Really only for downstairs, wooden floors, all accessible on a single level (with a couple of 10mm rises where the joins are), few rugs, no carpet. Two hairy/sheddy dogs. We vacuum downstairs every day with the mighty Shark, but I'm wondering about a cheap (TAPO) Robo-Vac. It's £180 currently and seems to get good reviews, both for cleaning and for the map customisation you can do in the App. Sure I'm sending all my floor plans to China, but we already have quite a few bits of TP-Kit so that boat has sailed.
This: https://uk.store.tapo.com/products/ultra-powerful-suction-lidar-imu-dual-navigation-robot-vacuum-mop-smart-auto-empty-dock-tapo-rv30-max-plus was the one we were looking at. Better half not convinced it's worth it. I hate hoovering so I'm in the Yes camp 🙂
What say you robo-vacers? Waste of time or genuine time saver for the lazy?
I predict at least three different robo-vac purchases... all proving to be very good for all rooms... some better for specific rooms... so all kept.
😜
Bought an early Roborock S5 when I moved to Sweden (apartment, two dogs) and it helped a lot with keeping the doghair under control. I still needed to vacuum, but it was once a week, not once a day.
I would say to go for it, but buy spare brushes and filters because you will need them sooner than you think.
I will also say that you should think of a name that is a terrible pun and/or make sure the robot had googly eyes and a moustache.
ours lives in the dining room (split level) and cleans up after 2 small children.
Its an older botslab with mopping capibiliity . Works well still hoover maybe once a month and steam clean the floor maybe once every 6
has obligatory googly eyes.
That's definitely happening. We already have "Derek the Dalek" kitchen bin and Roddy the Recycling unit. If we get one, I'm hoping to get at least one amusing* video of our ancient cat in a homage to the scene in "Teen Wolf" riding on top of it
*must be as there are about 1M posts on IG
I've got a cheap one, a Lubluelu SL60D. Think it was about £100. It does mopping and vaccing. It's very good, although for a bit of expectation management, the mopping is basically dragging a damp microfibre around the floor (although it does go back and forth in a Y pattern, it's nowhere near as good as mopping manually).
If you can, get one with two sweepers at the front, they do a better job of picking up slightly larger stuff like bits of cereal. Before buying the SL60 I borrowed one with a single rotor and found it tended to flick things away and miss them, whereas with two, if it flicks stuff, it tends to go into the other rotor and then eats it.
Think we're on our 4th now....
Don't go for one that only has a single sided dust spinner - look for one that has 2.
Anything that says it has an anti-tangle roller, is lying.
Our most recent one is made by Lefant. It's a tad smaller than say EcoVacs but.... there is no roller and much harder for it to get tangled on say.... a usb cable that's on the floor.
I like the fact I can remotely run the vac and give the floor a quick going over before we all get home. They aren't brilliant but if used daily they do a reasonable job on hardwood/laminate/tiles. Hit n miss with carpet - depends on the shag, baby.
Ours is called RoboSlave. We also have Audrey Laundry (washing machine) and Danny Dryer (err.... the dryer).
we have one for our kitchen/diner/entire downstairs. Did some research, bought the one that had some great reviews. It doesnt get used much. We tried to return it, as it just didnt work well with our dining chairs and the couple of carpets we have. Unfortunately the chinese company who make it were awful to deal with, and despite their 'money back guarantee', they refused to let us return it. Then they finally said we could, but despite coming from a UK warehouse, it would need to go back to china at a cost higher than the value of the machine...... any who... that aside....
It works well enough, but by the time you have moved all the things out of the way that it has a hissy fit with, you couldve hoover the room anyways with the trusty old Shark.
its this one we have: https://moxier.co.uk/products/robotvacuum
One of the things I did when I got my very first flat was hire cleaners. In the 30 odd years in between that decision and now, I've never ever regretted it.
Look at it this way, cleaning is paying work, if you do it yourself, you're essentially scabbing.
Up the workers.
I'm intrigued by one of these as like the OP, we have a dog and feel we should be vacuuming more often than we do.
