Keeping a tidy home gets easier and easier as new cleaning technologies come out, and the Redroad CM17 electric mop is one of those technologies. Simple and straightforward, this self-cleaning mop and bucket combination makes it easy to scrub and wax your floors with a lightweight, no-sweat tool.
What’s in the box of the Redroad CM17 electric mop?
In the box of the Redroad CM17 electric mop, you’ll find the mop itself, four mop pads, a dual-use charging cable, and the mop’s automatic cleaning bucket. The mop comes disassembled for more efficient shipping, so you’ll need to click its handle together. Of the four mop pads, two (one set) are for water mopping and two (one set) are for waxing. The mop’s cleaning bucket holds 150 ml of water and includes a clean water tank, a dirty water tank, and two squeegee surfaces.
Redroad CM17 features
The Redroad CM17 is made to be quite flexible and multi-use. It’s cordless, has a front-facing LED “headlight,” and offers 30 minutes of dry cleaning or 50 minutes of wet cleaning on a single charge. Its dual mop heads rotate synchronously at up to 210 rotations per minute. Even the head itself is made to be convenient to use at home: it flexes 90 degrees vertically and 180 degrees from left to right.
What’s interesting about this electric mop is that it’s designed to do more than just mop. Redroad includes four dry mop pads intended for waxing your hardwood floors. That’s actually more heads than what the brand allots to mopping—there’s just two mop pads included here. The CM17’s wet mop pads are described as “high-density water-locking mopping cloths,” for use on tile, marble, laminate, and wood with both wet and dry mopping.
Beyond that, the CM17 is additionally meant to be used on glass: Redroad specifically mentions that you can use the mop pads on windows to give them a deep clean.
Why might an electric mop perform better than a manual one?
There are a lot of reasons why an electric mop might perform better than a manual mop. Personally, I appreciate the convenience of an electric mop—I actually feel like they’re a compromise between manual mopping and hiring a professional cleaning service. With an electric mop, you’re doing the work yourself, but the work isn’t difficult. The mop takes on the responsibility of scrubbing, wringing itself out, and, in some cases, even self-propelling. Where non-electric mopping could take hours and a significant amount of pressing the mop down into the grain of your flooring, electric mops do all of the scrubbing for you with their self-rotating mop pads.
There are some situations that an electric mop probably isn’t the best for. If you were cleaning a very dirty, grouted floor that required intense hand scrubbing, for instance, I don’t think an electric mop would suffice. Or, if you had something like an insoluble adhesive to clean up, you might not want to spend the money on replacing your electric mop heads afterwards.
However, for everyday tasks at home, electric mops are a great choice. They’re easy to use, are often more efficient than manual mops, and are more than powerful enough to tackle everyday messes like syrup-sticky floors and spilled milk.
What kind of households would benefit from an electric mop?
I love having an electric mop of any kind in the house—a self-cleaning mop like this one, a wet and dry vacuum like the Dreame H11 or Tineco iFloor 3, or even a self-cleaning robot vacuum mop like the Redroad G10 or Dreame Bot W10. Each category of electric mop is great for a different type of household.
In a busy home with only one level and mostly hard floors, for instance, self-cleaning robot mops are fantastic. They’ll get your daily and incidental cleaning done for you with just a touch of your finger. Robot mops are great for people with limited mobility, busy households, and households that are generally tidy but want to reach that next level of having immaculate floors.
In a home with limited areas of hard flooring or multiple levels, wet/dry vacuums and self-cleaning mops like this one are more ideal. This style of mop needs to be used by you. In exchange, they provide a deeper clean and more control. If you tend to have a little bit of clutter in your home, like cords or socks on the floor, self-cleaning mops give you the ability to clean around things in a way that robot mops often do not. They’re also great if you know you’ll need to repeatedly clean a very dirty area, as their larger water reservoirs will help dilute large smears more easily. I can see this electric mop being perfect for a Canadian boot room in the winter—just sweep the mop through the room after everyone gets home for the day to clean up any melting mud puddles.
How to use the Redroad CM17 electric mop
The Redroad CM17 isn’t an intuitive mop to learn how to use, but once you’ve skimmed the instruction manual, it’s easy. The included charger plugs into the mop’s removable battery to recharge and also plugs into the mop’s cleaning base to power it. This seemed a little inefficient to me at first, but then I realized it’s just cutting down on cord clutter: You can’t use the mop while it charges and you’d never need to power the base without the mop, so there’s really no need for two chargers.
To use the CM17, assemble its handle by clicking each piece into place. Then, fill the clean water tank and attach it to the cleaning base. Turn the mop on and place it in the base to wet the mop pads and fill the mop’s spray water tank. To clean the mop pads, hold the handle spray switch for three seconds to put the mop into cleaning mode. The base will light up in green when it’s spraying and in red when the spray has been turned off to scrape the mop pads dry. Make sure to empty the mop’s spray tank and the base’s dirty water tank on a regular basis—and remember to wash and dry the mop pads on a regular basis, too.
My experience with the Redroad CM17 electric mop
Overall, I love the concept of the Redroad CM17, but I think their G10 robot mop is better-executed. The CM17 was consistently just a little too wet, and there’s no way to switch its base to squeegee-only without manually removing its water tank. It did a great job cleaning my floors and made scrubbing them very easy, but one mop wetting cycle soaks the CM17’s mop pads so thoroughly that I can clean my entire apartment without the pads going dry—that’s 700 square feet! That makes the CM17 great for large spaces and really caked-on cleaning jobs, but less ideal for small spaces.
What I loved about this Redroad electric mop was its self-propelling rotating mop pads. They’re thick and textured, scrubbing deep into the grain of my flooring without needing me to push down on the mop. The mop’s base does a great job of cleaning dirty water into its lower tank, and I love that you can pop out the mop’s battery to charge it instead of needing to set up a permanent mop dock.
What to watch out for is this mop’s tendency to be too wet (which can cause warping in hardwood floors), as well as its mop pad attachments. Each of these pads is held in place with Velcro, but the adhesive Redroad uses on them is stickier facing the pad than the mop. Make sure to remove them carefully when you clean them so that you’re able to put them back on in the future.
Conclusion
Redroad’s CM17 is ideal for washing large floors and big, hard-to-reach windows. It’s easy to use, self-propelling, ergonomically designed, and doesn’t need a full-time docking station. If you find that floor cleaners with cylindrical mop designs aren’t cleaning your floors deeply enough, this rotating design could be an option that might work better.
Check out the Redroad CM17 electric mop online at Best Buy today.
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