★★★★★ 5
Great robovac! We named ours “Robby the Robovac.”
Size: 06-15C Max
I hesitated for years to pull the trigger on getting a robot vacuum, and I shouldn’t have. If you are on the fence, get one. This thing has been worth the $250 in the first month, alone. (I compare it to a maid service fee.) It automates the simplest but most essential task of cleaning, because most dust and dirt ends up on the floor. It also forced me to finally tidy up all the wires and miscellaneous junk I had laying around on the floor, and thereby also eliminate areas where dust and dirt would accumulate, both of which were unexpected side benefits. It also frees up time to then wet mop and clean other places more easily, and tacitly helps me WANT to follow through with those final stages of cleaning that are easier because it takes care of the most time-intensive, initial stage of cleaning.
It has been a life changer for us. The first week made the house smell a bit dusty because it kicked up all the latent dust from the corners, under furniture, and in the rugs. But once it got through that stage, the whole house looks and “feels” so much cleaner and smells nicer. Subtle but significant difference.
I live in a one-story bungalow with mostly hardwoood or laminate floors, with a low-nap Berber floor covering in my master bedroom. I have a mid-size wire-hair dog who sheds normally, and it is perfect for picking up dog hair. I also have a nine year old son who adds to the dust and dirt. The suction is great on all of our surfaces. It works better than my stand-up “cyclonic” Hoover. Having three suction settings allows you to adjust the noise level depending on how clean you need the suction to be. The side brushes seem trite but definitely do work to help collect and”funnel” dirt into the collection bin. They also hit under furniture legs and walls edges to help collect the dirt that hides there.
The collection bin does need to be emptied frequently (every few uses, especially when you first use it), but I look at that as letting me know what would have been on my floor if I didn’t have the unit. It is amazing how much it cleans off the floor even after the first wave of cleaning.
The different cleaning modes are also well thought out: edge cleaning, spiral-spot cleaning, and random walk cleaning. I use the edge cleaning mode the most because dust and dirt tend to congregate along the edges.
Three downsides that are probably fixed in higher end models. First, getting the app to work was unnecessarily frustrating and difficult because I forgot my exact WiFi password. The problem is that the interface requires you to go through about a five minute process for each “guess,” which made syncing to the app much more frustrating and unnecessarily slower than it should have been. Then with each failed attempt, I also had to also manually reset the entire unit by pressing the power button for 20 seconds. They should program it to test the password quickly so the entire syncing process does not take five minutes until you find out you typed the password incorrectly. (Especially because WiFi passwords are case-sensitive, so it is easy to mistype it). Once I typed the correct password and synced it, the problem was over, but it was frustrating and time consuming.
Second, controlling the unit manually through the app is difficult because of the lag time in the signal through WiFi. So any time I manually steer the until, I use the remote and not the app. Not a big deal, but something to note.
It is also too loud to schedule vacuuming at night. It woke us up the first three times it ran a scheduled overnight clean, partly because we keep our bedroom doors open at night. We are still on COVID lockdown, so I can’t just schedule it to run during the day while we are at work. So I just run it in the background during the day or when I leave to go to the store or take the dog for a walk.
Nonetheless, none of those are dealbreakers, mostly just minor inconveniences that are acceptable at this price point. It still earns its five star rating for fulfilling its primary purpose and then some.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2020
