Roborock H60 Hub Ultra review – Pickr

Quick review

Roborock H60 Hub Ultra – $999

The good

Turns the vacuum stand into something useful

Capable vacuum with plenty of suction

Ideal for hard floors

Uses the neat green light to find dust and debris on the ground

Comes with accessories and a place to store those accessories

Easy to use, easy to clean

The not-so-good

Not super fun to use

Carpet isn’t always a great experience

Battery depletes fairly quickly

Relies on a dust bag, so you’re going to have to replace the bag eventually

Making the standard stick vacuum more interesting is a challenge robo-vac maker Roborock is trying with the H60 Hub Ultra. Is it a success, or just a computer-less cleaner?

One of the many chores of being an adult, vacuuming isn’t something you’d probably call “fun”. Nobody really says “I’m going to have fun the next time I vacuum the house”, and if they did, they’d definitely be the next in line to do something actually enjoyable, anything enjoyable.

And yet, it is entirely possible to have fun vacuuming the house.

Appliances can be built to be more fun by adding features that make them more interesting.

We saw an example of that when Dyson rolled out its green laser and dust counting tech, features that light up your ground and almost turns vacuuming into a video game of sorts with a high score board, as if Space Invaders and laser tag both same to fight against the scourge of dust in your home. Pew pew!

In the time, vacuuming has seen a few changes here and there, but the idea of a “fun” vacuum has largely been just something Dyson did. Pull the trigger, light up the ground, and bust some dust bunnies ASAP.

Most people don’t do fun vacuums, and the latest from Roborock doesn’t really fit that vibe, either.

But it does learn some tricks from Dyson’s take on the tech, all the while blending features from the world of robotic vacuums. This combination makes it formidable, and a potentially compelling alternative to other vacuums you can find today.

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What is the Roborock H60 Hub Ultra?

What happens when a known for robotic vacuums decides to get into the more conventional style and deal with the bigger spills in life?

You’ll find out when you glance at the Roborock H60 Hub Ultra, a stick vacuum designed similarly to a robotic vacuum, albeit without the sensors, wheels, and other bits that make the whole deal actually “robotic”.

However, the Roborock H60 Hub Ultra definitely gives off robo-vac design vibes when you see it, either in pictures (which we’ve provided) or in the flesh.

A stick vacuum with a barrel and pistol-styled grip, the vacuum portion of the system definitely gives you the vibe of any other stick vac made by another company, while the stand is something different altogether.

While some companies provide a stand simply to hold your vac and keep it out of the way, the “hub” portion of the H60 Hub Ultra needs to be plugged in and equips a vacuum bag.

Armed with power and a bag (of which it comes with two in the box), the H60 Hub Ultra is like the Roborock Qrevo Edge it that it can automatically empty your H60 once it’s docked and charging, its futuristic look also housing the extra accessories, too.

What does it do?

If you’ve never seen a vacuum before, congratulations and welcome to the world of adulthood, a realm Roborock has been a part of for quite a while. The H60 portion of the package is the part you’ll mostly use, while the Hub Ultra is where you’ll rest the hardware.

On the vacuum, there’s a washable dustbin you can separate from the unit, plus HEPA filters for allergies, and the whole thing comes in a familiar design, familiar because it seems like every manufacturer is doing this approach lately, something Dyson popularised.

There’s no trigger to pull on, but there is a circular digital screen at the back, and two buttons: power and speed, the display showing you the power and battery life, and possibly an error if the vacuum (or you) do something wrong.

You’ll find an extendable tube easily mounted to the vacuum, plus a roller head with a green light attached to it. From what we can tell, the green light is an LED rather than a laser; Dyson may have introduced green laser dust finding in the V15, but from what we understand it moved to LEDs later down the track.

Roborock’s green light looks more like a light than a laser to this reviewer’s eyes, so you’ll get that, which works more or less the same: shine the green light at your floor, and the dust you normally won’t see with your eyes is lit up, ready for you to suck it up and move on with your life.

When you’re done, dock the H60 with the Hub Ultra portion of the package, and the system will empty itself like a robotic vacuum, while setting the H60 vacuum to recharge.

It’s pretty easy, and kind of acts like an all-in-one system.

