Dad’s short answer: Worth it if you've got a lot of hard floor and a household that makes messes. The machine turns a twenty-minute mop-and-bucket job into about five minutes of pushing. What it costs you is a maintenance routine you can't skip.

The case for

Mopping is a chore people avoid, and that's the real problem these solve. When mopping means filling a bucket, wringing a mop and then waiting for the floor to dry, you do it when the floor is visibly bad. When it means grabbing a cordless machine off a dock and pushing it around the kitchen, you do it when the floor is only slightly bad. Your floors end up meaningfully cleaner because the job got easy.

The dirty water tank is also its own argument. You see exactly what came off your floor. Everybody I've handed one to has the same reaction the first time they dump it.

Three homes where I'd skip it

Mostly carpet. These are hard-floor machines. If you have one small tile entryway and carpet everywhere else, you're buying a lot of machine for very little floor.

A very small apartment. If the whole hard-floor area is a galley kitchen and a bathroom, a spray mop and a good vacuum does the job for far less money and takes up far less space.

Anybody who won't do the maintenance. This is the honest one. These machines have a roller, a filter, and a dirty water tank that all need attention, and the ones that get neglected start to smell and stop cleaning well. If you know you won't rinse the tank after a run, this isn't the category for you and I'd rather say that up front.

Dad’s Take: The machine doesn't make your floors cleaner. It makes mopping easy enough that you actually do it, and that's what makes your floors cleaner.