Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam Review

There have been tons of innovations in the home cleaning space over the past decade or so. Robotic vacuums are getting more and more capable, and these days, can mop the floor and even wash the mop, without any manual intervention on your part. But, there are still reasons you might need to manually clean the floor. Maybe the spill is more than a robotic vacuum can handle, or maybe you find cleaning to be therapeutic. The Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam is built to be the ultimate manual floor cleaner, sitting at the top of Tineco's lineup and boasting a range of interesting features.

But just because it's a manual cleaner, that doesn't mean that it can't make the cleaning process easier. With a high suction power, the ability to steam your floors at 185 degrees, and more, it's built to make your hard floors cleaner than they've ever been. It also comes at a high price. Does it justify the price tag with actual cleaning performance?

The Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam may be a little big and bulky, but it's also relatively sleek and stylish. It's built largely from black and gray plastic, but it felt relatively strong and durable, and I never found it to break or scratch. Presumably, it would be pretty easy to scratch it over time though — but that's true of any cleaner.

The cleaner is super easy to set up. All you have to do is attach the handle part of it to the main unit. Everything else is already connected and ready to go. Also in the box are an extra mop pad and filter, along with the charging station, which is basically just a base that you'll place the cleaner onto when you're not cleaning. The website says that the cleaner comes with a cleaning solution, but it does not.

After you start charging, you'll notice some other neat, modern design touches. Notably, there's LED lighting on the front to indicate charging status. It doesn't stay on all the time, but it's still a nice-looking part of the design. There's also an LED headlight on the front of the cleaner to help illuminate any dirt or debris you might want to pick up.

There are a few buttons and controls dotted around the handle of the cleaner. On the front, you'll get a small display that shows information like cleaning mode, battery level, and more. While you would be able to get by just fine with a monochrome screen, the display on the vacuum is colorful and bright, which was interesting to see. It's wholly unnecessary that it looks good, but it does. Directly under that can be found a power button and a button to switch cleaning modes, and on the top of the handle is a button that cleans the mop pad when the cleaner is docked. The controls are easy to learn, though you'll have to remember which button is which, as the mode switch and mop cleaning buttons aren't necessarily obvious.

Christian de Looper for BGR

On the bottom, of course, is where the action happens. The cleaner has a roller mop pad that it uses to mop your floors, and it's the star of the show. Unlike traditional vacuum/mop combos, the suction comes from behind the mop pad itself, which is also where a comb can be found to dislodge debris like tangled hair. That makes sense. Keep in mind the fact that this is built for hard floors only. It's not meant for carpet.

Depending on the height of your furniture, you might be able to clean underneath it with the Floor One S9 Artist Steam. That's because it can lie flat at 180 degrees. To be clear, it's relatively thick even when flat, so it won't fit under all furniture, and it certainly didn't fit under either of the two couches in my house, which only have a gap of a few inches. But it did fit under some other furniture, like a cabinet.

I did find the Floor One S9 Artist Steam to be slightly heavy, especially with its water tank full. As the dirty water tank fills and you refill the clean water, it gets heavier, too. It won't be too heavy for most users, but, for example, older people might find it a bit much to lift off the dock and place back onto the dock after cleaning.

To be clear, the Floor One S9 Artist Steam is not a traditional vacuum-mop combo, which you might have to remind yourself of if you're used to products like modern robotic vacuums that separate mopping and vacuuming. It's more designed as a handheld steam cleaner that can leave your hard floors looking clean, even when it comes to larger messes.

At the core of the cleaner is the roller mop pad, which spins around and applies pressure to your floor to clean up any stains or other messes. But the Floor One S9 Artist Steam goes beyond that to remove stubborn stains. Notably, it uses Tineco's so-called HyperSteam technology to heat water up to 284 degrees to steam the floor as you go. As you clean and after you dock the S9 Artist Steam, the mop pad rotates past a scraper to get off any sludge and can be dried using hot air when you're done.

Unfortunately, you have to manually initiate drying, as it doesn't enter a drying mode automatically. I wish it did, as having to enter drying mode is just another step. Thankfully, the cleaner will tell you to initiate self-cleaning if it thinks it needs it, but it won't go the extra step and do so on its own. Thankfully, even when it's steaming, it doesn't actually keep water hot, so it's perfectly safe for pets and kids to be around a recently cleaned floor.

