★★★★★ 5
It’s not quite perfect, but it’s so much better than cleaning by hand.
I’m going to frame this review as a series of responses to what I imagine are common concerns for potential buyers.
Q. This version doesn’t come with the fancy dock. Is that bad?
A. Yes and no. The robot has an internal dustbin of perhaps 20 cubic inches volume, which is enough to clean a few large rooms in a row without filling up, but only if they’ve been cleaned already recently (which thankfully is usually the case after a while if you’ve set a proper cleaning schedule). That said, since the robot runs as little as once per week or as much as 4 full runs per day (“full run” here meaning the robot runs until its battery reaches 20% and it has to return to dock), depending on your schedule, if a lot of dirt is introduced or you haven’t run it recently, it can get tiresome to empty the dustbin manually. On the one hand, that’s still a lot less effort than manually shoving a vacuum into every corner of the space, but since the robot uses a semi-enclosed dustbin rather than a filter bag, you have to shake all the dust and fibers out of the bin by hand which inevitably leads to a small cloud of dust in your face and around your trash bin. I lasted less than a week before I decided to order the auto- empty, or “plus” dock.
Q. What about my privacy? I heard this model has a camera.
A. It does. It also has an onboard AI to process the images from the camera so it doesn’t need to send them to the cloud for processing. It’s not my job nor my area of expertise to tell you how much privacy you need, but i will say that I’ve had the robot for most of a week and my router has logged a total traffic of about 500MB from the robot. Since I’ve been monitoring the robot from my phone at work and used the remote access function, that’s a reasonable amount.
Q. Remote access?! But what if someone used that to drive around my home taking pictures of my stuff?
A. Well, assuming that they didn’t go to the effort of brute forcing their way past the encryption on the connection, they’d have to have your login information for the app (they’d have to know which brand of robot you got to even know which app to use) and they’d have to enter the dot-pattern lock code that the app asks for every time you use the remote function, and that’s assuming you enabled that function at all, as it’s disabled by default and can only be enabled by physically interacting with the robot. But even assuming that they got past those hurdles, they’d then have the privilege of directing the robot to crawl across your floor at ~5 inches per second while announcing that “remote viewing is active”, and they’d still only have a camera view from 1.5 inches over the ground, which isn’t a great perspective from which to steal someone’s data. Combine that with the fact that the robot is incapable of opening doors and the remote connection can be terminated by pushing any of the easily accessible buttons on the slowly moving robot, and you aren’t exactly left with the stuff of nightmares.
Q. What about the AI? Is it going to take over the world?
A. Well, I can’t be sure about larger AIs, but the one in this robot is nearly smart enough to avoid getting the robot trapped by chairs with crossbars for feet and not quite smart enough to find a way to roll over ethernet cables without tangling them. It helps the robot navigate and it lets you look at pictures of objects the robot has identified as obstructions (if you have that option enabled), but it’s not going to be thinking circles around even the average housepet.
Q. What about this mopping function?
A. I wish I could say that it’s amazing and I don’t think I’ll ever mop again, but that just isn’t so. Mostly it’s because my house was built over half a century ago and the robot was designed last year, but my kitchen is the main area that needs to be mopped and it is unfortunately filled with the sort of cupboards that overhang the floor by a couple inches - just low enough that the robot can’t get under them. As a result, the major splash zones right under the ledge go completely untouched by the mopping operation. As if that weren’t annoying enough, the mop attachment has no way to actually remove fluid from the surface it’s cleaning, so cleaning with it is kinda like putting a moist washcloth on a string attached to a stick and kinda dragging along the ground over the stains: not the most immediately effective option. That said, with enough passes and cleaning of the mop attachment proportional to the amount of material to be cleaned, it eventually gets most of the floor pretty clean. And since individual passes are essentially free as far as personal effort goes… it’s good enough I guess. I just wouldn’t go for this model if all you need done is mopping.
Q. What about the price?
A. Well, at 2-5 times the cost of manually operated vacuums, it is definitely an investment, and it does fall a little short in some ways. For example, it doesn’t agitate carpet as energetically as most vacuums and doesn’t suck quite as hard either, so it’s unlikely to get as much cleaning done on the first pass as other vacuums. Then again, each pass is a significant investment of your time and effort with a regular vacuum, whereas with the robot you just have to tell it where you want it to clean, how many times, and what level of suction or scrubbing to do and it will do the rest on its own (note: it will charge in between cleaning cycles if it needs more charge to be able to finish, but it will resume once it has enough charge and will remember where it left off. second note: depending on which dock you have, you may be required to intervene to empty the dustbin, as well). The other main flaw is that there are some things it just can’t do. The robot is incapable of fitting into tight spaces and can’t climb stairs, so cleaning those areas is right out. In addition, the vacuum roller is several inches from the edge of the robot, so while the side brush can sometimes push loose debris into the vacuum, that pretty much only works on tile, wood and other flat non-porous surfaces. Thankfully, humans and most of our preferred living partners tend not to travel those areas much either, but you can still expect to occasionally need to shove a conventional vacuum around into those awkward spaces. And of course the stairs. In any case, I suppose it’s a long investment, but some napkin math tells me that over the course of the next year, I’ll save approximately 40 hours of cleaning. Assuming the robot lasts past the initial year (given how easy it is to maintain, I rate that as very likely), it will have paid for itself by then in saved labor.
Q. If there was one more thing you’d add to make this product better, what would it be?
A. Fast charging. The robot will automatically attempt to return to its dock when it drops below 20% power. Using the basic charging dock, it takes just over 4 hours to charge after that. In a world where most phones can charge from 20% to 80% in less than an hour (some in less than 15 minutes), I’m not entirely sure why this robot takes over 4 hours to charge. There is something to be said for the longevity gains to be had from slow charging over fast charging, but I think I would have preferred a setting in the app with an explanation attached and a slot on the side of the robot for installing a new battery. I’d like to stress that this is not a critical feature of this robot, but it would be nice to be able to schedule all the cleaning for when I’m at work, but it requires too much battery charge, and the dock can’t replenish it fast enough.
Q. Overall, are you happy with the robot?
A. Yes. Very. I was happy enough with it when all it had done was clean my carpets, but for an extra kick, I decided to ask it to clean my garage, in which everything from woodworking to machining to welding is performed and which hadn’t been cleaned for 2 years. Not only did the robot not catch fire or explode (not even a little, though it did ask me to clean its roller), but it actually cleaned up all the dust, sawdust, metal filings, welding sparks and stray leaves! I honestly hadn’t been sure it would survive that sort of torture test, especially since the manual says it’s only for indoor home use and my garage is not the environment the designers meant when they wrote that. So far, I’m quite impressed and I just hope I can find a way to make it do its job without buying every accessory and replacement part under the sun, since you kind of have to expect that sort of nonsense with companies that try to convince you their product catalogue is a lifestyle.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2022