As an owner of several smart vacuum cleaners, I can answer one question for you straight away: They do save time. The question as always remains: How much should I spend on one? OKP K5 (AmazonUK, AmazonUS) is a budget offering that can be snapped from Amazon for around £200 (or even as low as £120). I have one with me, and I have a new set of floors to test it on – Oh, I also bought a carpet just for this purpose, as right now, all I have is a fake wood finish! That’s going to be interesting.
Smart cleaning on a budget
Without often spending a fortune, options like Lidar, advanced sensors and even AI object recognition are not available on inexpensive robotic cleaners. Taking OKP K5 out of the box, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The box was already surprisingly small, therefore I knew the vacuum will be much smaller than the alternatives I have from Xiaomi and Yedi.
Despite a smaller diameter (28cm), OKP K5 is as tall as other vacuums I own. At 8cm, it doesn’t offer any additional advantages that come with a smaller size, other than the ability to squeeze in much narrower places. At first, the OKP K5 got me puzzled. Without a camera, mechanical bumper and other sensing features I wasn’t sure how “clever” this vacuum could be.
Thankfully, a quick table test confirmed that OKP K5 has edge sensors that prevent the cleaner from tumbling down the stairs and infrared proximity sensors that stop the cleaner in its tracks. While these sensors are clever, as the robot rarely drives itself into walls, thinner obstacles like chair’s legs, may not always be recognised.
OKP K5 comes with 2 sweeping brushes which definitely improves corner cleaning performance but it doesn’t have a very common rotary brush that helps remove dust from rugs and carpets.
The base is small, easy to deploy and doesn’t have to be backed against the wall for the vacuum to drive itself back into a charging position. This should definitely help with picking the place for the OKP K5 to sleep and recharge.
Other choices
Unlike some other brands I tried, OKP actually offers a wide range of smart cleaners that could fit your requirements so if the OKP K5 is missing a trick or two and you are happy to stretch your budget – give it a browse. You may see something you like.
Cleaning performance
OKP K5 offers approximately 100-110min of clean time in the standard mode. The 2000mAh may not sound very impressive, but this equals to about 70m² of single-pass performance.
I will skip the fact, that the vacuum stopped in its tracks twice now, as it managed to close the bathroom door in itself and end up trapped until the battery ran low. Not the vacuum’s fault, but twice now it made me laugh – We are not due to the robotic apocalypse just yet.
The entire flat is in excess of 90m² which is just at the verge of the vacuum capabilities. As the vacuum can return to the dock to complete the cleaning later, I don’t find this to be a particular issue, especially when I’m at work.
Hardfloor performance is pretty impressive. I had a Yedi Mop perform a full clean, then run the OKP K5 vacuum 2 days later to dust off the floors again. The floors felt clean, but the dust bin collected an impressive volume of stuff that shouldn’t be on the floor. I wasn’t sure how the vacuum would handle itself without the rotary brush in the middle.
Torture testing
As some of you have carpets, I got myself a nice, carpet-like mat, to verify the performance on that. Rather than waiting for the carpet and floor soil itself, I used sugar and flour to check the strength of the suction of the OKP K5 – 2 substances that are relatively difficult to remove from carpets.
The hard floor performance was very good, although due to the small testing surface, the robot missed a corner of the table – I have not seen OKP K5 missing spots when cleaning big surfaces.
With the carpeted area, suction was strong enough to completely remove the residue of flour but not sugar, which crystals would require a much stronger sucking force or a rotary brush to disturb the bristles of the carpet. This vac is better suited for hard floors than dealing with rugs and carpets.
The smart app
Once registered and paired via Bluetooth and WiFi (2.4GHz) the app is surprisingly simple. The vacuum is responsive and quick on its feet to do the job at hand. There are options to enable voice assistant, schedule a timer and set the preferred cleaning mode.
If you feel particularly creative, you can manually drive the robot around or carry it to a place to perform a spot clean. I wasn’t sure if the robot could generate maps, considering the lack of optical sensors but, to my surprise once the clean had started, the robot was quick and precise to draw the map of the surroundings based on the paths already travelled.
Tuya?
One thing, that got my instant attention was the credentials listed to interact with Tuya. I promptly removed the vacuum from the OKP app (who needs 20 apps right?) and tried to add the vacuum via the Tuya app. It turns out, that the vacuum can be added with basic functionality retained.
If you already have Tuya devices in your ecosystem, you will be very happy about that integration. Plus, the vacuum will connect to the smart speaker of your choice via Tuya Skill.
Unfortunately, in both cases the mapping options are limited and while maps are generated upon completed cleaning, the lack of advanced features like going to specific rooms or setting orders is noticeable.
Final thoughts
As I live in a flat without carpets and thresholds, OKP K5 serves very well. The company has to work on their pricing, as the robotic cleaner is priced sub $200 on Amazon (AmazonUK, AmazonUS) and twice as much on their home page. If you are going to make your purchasing decision now – shop wisely. It will deal with the occasional carpet just fine as long as you run it often enough to keep the level of dirt at reasonable levels. If you need something more robust, check my reviews of the other robotic vacuums. Let me know what you think about OKP K5 in this Reddit thread.
🆓📈💵 – See the transparency note for details.
