Tineco Floor One S9 Artist Pro review: Cleaner than your average artwork

It may sound weird to call a wet and dry vacuum cleaner “Artist” series, but it's clear that Tineco has spent a lot of time and effort really focused on changing its offering.

The S9 Artist Pro is, in my experience, the best Tineco floor cleaner to date. By leveraging some design decisions of previous models and tweaking the overall style, Tineco has created a floor cleaner that not only does a good job of cleaning your floors but looks pretty good while doing it.

You do need to pay for the experience. And by design, it's not going to be the right option for people with lots of carpets throughout their home.

But there is a lot to like about the Tineco S9 Artist Pro, as I discovered over the past few weeks of testing.

What is the S9 Artist Pro offering?

The S9 Artist Pro is a massive design shift from previous generations of the brand’s floor cleaners. Gone is the cylindrical body, replaced with a stylish oval design.

This does come with a bit of a price bump. The S9 Artist Pro will set you back $1,299 RRP, with a steam version costing $1,499.

It’s also been restructured to allow for some practical improvements. The clean water tank is now located on the head unit, while the dirty water tank remains at the back of the main body. This shift means the S9 Artist Pro can lie flat to clean underneath furniture like the S6 Stretch… so long as your furniture is less than 12.85 cm high. For me, it meant I could properly mop underneath my bed, which was a very welcome inclusion.

The dirty water tank has also been redesigned slightly, which makes it easier to clean out the solids picked up when mopping. It’s still a bit gross, but it’s definitely less gross than cleaning out previous generations.

Like previous generations, the S9 Artist Pro uses MHCBS technology, which sprays clean water on the roller before scraping off the dirty water, ensuring your floors are only ever experiencing clean water as it washes.

The mop head runs right to the edge of the head unit, so you can get right up into the edges of your home for a proper clean.

The vacuum offers 22kPa of suction, and an anti-tangle design means you shouldn’t experience any blockages as you clean your home.

The shifted weight of having the clean water tank on the vacuum’s head means that it’s a bit easier to control, especially thanks to the omnidirectional wheel system and powered motion, which lets you move around with ease. When you turn the S9 Pro off, it automatically reverses back to help stand it up more easily.

And with all of that tech inside, you still get enough battery for about 75 minutes of cleaning. In the weeks I spent using it, I never had to stop to recharge the S9 Artist Pro mid-clean.

When you do stick it on the charger, it will wash and dry the mop head with hot water and hot air with a simple button press.

What does the S9 Artist Pro do well?

It’s only been a couple of months since I reviewed the S6 FlashDry cleaner from Tineco, so I feel confident in saying that the S9 Artist Pro is what happens when a brand listens to customer feedback.

My biggest issues with previous Tineco products were all pretty much the same – it didn’t lie flat, so it wouldn’t clean under furniture, and cleaning the dirty water tank was disgusting.

The S9 Artist Pro addresses both those issues and more. I love that it can lie flat so I can mop the floor under my bed. Let me tell you – that typically doesn’t happen veryoften.

The dirty water tank is also easier to clean than previous generations. It’s still disgusting – the colour of the water is consistently gross – but the way the unit captures hair and dirt now makes it much easier to clean without having to actually touch it.

The cleaner itself does a good job of cleaning. If you have a really stubborn, stuck-on stain, it probably doesn’t have enough downward pressure to get it off, but for regular maintenance and general hard floor cleaning, this is fantastic. It gets to the edge of your furniture, so your floor feels clean after you’ve used it.

It does feel a little different in control than previous models, given that the clean water tank is now located on the base unit, but the powered movement makes controlling the S9 effortless. I love that it pushes back to make standing it up easier when you switch it off.

Battery life is incredible. I never came close to draining the battery, cleaning all but the two carpeted bedrooms of my three-bedroom home.

The self-cleaning function is brilliant, doing all the hard work for you after you’ve run the S9 around your home.

What could the S9 Artist Pro improve?

I love the self-cleaning function of the S9 Artist Pro, but there is a catch. The entire process takes about five minutes, which is definitely quick, but not so quick that you don’t walk away and forget all about it.

While the cleaner does remind you to empty the dirty water tank at the end of the cycle, if you miss that and forget — man, the smell gets bad. I’m not talking regular bad – I’m talking nauseatingly bad.

After smelling that odour once, I would welcome an alert system that reminds you every 30 minutes or so after a self-clean function runs that you need to empty the dirty water tank, until you actually do it.

I also want to flag here that I found the iLoop function a little less reliable on the S9. iLoop changes the colour on the Tineco unit to highlight dirty areas you need to give a bit more attention to. I found it would get stuck showing a bit of red on areas, and near go down, no matter how long you ran over that area.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that when you lay the S9 Pro flat to clean under furniture, the suction power is reduced. It still works, but I don’t think popping the unit on the Max setting to clean under my bed made a difference to the suction power.

Verdict

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the best wet/dry cleaner that Tineco has ever made – with the possible exception of the $1,499 S9 Artist Steam (which I can’t review because I can’t use steam on my vinyl floorboards).

It does its main task – mopping floors – very well, though it’s better used as a regular cleaner than an occasional mopper. Still, it’s versatile and manoeuvrable, and has a battery that lasts for ages.

I love that it can clean itself once you’re done.

The biggest hurdle I think this faces – which is true for all wet/dry vacuums – is the price, combined with the fact you can’t use it to clean carpets.

So if you have any carpets or rugs, you still need a vacuum cleaner, despite the fact this does everything you need for hard floors.

Ultimately, this means that it’s going to be better suited to homes that have more hard floors than carpets. If that’s your home, and you are looking for a brilliant vacuum/mop combo, this is an ideal choice.

Behind the scenes

Specs comparison

Tips and tricks

• Never let the dirty water tank sit there. Trust me on this. I left a bit of dirty water in it for about a week, and when I went to clean the floors the next time, the stench followed the cleaner. I was gagging as I emptied it.
• You can clean up a big liquid spill easily by starting with the suction-only mode to pick up most of the mess, before switching back to Auto to give it a proper clean.
• The Max mode is great for more stubborn stains, unless they are under furniture – when you lay the cleaner down flat, its suction audibly reduces, so it may be better to move the furniture to clean difficult messes.

One more thing

I’m just trying to think about how Tineco – or any other brand – could improve the dirty water tank situation because emptying it is the worst thing about this appliance.

The easiest solution is what I mentioned in the review – a regular alert, so it’s impossible to forget to do it.

But as a more permanent solution, I think there probably needs to be an adjustment to the dock. You could make it more like a robot vacuum model, where dirty water is extracted to a dirty water tank in the dock. It would still need a regular clean, but would hopefully limit the odours within the unit itself.

Or better yet, a plumbed dock that disposes of the dirty water and cleans the dirty water tank automatically. Obviously, any actual plumbing makes it impossible, but even an extraction hose you could place into a laundry sink to enable that functionality could be cool.

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