Does it do the job?

With three modes for cleaning basically consisting of low, medium, and high, you’ll find it’s easy to turn the power up, plug in the right accessory, and get stuck into vacuuming.

Power it on at the back, change the power, and watch the LED counter for the battery start to drop as you pick up your dust and debris and genuinely clean your house.

When you’re done, the mess of the barrel is easy to handle thanks to the built-in cleaning of the hub, though there may be times when you need to unclog it manually or even clean the barrel, at which point Roborock makes it fairly easy, allowing you to pull it apart.

What does it need?

As capable a vacuum as Roborock’s H60 Hub Ultra is, it’s not terribly exciting to use. You’ll definitely be able to clean your home, and cover all the big spills missed by the robotic vacuum you might have in your life doing the maintenance work.

It’s definitely a challenger to the dominance that Dyson’s V-series stick vacuums hold, and offers a very similar design: cylindrical barrel, pistol-style grip, and a motor that really sucks (in the good way).

But Dyson makes a much more fun stick vac, that’s for sure.

Pick the Roborock H60 up and it feels solid, adopting that almost gun-style barrel, minus the trigger. It’s just not there.

Instead, you’ll press the buttons at the back of the vac to control it, one of which turns it on while the other cycles through power modes. The screen they flank on the circular back tells you how fast your speed is and the percentage of battery life left, but that’s it.

There’s no dust counter or even colours to denote the performance levels. It just lacks the level of user-focused design that Dyson throws into its gear. It’s not quite the same.

It may also have problems on carpet, or even rugs. Testing it on a small rug in Ms 2’s room, we found the vacuum would handle one direction totally fine, but then rolling it back found the carpet was eaten by the vacuum, essentially providing too much suction for a small bit of fabric.

We’re fortunate to mostly have hard floors in this house — wooden floor boards and the like — but our experience with the stray bit of carpet wasn’t the best it could have been.

Nor was the battery, because using the H60, you may even find it just doesn’t last.

Granted, its life will depend on the speed you run your vacuum at, so there’s that. However, we found that even at the low setting, the battery started to drop fairly quickly.

In total, we maybe found between 45 minutes of actual use, though it varies entirely on the speed the vacuum runs on. Theoretically, you can get up to 90 minutes, but you’d likely need to keep the H60 running at low the entire time.

It also comes with a dust bag, which is such an unusual inclusion for a modern stick vacuum. Most stick vacs that we see today are bag-free, allowing you to quickly dump the dust and debris inside straight into your bin, often by pulling on a level or latch.

Technically, the Roborock H60 can work the same way, but the moment you dock this vacuum with the hub it shares its name with (H60 Hub Ultra), you’ll find it automatically empties its gunk directly into the vacuum bag for you.

On the one hand, this is good because there’s no maintenance, and the included vacuum bag measures 3 litres, so it can back in a relatively decent amount of dust. However, it also means spending $70 for a pack of H60 dust bags later on, which come with a dozen in a pack, but are needed for the hub stand to work.

You get an extra dust bag in the box, though, so it’s not like you’ll need to buy one ASAP.

Is it worth your money?

Priced at $999, Roborock’s H60 Hub Ultra is actually reasonable value for what you get: a capable flagship-style vacuum with extras thrown in.

A thousand dollars may seem like a lot for a vacuum, but for what you get, the price makes sense.

The better news, however, is that you can typically find the H60 Hub Ultra for even half of this. At the time this review was published, the same model managed a $499 price tag, making it a stellar value if found at this price.

Could it be less expensive? Sure, but decent vacuums typically command north of $600, so this isn’t a total shock, and there are heftier price tags out there, too.

We have little to complain about in this category.

Yay or nay?

It’s pretty clear Roborock has created a great little vacuum in the H60 Ultra, and its whole hub concept not only makes the stand more than something that holds the vacuum up, but into a proper place to hold onto the dust.

Overall, it’s a completely effective addition, albeit about as un-fun as it gets.

And that’s fine: not everyone needs a fun vacuum. What Roborock delivers in the H60 Hub Ultra is an effective vacuum system that you needn’t think about, at least until the bag needs replacing a month or two later.

Roborock H60 Hub Ultra