The Kärcher KV 4 cordless cleaner is a vibrating wet cleaner that gives you serious elbow grease without effort. It may provide the muscle, but the clearing pad won’t scratch delicate surfaces.

First, a segue and why I love the Kärcher KV 4 cordless cleaner. My wife and I share the cleaning duties, and it was my turn for the bathrooms. So I fired up the Kärcher, and within a matter of minutes, the bath, shower screen, tiles, mirrors, benchtops and more were all wonderfully clean. I must say with not a lot of effort on my part.

A few weeks later, my turn came around again. The Kärcher was out of battery (my wife had been using it and not recharged). The same clean took me three times as long, I was exhausted, and the results were not nearly as good.

This little hand-held makes cleaning easy – just add some cream cleaner.

It is pretty compact at 260 x 94 x 100mm x 500g and has nice big buttons and a handle, so you won’t have any issues using it. If you have arthritis, this may be for you.

Essentially it is a rechargeable battery-powered vibrating washcloth with a motorised spray reservoir. You can use it on any smooth surface – glass, tiles, mirrors, stone benchtops, splashbacks, car windows, polished wood floors, two-pack and lamented cupboards or more. And it works so well on soap grimed tiles and shower screens.

The spray tank holds 180ml, and you can use either the Kärcher Window clean (20ml makes 200ml) or pure water. The pump spray comes out under the pad.

Where you tend to use a repetitive circular motion with a hand-held scourer, you can use long single-pass strokes – it is so much faster – by my estimates, 50% over hand cleaning.

Charge, attach a clean Velcro cleaning pad, fill the water reservoir and clean. No app.

Use it horizontally or vertically to the extent of your reach. There is a WV Evolution extension pole from .6 to 1.5 metres that could be handy

Once cleaned, water remains on the surface, and you can either use the WV 6 Plus window vac or a non-shedding cotton cloth to remove it.

Depending on how dirty the surface is, you may want to handwash the pad every ten sq metres or so, and it is machine washable.

The battery takes about 2.5 hours to charge and runs for about 35 minutes, and that should be enough to do a 100m2 area. A meter shows the charge remaining.

Kärcher has a range of replacement pads – Scrubber, Tile, Soft and Cleaning pads. You can turn the spray off so it can dry clean.

Kärcher offers a range of cleaning solutions and supplies a 20ml sample of the Glass Cleaner concentrate. A 500ml bottle costs $11.90. I went to my local Bunnings, but they did not have a great range of Kärcher cleaning solutions.

We cleaned about 10m2 of windows, and the battery showed 90% remaining. The pad removed grime like insect hits, bird droppings, dust and salt residue far easier than if I had scrubbed with a light-duty, non-scratch, sponge scourer. And it was so much quicker.

It cleans any flattish surface. We use the pad with a cream cleaner. Wash the pad and swap to the spray reservoir for windows and mirrors. The only small issue was curved armrests in the bath and tight corner cleaning.

Clean the pads, buy extra cleaner, and that is it. While you probably could use other cleaning solutions in the reservoir, make sure that they don’t block the spray jets – they must be suitable for this type of device.

Storage – my take – you need to store it upright to keep the damp pad off any surface. You don’t have to empty the water reservoir.

Like all Kärcher products, this has great availability of user-replaceable spares.

We have been looking at the Kärcher range to see how some German know-how can help with cleaning.

Maybe I am getting old, so I am more aware of the need for a clean home and the need to use cleaning aids that I did not need in my youth. This vibrating pad is a ripper taking the strain out of smooth surface cleaning – at $99 (plus spare pads and cleaning solution), it is a no-brainer.

Its Kärcher FC 7 cordless mop for a super effortless clean 9.3/10, and the Kärcher WV 6 Plus window vac (review coming) leaves windows streak-free.

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