What keeps coming up
Owners routinely report units still running after 4-9 years, sometimes on original batteries, and describe the design as modular enough to disassemble, clean, and repair themselves.
Robot vacuums · Roborock
Owners keep the S5 Max for years of daily cleaning on one appliance, trading its dated mopping and obstacle handling for a machine that's easy to open up and repair when something finally wears out.
No owner ratings here yet. What is on this page is our summary of 79 public owner accounts from forum threads and video comments, written by us. None of it was posted to Still Kicks by an owner. The number arrives when owners rate it here, and comes only from them.
Praised most for reliability (13 of the 14 who raised it); the most common concern is mopping quality (7 of 10).
Pick up to three. You get a page with just those, side by side, on the subjects owners raised.
Owners routinely report units still running after 4-9 years, sometimes on original batteries, and describe the design as modular enough to disassemble, clean, and repair themselves.
Mopping quality is the most disputed theme, with more owners against than for it, and obstacle avoidance draws similar complaints. Several switched to newer robots specifically for better navigation around furniture and clutter.
Counted from the owners who raised each subject, not from everyone. Nobody wrote this list; these are the subjects owners kept bringing up on their own.
9 more subjects came up from fewer than 4 owners each, which is not enough for a fair reading. To see how it stacks up, compare it with another machine.
The S5 Max settles into a daily routine owners barely think about: run it, empty it, move on. Carpet cleaning and hair tangling are non-issues for most, and battery life holds up well enough that several owners never touch the original battery for years. The mopping function gets used less over time (one owner skips it entirely, saying they don't need it living barefoot and alone), and that lines up with mopping being the weakest-reviewed part of the machine.
What owners have to adjust to is navigation. Without modern obstacle avoidance, it can get stuck on chairs, cords, or dark carpet patterns that trip its fall sensors, and a few owners eventually replaced it with something newer specifically for that reason. The tradeoff people settle into: a vacuum that's reliable and repairable, running an older mapping and mopping system that hasn't kept pace with newer robots.
Long-term reliability is the standout theme here, and it's overwhelmingly positive: owners report machines still working after 4, 6, even 8-9 years, often crediting the modular design for making repairs straightforward: swapping a battery, a fan motor, a dust bin latch, or soldering a diode on the dock. Several describe it as the best appliance they've owned, and multiple people talk about buying a second one or a used unit specifically because their original held up so well.
The parts that do wear are known and named directly by owners: batteries eventually need replacing (usually years in), fan motors can start sounding high-pitched before failing, and dock electronics can fail outright. None of this points to a fragile machine, just one with predictable maintenance points that owners handle themselves rather than replacing the whole unit. The long-term record here is thick, not thin: this is one of the better-documented products in that respect.
Parts named in the 5 accounts that describe a failure
The same owner, the same machine, asked again at each of these. It needs real owners answering a real follow-up, so it stays empty until they do. We are not drawing a line through numbers we do not have.
Counted by type. These are public discussions we read and summarised in our own words; none was submitted to Still Kicks, and none carried proof of purchase that we know of. The individual accounts are kept on file behind every claim; they are not reproduced here.
* N/A means we do not yet have enough data for a fair score. A rating appears once owners have rated this machine here. A subject is only judged once at least 4 owners have raised it; below that we show the count and not a verdict. Praised or Concerns means at least 6 in 10 of everyone who raised the subject leaned that way; anything less is shown as split, with the counts. Mixed means an owner said both good and bad things about that one subject.
Every figure here is counted from public accounts written by people who said they own the product, and summarised by Still Kicks in its own words. None of it was submitted here as a review, and nothing is a manufacturer claim, a lab test or an estimate. The accounts behind each claim are kept on file, not reproduced.
Owner ratings are the point. As they come in they become the page, and this baseline moves in behind them.
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