The Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam has everything a high-end floor washer needs: hot-air mopping, hot-water roller washing, a hot-air quick dry that finishes the roller in 5 minutes, strong suction and a modern design. Mopping with it is easy and it gets the floor clean.
You could say the Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Steam is about as complete as a floor washer gets, with little room left for any meaningful improvement. And yet with the Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist, its successor, which has just gone on sale in Asia range $600, Tineco still found things to upgrade, including a few nobody would have thought of.
The first upgrade worth mentioning on the new Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist is that the base station now has a 5-liter water tank that automatically pumps water into the tank inside the floor washer every time it docks.
The machine itself still has the 0.85-liter clean water tank and 0.8-liter dirty water tank you find on other floor washers, enough for roughly 80 to 150 square meters depending on the mode. With the 5-liter tank added at the base station, you no longer have to think about refilling the machine with clean water after every clean. That tank holds about a week of mopping for a typical household, so a job that was already light loses one more step. The only thing left to do after each clean is empty the dirty water tank.
The second upgrade on the Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist is a feature I tried recently on the Deebot X12 OmniCyclone robot vacuum: a high-pressure water jet that Tineco calls HydroBurst. There is a nozzle at the front of the machine that sprays at a 15-degree angle. On patches that are hard to mop, such as dried-on grime, you can spray water to soften the mess first so the roller can lift it more easily.
The third upgrade worth noting is a soft rubber squeegee called StreakFree, sitting in front of the roller so the roller stops leaving water streaks behind, which gets the floor dry faster. The squeegee raises and lowers itself automatically as you work, thanks to a very sensitive TMR magnetic sensor.
In actual use, I found the squeegee lifts as you push the roller forward and drops again very quickly the moment you pull it back. If you have ever mopped with one of these machines, you will know the pull stroke usually leaves more standing water than the push. The squeegee and the TMR sensor on the Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist exist to deal with exactly that. In practice it behaved the way Tineco describes: the roller left an even, faint trail of water whether I pushed forward or pulled back.
The mopping on the Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist differs from its predecessor in one big way. This machine has an 85°C hot-water mopping mode for disinfecting and better cleaning, replacing the 140°C steam mode.
The way the water gets heated is different too. The Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist heats the water right at the station, drawing on mains power rather than the battery the way many other floor washers do. That means hot-water mopping does not eat into the battery.
For mopping, the machine has the same four basic modes as earlier generations: auto, max, suction-only and quiet. Auto runs off a sensor Tineco calls iLoop, which reads how dirty the floor is and adjusts suction and mopping power on its own. The dirt level shows up in real time as a blue or red light on the body of the machine.
On cleaning performance, I think floor washers do a better job than robot vacuums, and this one is no exception. Plenty of robots use a similar roller, but the roller on a robot does not press on the floor as hard as it does on a floor washer, because with a floor washer you are pushing down on it yourself.
Once you are done cleaning, washing and drying the roller takes one button press. The machine washes the roller with hot water and dries it with 85°C hot air. Washing takes about 4 minutes; for drying you get two options, a 5-minute fast dry or a 40-minute slow dry. The slow dry makes no noise.
Beyond the differences above, the Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist carries over everything familiar from Tineco’s high-end line. It has 22,000 Pa of suction, enough for larger debris such as snack crumbs as well as puddles of dirty water on the floor, and the roller runs out to both edges so you can mop right up against the baseboard, with an anti-tangle design for hair.
The Tineco Floor One Station S9 Artist looks modern, folds flat to 180 degrees and has a slim body (12.85 cm) that slides under furniture easily, plus a blue light that makes it easy to read how dirty the floor is.
Mopping with it is very light work. The roller acts as a third wheel, so you more or less just walk behind the machine, and your arms never get tired. The handle swivels freely for changing direction, which helps, and the unit stands upright on its own when you pause.
As for controls, most of the basics are handled by the buttons on the body. That said, the Tineco Life app adds some finer adjustments, such as setting suction power in suction and max modes, turning the voice prompts on or off, and changing their volume.
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