Gtech Orca

Verdict

A powerful floor cleaner, the Gtech Orca sterilises water automatically to leave floors clean beyond looking nice. It generally works well, managing my full range of test stains, but lift the handle too high and it powers off, which I found a frustrating experience and holds this cleaner back for those that might want to use it in more confined spaces.

Introduction

The Gtech Orca is the company’s first wet and dry cordless vacuum cleaner for cleaning hard floors. It has a powerful cleaning action and sterilises water automatically, to make your floors more than just clean to look at.

It’s generally an easy-to-use floor cleaner, although the fact it shuts down if you get the handle too close to vertical can be quite annoying.

Design and Features

• Separate dirty and clean tanks
• Charging dock
• Self-clean mode

Externally, the Gtech Orca looks like pretty much every other hard floor cleaner, such as the Vax Glide 2. Designed like an upright vacuum cleaner, it has a single floorhead at the base, which has a spinning roller.

This roller and cover are easy to take apart for cleaning, and should be cleaned properly after each use.

You’ll need to rinse the cover under the tap, but the roller can be cleaned with the Gtech Orca’s self-cleaning mode, which is accessed via the LCD on the front when the cleaner is in its charging dock.

This dock has accessory holders that take the roller for drying, plus the provided brush, which can be used to clean out the floor head and other parts of the cleaner.

As with most hard floor cleaners, the Gtech Orca has two tanks. There’s a clean water tank, which takes 0.8-litres of water. To this, you had the Orca cleaning detergent, and Gtech says not to use alternatives. There’s a 0.3-litre bottle of cleaning solution in the box, and replacements cost £5.

Mixing the detergent in is easy, although the tank is fiddly to get under a tap when adding water. As the access flap is mounted vertically, the tank has to be tipped almost horizontally to fill it, which makes checking the fill-level marks a little tricky.

There’s a separate 0.7-litre dirty water tank. Given that some water is left on the floor when cleaning, it roughly works out that the dirty tank needs to be emptied every time a full clean water tank is used.

Inside the dirty tank is a washable filter, and a solids separator, which helps separate debris from liquid. This tank is easy to pull apart for cleaning, but it’s not as neat as the tank in the Shark HydroVac WD210UK, where water can be poured out, leaving solid debris behind for emptying into a bin.

There’s a power button to turn the vacuum cleaner on, which lights up the LCD and gives a choice of three modes. Sterilization mode uses an electrolysing process to generate clean water free from viruses, spores and bacteria, as well as eliminating odours.

In this mode, this hard floor cleaner dispenses water and detergent onto the roller automatically for cleaning, sucking up dirty water and mess into the dirty water tank.

There are also two vacuum-only modes, which can be used for picking up mess: Eco and Max.

Generally, the Gtech Orca is easy to use. Once it’s on and the handle is tilted back, I found the hard floor cleaner easy to push around, leaving a gentle fresh smell behind thanks to the detergent.

However, there is one annoyance: lift the handle too high and the Gtech Orca turns off completely, immediately. As the roller gets closer to the edge on one side than the other, this limitation meant that I kept turning the Orca off while trying to clean along a line of kitchen cupboards.

I also repeatedly turned the cleaner off when doing things like moving chairs or working in a more confined space. It can be a frustrating experience at times.

Performance

• Deals well with large bits of debris
• Cleans all stains well can be slow
• Hair can get left in the vacuum

I tested the Gtech Orca with a series of dried-on stains to see how well it could be cleaned. Starting with the coffee stain, I found that a couple of passes were all that was required to lift them and leave the floor clean.

Next, I tackled my red wine stain. Again, the Gtech Orca made short work of this, with just a couple of passes needed to lift the stain.

With the tougher ketchup stain, I found that the Gtech Orca could remove the mess, but it took multiple passes to do so. And some of the passes ended up spreading a bit of mess elsewhere, which I had to go over again. Still, the end result was a clean floor.

I then tackled a mud stain, which comprised dried-in dirt and loose particles. Everything was removed with relative ease.

For wet messes I added rice granules to a ketchup spill, and everything was lifted quickly and cleanly.

I added mess up to the side of the kitchen cupboards. Running the Gtech Orca along the cupboards, so that its roller was as close as possible, the mop did a good job, but there’s a clear gap where it can’t quite reach. That’s the same with all hard floor cleaners of this type that I’ve reviewed.

I put human hair on the floor to see how the Gtech Orca could cope. The hair was removed and made its way into the dirty tank.

Removing the tank for cleaning, I saw that some of the hair remained caught in the vacuum cleaner’s body, so needed to be removed. Where possible, I’d definitely tackle dry areas with a regular vacuum cleaner, before mopping.

At the end of cleaning, the floor head was dirty and saturated, but the self-clean cycle cleaned it up, ready for the next use.

There’s around 20m of battery life for mopping, which is generally enough to clean a lightly-soiled floor of a home, or give one room, such as a kitchen, a deep clean.

Sound wasn’t too bad, coming in at 68.5dB when mopping, 68.5dB on the max vacuum mode and 65.3dB on the Eco mode. That’s similar in operation to a standard cordless vacuum cleaner.

Latest deals