The device is supposed to be able to automatically detect how dirty different parts of your floor are, adjusting suction and water flow as needed. It's hard to tell if this is working or not, but it did seem like it adjusted at different points, even if it wasn't ultra-precise.

One thing that might be slightly surprising when you first use the Floor One S9 Artist Steam is that it actually turns the wheels on its own. As a result, you don't need to push and pull it around quite as much. Just guide it in the right direction and then pull it back as needed. It's easy to pull back even though the wheels are working in the other direction, and it was kind of nice to not have to be quite so involved.

Technically, the Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam works with the Tineco Life app — however, it's far from necessary. On the app, you can remotely trigger things like different cleaning modes, and set how much suction and water you want to be used for those different modes.

Unfortunately, however, you can't use the app for the one thing that the app would be most useful for, and that's initiating a mop cleaning cycle. After all, if you want to change cleaning modes, you're probably actively using the cleaner and can simply press the button, which would be much more convenient than pulling your phone out and using the app. But if you forgot to clean the mop pad after your last cleaning and plan on cleaning again soon, it would come in handy to activate a cleaning cycle.

The only other thing that the app is really useful for is maintenance, but considering the fact that I only used the cleaner for a few weeks, this isn't an issue I ran into. I downloaded the app to test it, but I didn't use it after poking around. It's more or less useless in day-to-day cleaning.

Before going any further, it's important to note that a steamer like this is not meant to be used on all different kinds of hard floors. It's best for sealed, undamaged floors and can damage certain kinds of laminate or other hard floors. Thankfully, you don't have to use it in steam mode. You can simply use it in mopping mode instead. But you'll want to remember to switch modes before you use it on a floor that could be damaged.

That said, it did clean the floors decently well, even when it came to stains and other stuck-on messes. To be clear, I have a lot of those — I have a toddler. My floors need to be cleaned on a daily basis. Impressively, it managed most of those trickier messes easily.

But it does require a little getting used to. You may have to hold the cleaner in place for a second or two while it cleans specific spots, and it's a good idea to clean slowly to ensure you're getting all the stuck-on stains on your floors. It doesn't clean as quickly as a vacuum.

The Floor One S9 Artist Steam is a little loud, though. Its noise depends on the cleaning mode, but no matter what, the self-cleaning mode is too loud to run, for example, if there's a baby napping in the next room.

I routinely review high-end robotic vacuums, so it's hard for me not to compare other cleaners with them. Floor cleaners like the Floor One S9 Artist Steam are more targeted towards cleaning large wet messes and removing really stuck-on messes that require a little more work. But, if I had to pick one, I'd still go for a robotic vacuum. It's less work to manually clean larger messes and stuck-on stains, then leave the rest to a robotic vacuum, than it is to use a floor cleaner on a regular basis. There's no reason you can't have both — one for so-called maintenance cleaning and one for deep cleaning — but that costs a whole lot more.

That's not to take away from the Floor One S9 Artist Steam, though. That steaming functionality definitely makes it better at deeper cleaning, not to mention taking care of those big spills that would ruin a robotic vacuum.

The Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam is a great wet/dry vacuum that's very good at removing stuck-on spills and messes. The steam functionality makes it even better at this, loosening up stuck-on stains so that it can clean more effectively. Most households will still need another cleaning machine for carpets, and some will prefer to manually clean larger messes and rely on a robot vacuum or something else — but for those households that often have larger wet messes, the Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam is an excellent choice.

The competition

Tineco itself offers other cleaners that use steam functionality, including the slightly cheaper Floor One S7 Steam. It's not quite as powerful as this model, though. Additionally, you might decide you don't need the steam functionality or can't make use of it on your floors. In that case, it might be worth going for a wet/dry vacuum like the Tineco Floor One S7 Pro, or another cleaner that can be used on both hard floors and carpets alike. But, those models likely won't be quite as good at getting off super stuck-on stains.

Should I buy the Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam?

Yes, but keep in mind that you'll likely need other cleaners too.