From retail sales of less than 100 million yuan to close to 10 billion, in the past three years, the floor scrubber industry has continued to prosper. In the face of the sudden market boom and the low penetration rate of domestic smart home appliances, there are many entrants in the field of smart home appliances and hardware. As a leader in the smart home appliance industry, Dreame Technology has devoted itself to research, injected innovative technology into life, endowed products to promote the continuous development of the market, and led the floor scrubber market to real prosperity.
01 A cup of hot water to solve the puzzle
On September 1, 2023, Dreame floor scrubber H30 was officially launched. Dreame H30 has added a new technology - 60 hot water forward and reverse cleaning roller brush technology. The rise of floor scrubbers stems from their ability to deep clean floors and their intelligence. Having the ability to clean dry and wet garbage that other household cleaning products do not have, this is the inherent advantage of the product category of floor scrubbers, and it is also the standard ability of floor scrubbers.
Intelligence is the core of improving user experience, and it is also the key to differentiated competition of floor scrubbers.
Similar to sweeping robots, in 2023, the intelligence of floor scrubbers is mainly reflected in the self-cleaning ability, and floor scrubbers will enter the era of self-cleaning in 2020.
In 2020, when the floor scrubber swept the domestic market, the one-key self-cleaning as a standard function was also promoted with the floor scrubber, and the one-key self-cleaning technology that the floor scrubber was standard at that time was cold water cleaning + scraper scraping. This self-cleaning solution gives users a first taste of hands-free, but it comes with a series of problems. This year, with the launch of various floor scrubber products and the influx of user homes, Dreame official has also collected a lot of user feedback, among which the most criticized is that the floor scrubber roller brush is not clean thoroughly enough. The incomplete self-cleaning of the roller brush has also become a pain point in the floor scrubber industry in 2020, and this is actually related to the Chinese family environment. Since the kitchen in Chinese families is the hardest hit area by oil pollution, it is inevitable that the floor cleaning of the kitchen will encounter oil stains, and in the process of gradually improving the cleaning capacity of the floor scrubber, how to deeply clean the oil-stained roller brush has become a key issue. Faced with this problem, the Dreame floor scrubber team thought of a carpet cleaning machine that has been very mature in foreign applications. "Carpet cleaners are designed to deep clean carpets with hot water with cleaning liquid, so why can't we use it for self-cleaning with a roller brush? ”
This was the original idea of the Dreame floor scrubber team. With such an idea, the Dreame floor scrubber team began to try to bring the self-cleaning function of the hot water roller brush to the floor scrubber, at this time, the first thorny question encountered by the Dreame floor scrubber team was: how many degrees of hot water temperature is appropriate?
According to information obtained by the zinc industry, the problem was difficult because the team needed to consider three factors: decontamination capacity, impact on the service life of the roller brush, and safety of use.
After repeated research and testing, the Dreame floor scrubber team found that 50 -60 hot water can dissolve most common household oil stains, and the optimal water temperature ratio of individual cleaning solution is 45 -60. 60 can not only ensure that the temperature of the roller brush after heat loss can still be maintained above 45 in the process of self-cleaning, so as to ensure the cleaning ability of the oil stain, and will not affect the life of the roller brush.
Ethan, who is responsible for the research and development of Dreame H30 technology, said, "In the end, the actual test results in the Dreame laboratory showed that the decontamination effect of 60 hot water alone reached 60%, and if it was combined with the official cleaning liquid of Dreame floor scrubber, the effect of the two was superimposed, and the decontamination capacity exceeded 90%. ”
Such a self-cleaning ability of the roller brush is far from the floor scrubber equipped with a cold water self-cleaning solution on the supermarket.
However, it is such a technology that has been honed by Dreame for almost four years.
02 The four years that were polished
At the end of 2019, Dreame developed the first engineering prototype of a floor scrubber equipped with hot water cleaning roller brush technology in the laboratory, but at that time, the first generation of Dreame floor scrubber had not yet been launched.
