MOVA V70 Ultra Complete, Coming From a V50: Best Cleaning I've Had, but the Bagless Dock Is Struggling With Dog Hair
A week or two with the MOVA V70 Ultra Complete after a trouble-free V50: the best cleaning I've had from a robot, and a bagless dock that clogs with heavy dog hair.
By Nick Meyer · · 6 min read
My main reference point is the V50 Ultra Complete, which has been close to trouble-free for me (I know some of you haven’t been as lucky). I’ve owned a few other brands, but most of my hours are on MOVA robots, so factor in that bias. Photos attached.
Cleaning Performance
This is the best-cleaning robot vac I’ve used, and I can feel it walking around barefoot. MaxiReachX is the big new feature. MOVA lists 6.69 inches of mop extension and 4.72 in on the side brush, while the V50’s mop swings out 1.57 in. The baseboard pic shows both arms out at once. It grabs more debris than I figured it would, and its judgment on when to extend has been good.
That MaxiReach is impressive, really. And this isn’t nearly as far as it goes!
Water use is way down compared to the V50. The floor is visibly less wet, and there’s less in the dirty tank after a run. I expected mopping to suffer because of that, and I haven’t seen it happen. I know other users have reported reduced cleaning performance due to this. I find that the cleaning performance is greater and I have to fill the clean water tank far less.
It uses the same TroboWave DuoBrush as the V50, and hair still isn’t wrapping. I’ve never experienced a clog with my V50 or V70 from the robot and I attribute it largely to this brush design.
It does a really nice job on carpet!
Dock: Bagless Tank
No bags to buy, and cleaning the tank means rinsing it under the sink, letting it dry and dropping it back in.
Now the problems. My dogs shed like crazy, so your mileage may vary:
- Hair collects at the dock’s suction port and in the pipe to the tank instead of reaching the tank. The dock pic shows a clump sitting right at the port. This never happened on my V50.
Hair clog that never made it to the dust bin
- The tank fills faster than the V50’s bag, and the debris doesn’t compress much.
- The tank’s filter assembly is caked with dust after a single week (see the filter pic). It’s washable, and the V70 manual lists a 6-month replacement period for the dock’s HEPA filter. There’s no spare in the box, and I can’t find one in MOVA’s store yet. With my shedders, I doubt mine makes it to 6 months.
Dust bin filter & hair accumulation after just a couple of runs
- Emptying is loud, but I can’t say it’s much louder than the V50.
Dock: Solution Tanks and a Leak
Tank B ships with MOVA’s pet cleaner, but you can use wood floor cleaner in it instead, which is a nice option for hardwood homes.
The problem: cleaning solution is leaking where the solution module seats into the dock. I got a pic of it dripping onto the top of the robot. I can’t tell how much is making it to the robot’s tank.
Solution dripping from the charging station onto the robot
Obstacle Recognition
MOVA’s number is 300+ recognizable objects, up from 200+ on the V50. Furniture, dog toys, dog beds and cables have all been fine. It even drove under a bench in a cluttered corner (the pumpkin pic), got itself out quick and cleaned the spot well.
This is a messy area & the robot managed to navigate in and out under the bench easily!
My issue is over-avoidance. It has treated plain dirt, a rug and my A/C floor registers as obstacles, and my V50 drives right over those registers.
Retractable DToF Tower
Inconsistent so far. It reads the gap under my couch as a wall and won’t lower the tower or go under unless I remote-drive it. Then it drove under my bed with the tower still up in a very tight space (sorry for the poor quality photo!).
LiDAR Tower barely getting under the bed and not lowering
The Obstacle Recheck Test, and a Settings Lesson
In my office, the robot saw the red chair and some cords near the desk during its perimeter pass and avoided them. The app tagged the cords as “Cords” at 85% possibility. Once the perimeter was done, I pulled the chair and cords out. It finished the interior and never returned to the desk area.
Then I found Dynamic Obstacle Area Cleaning in Floor Cleaning Settings, which I had off. The in-app description says it marks areas missed while avoiding people and pets and cleans them at the end of the task. It’s on now, and I’ll rerun the test to see if it applies to furniture too.
Lesson learned: MOVA gives you a lot of settings, so go through all of them before you write something off.
Identification of obstacles is impressive, but sometimes to a fault!
App, Status Lights, Battery
The app redesign follows the S70: cleaner look, a reworked settings page, and a new overview plus cleaning timeline. The timeline screenshot shows it logging steps like mop removal before carpets. MOVAhome is still my favorite robot app across brands. The status lights behave differently than the V50’s, so expect to relearn them. Charging is quick (MOVA says up to 30% faster than its 50/60 series fast charge), and runtime feels a little longer than my V50.
Live Overview & Cleaning Timeline
Where I’m at After a Week or Two
Cleaning is excellent, and that’s the part I care about most. What I’m watching is hair reaching the tank, the filter and the solution leak, because those look like hardware to me. It could also be my unit or something I’m doing wrong, so if you’ve fixed any of them, I want to hear how.
On the software side, a room-by-room run today did room 9 first and then went to room 1. Once it completed room 1, it never cleaned rooms 2-8. That looks like a firmware glitch to me. The over-avoidance and the DToF tower behavior seem like firmware territory too, and MOVA has fixed that kind of thing before in my experience.
One more thing if you read this far. I have no idea whether the V70 went through a beta test. If it didn’t, it needed one. A room-order glitch shouldn’t make it to launch, and real homes with real dog hair would have surfaced most of what I’ve listed here. I’m still a MOVA fan, and I’d like to see the next flagship get that round of testing first.
TL;DR: Best cleaning I’ve had from a robot. The bagless dock clogs with heavy dog hair, the tank filter is already caked with no spare available, my solution module leaks, and obstacle avoidance leans too cautious (turn on Dynamic Obstacle Area Cleaning). I think a beta would have caught a lot of this.
Oh, and the dog is totally innocent in all of this!
This was pulled from the clogged charging station
V70 owners: have you noticed any similar benefits or problems with your V70?
This write-up was first posted on Reddit in r/RobotVacuums. Read the original.