Question, does it just do 1 room or can it do the whole of downstairs? Our house is relatively small and leaving it to do the kitchen and living room (assuming we remember to leave the door open) very much appeals.
@lunge my "research" suggests it can do multiple rooms with caveats about if it can get over stuff. In practice tho who knows? Seems that it'll create a map of where it can and cannot go and you can adjust that through the app.
@nickc - this was my first suggestion and that's had even less love than the robo-vac!
We have a robovac, iRobot J something, to help keep the floors clean from dog/ dirt/ sand/ etc. It's not perfect; there are still tumbleweeds of doghair rolling around, and if I go on holiday and set it going, it will get itself stuck in the first 30 minutes and be sat there until I get back from holiday.
But it's still a gamechanger; it just keeps on top of the daily basic vacuuming, so we need to hoover maybe once a week rather than every other day.
Question, does it just do 1 room or can it do the whole of downstairs? Our house is relatively small and leaving it to do the kitchen and living room (assuming we remember to leave the door open) very much appeals.
On my SL60D, it will automatically map as much as you let it. Then you can split it into rooms and choose which rooms you want to be vacced/mopped
Don't leave an outside door open unless you want your garden vacuumed 😉
edit- the current map on mine:
We have a Tapo like the one you've linked to. Set to go around at 10am each day on the ground floor. Lots of hard floors with one rug. Good for keeping on top of fluff and bits on the hard floor. We call it Barry and at least once a week it gets lost or tries to eat something someone left on the floor.
For £180 I'd say it's worth the money. I don't regret buying ours. The mop function is pretty useless though.
The mapping reminds me of when mine used to try and clean over my dogs. One had the sense to go and sleep in the kitchen, but the other just stayed on the rug in the lounge and left a dog-shaped gap in the cleaning map for that day. Ted really never gave a shit about Marvin bumping into him... Most chill dog in the world when he had a sunny patch of floor to sleep on.
we have one for our kitchen/diner/entire downstairs. Did some research, bought the one that had some great reviews. It doesnt get used much. We tried to return it, as it just didnt work well with our dining chairs and the couple of carpets we have. Unfortunately the chinese company who make it were awful to deal with, and despite their 'money back guarantee', they refused to let us return it. Then they finally said we could, but despite coming from a UK warehouse, it would need to go back to china at a cost higher than the value of the machine...... any who... that aside....
It works well enough, but by the time you have moved all the things out of the way that it has a hissy fit with, you couldve hoover the room anyways with the trusty old Shark.
its this one we have: https://moxier.co.uk/products/robotvacuum
Similar experience here. Kept getting caught under chairs, rowing machines, you name it. Good when it works - similar to OP ours was bought to keep the dog hair under control, but we're back to the Dyson.
Its the first thing that goes to the top of the budget tree should it ever breakdown (as 2 already have). Currently on a RoboRok QRevo (vaccum and mop) - we have a large downstairs ~220m2, so it gets used a lot - it's programmed to do different zones at different times on different days. It self cleans and empties (both dust and water), so very happy with it. It's not perfect, but i hate our tiles with a passion, and it does a good job of keeping the floors shiny and lint free.
Its now told me it's covered 53.1km2 and run for 803hrs with 1142 cleaning cycles since purchased a couple of years ago. Before that we had 2 x Ecovacs, both good, but this is better.
We love ours, it's a Eufy with obligatory googly eyes so it's called Goofy. One thing I have noticed is that because it always goes round the outside of a room first in exactly the same way, all our carpeted rooms now have a wheel track all around the perimeter. Do they all do this?
mine does this too so have the same tracks on the carpets - doesnt seem permanent though.We love ours, it's a Eufy with obligatory googly eyes so it's called Goofy. One thing I have noticed is that because it always goes round the outside of a room first in exactly the same way, all our carpeted rooms now have a wheel track all around the perimeter. Do they all do this?
I have to say I've been inderwhelmed by our Shark robovac + mop. Maybe we're not using it right but it just seems to be more effort than it's worth. Some points have already been mentioned.
- The mapping - you have to have all doors open so it can roam around and map. If you then close a door and set it to do just one room then it leaves a spot where the open door was.