In fact, even two years later, when the first generation of Dreame floor scrubbers was launched, it was not equipped with this function as standard, and the real use of this technology was the Dreame H30 released in September this year.
In the meantime, the technology of hot water cleaning roller brush has been polished by the Dreame team for four years.
This also makes the hot water cleaning roller brush technology delayed again and again, and finally becomes the self-cleaning technology of the Dreame floor scrubber.
However, Ethan, the head of Dreame Technology R&D, concluded, "This is actually more in line with the law of market demand." ”
The law of market demand mentioned here is actually the evolution route of self-cleaning technology of floor scrubber products
Before the first generation of floor scrubbers came out, various floor scrubber teams added a one-button self-cleaning function based on the prediction of the market.
After the first batch of floor scrubbers were launched, the Dreame team found that although the one-button self-cleaning function was frequently used by users, users still needed to remove the roller brushes and put them on the balcony to dry because the roller brushes were not dried.
Drying has become another self-cleaning function of floor scrubbers that needs to be developed urgently.
As a result, the Dreame team began to develop hot air drying technology, and the H12S released in March 2022 introduced the hot air drying function for the first time.
Following the research and development of the hot air drying function, in order to clean the roller brush more cleanly, the forward and reverse rotation technology of the roller brush developed by the Dreame team was launched in the second half of this year.
Based on the feedback from users after the floor scrubber products equipped with the previous three generations of technology were put into the market, users have become more and more aware of the self-cleaning function of the roller brush, and the Dreame team has the confidence to bring the 60 hot water cleaning function of the deep cleaning roller brush to the mass production product.
This leads to the Dreame H30 floor scrubber equipped with a 60 hot water roller brush self-cleaning function.
The development of self-cleaning technology of floor scrubber is not the disposal of technology, but the superposition of technology.
Among them, before the advent of 60 hot water roller brush self-cleaning technology, hot air drying was another key technology to promote the qualitative change of the self-cleaning ability of floor scrubbers.
In 2021, the Dreame floor scrubber team began to develop hot air drying technology, which is no less complex than the technical research of 60 hot water washing roller brushes for the product of floor scrubber.
In fact, as early as the beginning of the research and development of this technology, Dreame proposed four measurement criteria internally:
In terms of drying effect, it is necessary to ensure that the water content of the roller brush does not exceed 1 after drying5g, so as to ensure that the roller brush is completely dry;
In terms of drying noise, it is necessary to ensure that the self-cleaning process of the floor scrubber does not exceed 50db, so as to ensure that it does not disturb the people in the home environment;
In terms of power consumption, it is necessary to ensure that the drying process of the floor scrubber will not surge the user's household power consumption;
In terms of safety, it is necessary to ensure that the drying process of the floor scrubber will not cause harm to components and users.
This requires the Dreame floor scrubber team to consider fans, heating wires, and air ducts in the research and development process of this technology
For material and structural issues such as air outlets, it is also necessary to consider how to accurately control the drying degree of the roller brush through algorithms.
Taking the most basic power consumption problem as an example, Dreame did not improve the drying effect by increasing the power of the whole machine.
It is to accelerate drying and reduce power consumption by optimizing the structure of the whole machine, such as air duct and air outlet, to reduce wind resistance and improve the uniformity of hot air blowing to the roller brush.
It is reported that the Dreame floor scrubber H30 only takes 30 minutes for a single hot air drying, and the power consumption is only 01 degree.
Dreame said, "Compared with the high-power drying solutions of our competitors, the power consumption of our hot air drying solutions has been reduced by three times. ”
In fact, the hot air drying scheme equipped with Dreame floor scrubber H30 has also undergone three upgrade iterations, which has made an efficiency leap from the initial 2 hours of drying to the current 30 minutes of drying. It is worth noting that in order to ensure such an efficiency improvement and at the same time take into account the cleaning efficiency of the roller brush, just the material selection of the roller brush, Dreame's internal material expert team has conducted research and testing on more than 20 kinds of materials on the market.
