet. It has more difficulty vacuuming up fine debris, especially along corners and edges where its suction and agitation is low and its side brush can't move fine particles.

The pet hair pickup is acceptable. The results are underwhelming for a robot vacuum equipped with twin brushrolls, since this design tends to perform better with pet hair, like the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra. By contrast, the Dreame X50 Ultra leaves a fair amount of embedded hair behind and drags around a small amount of hair as well.

The Dreame X50 Ultra's airflow performance is good. It's on the high side for a robot vacuum, so it should be able to move even heavy debris.

This is a very quiet robot vacuum. You won't find it disruptive to conversation or TV watching, whether it's cleaning bare floors or carpet. It's a little louder on bare floors if you activate the Max+ setting, peaking at 63.5 dBa, which you might find a little more annoying.

The docking station's self-empty cycle is much louder at 73.1 dBa, which is loud enough to be bothersome in a family room.

The Dreame X50 Ultra does a great job of adapting to obstacles. It has no trouble navigating around a room, avoiding all obstacles while cleaning tightly around and beneath them. It's especially impressive under low tables where it performs a brief initial pass around the legs, then comes back later, lowers its LIDAR sensor, and cleans very thoroughly underneath. However, it tends to get caught up in tasseled rugs and won't clean underneath a coat rack. It nudges the coat rack a bit at first, then avoids it entirely.

The vacuum's obstacle avoidance is excellent. Its 3D structured light and camera system detects and avoids almost every obstacle, large and small—and most importantly, pet waste. It also cleans tightly to the object, so it doesn't miss a spot. It occasionally gets caught up in USB cables and, more rarely, extension cords, requiring manual intervention.

This robot vacuum's height clearance is decent. It's better than most other robot vacuums equipped with a LIDAR sensor tower because the sensor can be retracted.

The robot vacuum's default safety settings prevent it from going under obstructions too close to the retracted LIDAR sensor. Turning this safety feature off allows it to pass below 9.0 cm (3.5") heights, but with the risk of the vacuum damaging itself or the furniture.

Representing another approach to lowering height, the Roborock Saros 10R eliminates the top-mounted LIDAR sensor entirely in favor of front and side-mounted solid-state LIDAR sensors.

This robot vacuum does a fantastic job clearing thresholds thanks to Dreame's ProLeap system. When it detects a high threshold, the robot vacuum props itself up using legs that extend down from its drive wheels. There's a tiny wheel at the bottom of these legs that's powered from the main drive wheels by gears. The legs fold back slightly when they contact the threshold, tilting the robot vacuum down while still driving it forward. The robot vacuum ascends the threshold either one leg at a time in Hurdle Style Obstacle Crossing mode or with both legs in Synchronized Obstacle Crossing mode.

The Dreame X50 Ultra does a poor job of sealing in fine particles, as they bypass its exhaust filter and are blown straight out of its exhaust port.

This robot vacuum doesn't suck up material sitting in cracks because its suction scoop is positioned too high. This is typical for a robot vacuum. Using the Max+ suction setting doesn't improve the robot vacuum's performance.

The vacuum does an acceptable job of cleaning stains using the highest water flow setting, enabling Deep Pathing, and washing the mop pads before cleaning. It removed some of the stain, and a second pass removed more of the stain. Using detergent didn't make much of a difference after the first pass.

The Dreame X50 Ultra can't pick up standing liquids.

This robot vacuum has many physical automation features, but the app controls most of them. Only the essentials are present on the vacuum itself. Pressing the Dock button sends the robot vacuum back to the docking station. If you press and hold this button for three seconds, it disables the Child Lock. Pressing and holding the Power/Clean button for three seconds toggles the power state, while pressing and holding this button for 10 seconds forces a shutdown of the robot vacuum. If the robot vacuum is on, pressing the Power/Clean button starts a cleaning task.

The Dreamehome app is incredibly full-featured and offers fine control over every aspect of the X50 Ultra. Watch this video to see all its menus and features.

First, you should set the robot vacuum on a mapping run of your home using either Fast Mapping or Clean & Mapping. You can see the vacuum's path in real-time as it constructs a map. Once complete, you can create another map for another level of your home, add no-go and no-mop zones, add virtual walls, and identify thresholds. You can divide, merge, hide, and name rooms and add locations of furniture, carpet, curtains, and low-lying areas where the X50 will retract its LIDAR sensor. You can set the direction of floor gaps from vertical to horizontal for tile, hardwood floors, or other surfaces so the robot vacuum won't create wear along the gap with its Cleaning Along Floor Direction feature. Shortcuts allow you to create custom cleaning sequences by room or by zone.

Specific settings are available for pets in the Pet Care menu. You can toggle Pet Recognition and Pet Avoidance and perform Strategic Cleaning around pets, as well as take Pet Pictures to check on your pet with the robot vacuum when you're away from home. To ensure your pet won't walk through wet surfaces, you can set Mopping with Minimal Moisture. You can also adjust the Auto-Empty frequency to deal with shedding and toggle Large Particle Boost to increase suction when the robot vacuum encounters a large mess.

You can toggle obstacle avoidance, control whether the vacuum takes Pictures of obstacles, and turn the Fill Light on or off to help with obstacle detection.

There's deep control over every feature of the docking station, including adding detergent, washing the mop pads after every mopping task, setting the wash water temperature, controlling the docking station's washboard self-cleaning, controlling mop drying time, and setting the Auto-Empty frequency. You can also initiate dustbin emptying, mop washing, and mop drying.

The Voice Assistant can be toggled on or off. You can view valid voice commands and conversation history and set the robot vacuum's Voice Tone, Language, and Volume.

You can turn on the Real-Time Camera and set the Cruise Settings—the schedule and history of cleaning sessions. To remind you that the camera is operating, you can set Quiet, Weak, or Strong prompts. In this menu, you can also control the vacuum, take photos and videos, take pet pictures, have a two-way conversation using the microphone, and turn the Fill Light on or off.

The General Features menu shows you the Accessories Usage, tracking the run time of each replaceable part. This menu lists the Off-Peak Charging, Child Lock, and Robot Notifications settings. You can also access the Help menu here.