In the process of continuous screening, testing, verification and elimination, the final material of the roller brush can ensure that it can not only provide enough friction, water stains and oil adsorption power required to clean the floor, but also have better hydrophobicity for fast drying.
These are also the key to Dreame floor scrubbers being able to ride the dust in fast drying technology.
03 The lively industry is in urgent need of standards
According to the statistics of Aowei Cloud Network, from 2019 to 2022, the retail sales of China's floor scrubber industry will increase from 0700 million yuan increased to 99700 million yuan, the sales volume of floor scrubbers also increased from 260,000 units increased to 3.48 million units.
As far as cleaning appliances are concerned, no category can surpass the growth rate of floor scrubbers in the past two years, and even in the first half of 2023, floor scrubbers will still achieve 30With a growth rate of 9%, it is still the fastest-growing segment in clean household appliances.
As a result, it has also attracted hundreds of enterprises in various fields to enter the game across borders.
On the one hand, the floor scrubber market is growing rapidly, and on the other hand, industry standards are gradually landing.
Since the formulation of the first group standard of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association in 2021, "Household and Similar Floor Scrubbers", the compilation of "Performance Requirements and Grade Evaluation of Household Floor Scrubbers" will be carried out in 2022.
At the same time, Chinese users also have a higher understanding of the emerging category of floor scrubbers, and have their own judgment standards for cleaning ability and self-cleaning ability.
In terms of cleaning ability, users are more concerned about the ability to clean stubborn stains, ground hair, dirt identification, sterilization, etc.; In terms of self-cleaning ability, hot air drying, hot water cleaning, sterilization and disinfection functions have also begun to become the standard configuration of floor scrubber products.
In addition, the Dreame team said that since floor scrubbers are still generally heavier, whether they can better provide assistance is also a concern for many users.
Compared with the multiple deceleration scheme of motor + reducer on the market, the Dreame floor scrubber team has specially installed a servo hub motor for H30.
According to Ethan, by switching to a servo hub motor, the weight of the H30 machine has not only been reduced, but also in the .
At the key node of pushing forward and pulling back, H30 is 40%-50% less labor-saving than the mainstream floor scrubbers on the market.
The upgrade of the push-pull experience also makes this product more convenient for the elderly at home. And this is one of the reasons why Dreame has made great efforts to replace the H30 with servo hub motors.
04Seize the mid-range market
Compared with the prosperity of the floor scrubber market, the sweeping robot has not recovered after experiencing the boom, so will the floor scrubber also fall into a trough period?
The above-mentioned person in charge of Dreame R&D judged that there is at least 3-5 years of rapid growth period for floor scrubbers.
In fact, in 2023, with the maturity of various technologies of floor scrubbers, the completion of the first chain, and the sinking of technical dividends, the mid-end market has become the most lively market for floor scrubbers this year.
According to the survey data in the "2023 China Floor Washing Machine Industry Development and Consumption Insights***", the highest proportion of the ** segment of floor scrubbers in 2023 is 2500-3000 yuan.
Stepping into the mid-end market is actually a sign that the floor scrubber is moving towards a mature stage.
If you look at the penetration rate, in 2023, the penetration rate of floor scrubbers in the Chinese market will only be about 3%.
In this way, the next mid-range market battle is particularly critical for floor scrubber manufacturers.
According to Zhongyikang statistics, from January to September 2023, in the mid-range floor scrubber market of 2000-4000 yuan, Dreame floor scrubbers accounted for 24%, ranking top 2 in the industry, and the star product H12 Pro Plus was sold to the first in all channels in the price segment during the 618 period this year.
Dreame's performance in the mid-end market proves its leading position in the industry, and in the future, it is believed that Dreame will continue to depict the grand blueprint of the floor scrubber market with ingenuity and core technology.