- If you ever move any furniture such as a footstool or chair then it doesn't adapt and sticks to the original map. The only way to update the map is to rescan the whole of downstairs, meaning you have to clear everything out of the way in all rooms rather than just rescanning the room where things have changed.
- It takes forever (maybe just in our house but we don't live in a show home) to move stuff out of the way like shoes, bags etc that have been left around, and have to put all the dining chairs up on the table otherwise it can't find a gap wide enough to get underneath.
- If you set it on free-roam (in an upstairs room that's not mapped for example) then when it's finished and you put it back on the dock it doesn't empty its dust tank so is full unless you set it off on auto for a couple of minutes then send it back to base.
- I'm convinced that when it mops the hallway it either does 2 strips in the middle and not the outside edges, or it does 2 strips on the edges and not in the middle. Never seems to do all 4 strips.
- The single spinny thing on the front just flicks stuff across the floor rather than under the middle brushes.
- The spinny thing still doesn't get right in to the corners in the kitchen. Exactly where most crumbs end up.
- We shut the lounge door on a night to keep dog and cat out, so can't do the whole downstairs on a middle of the night routine.
There are some positives such as it's nice, once I've spent time clearing the floor, to leave it to do it's thing and come back to a clean floor.
So ours was an older tech iRobot. No mapping or planned routes so it just randomly bounced off the walls and then wandered around trying to find the base station after the battery got low. It would get stuck under things, it was noisy, it bashed into stuff to find its way around and left a black line around all of the skirting boards as a result. A fair few of those issues may be solved by the modern navigation stuff.
Pros - it did a remarkably good job of cleaning. Surprisingly thorough (we had a Dyson and a Miele Cylinder cleaner). With a cat shedding hair and bringing in grit from outside it was nice to just be able to set it off.
Cons - the stuff in the top para. But years of satisfaction with a clean house are quickly forgotten when the pet has a dump on the floor and the robot vacuum cleaner spreads it evenly over the whole floor of the house. The second time it happened the robovac was retired.
Do your dogs ever have an 'accident'? Most of it with our cat was that she'd got very elderly, but she was prone to having a revenge shit on the doormat or something if she was really pissed off with us (maybe when we'd got back from a week away...)
Cons - the stuff in the top para. But years of satisfaction with a clean house are quickly forgotten when the pet has a dump on the floor and the robot vacuum cleaner spreads it evenly over the whole floor of the house. The second time it happened the robovac was retired.
Do your dogs ever have an 'accident'? Most of it with our cat was that she'd got very elderly, but she was prone to having a revenge shit on the doormat or something if she was really pissed off with us (maybe when we'd got back from a week away...)
Ah yes, the dirty protest. A mate's robovac did exactly this spreading the cat diarrhoea all over the kitchen floor.
I'm a pretty big fan of our Eufy.
It's worth spending the time to mark areas it can get trapped as 'no-go' zones. We have some dining chairs where it can occasionally get trapped.
Yes, if your room is a tip then it can feel like a ballache to clear things away before it can do its stuff - my daughter is currently going through a phase of leaving her art projects strewn across the floor - makes the vac pretty much unusable. Due to the need to clear, I never really understand how people have their robo friends on timed schedules.
I've noticed the wheel tracks round the edge of carpets. I just tend to set slightly different zones for it to clean rather every time rather than the whole room, unless it desperately needs it.
(I find Eufy products are really good, but not fan of the company - if I have paid for a product, then the associated app should never have any ads in it under any circumstances. Also the Chinese Government will know the layout of my house, but that does not bother me frankly.)
@b33k34 - not often thankfully since the senior dog passed on last year. But it can happen and had not considered that!
Anyway thanks for all the advice/experience. I'll pass them on to see if this strengthens the business case 😉
We're on our second Eufy now. The dumb one now just bounces about upstairs when the kids can be bothered to clean up their floors. The clever one is used every day downstairs and whilst a real vacuum with a person attached does a better job, this one does it well enough whilst I'm out walking the dog in the morning. I was against both purchases initially but have not stuck to my guns and rarely get the upright out nowadays
I've a "Botslab s8" - it vacuums and empties itself. It can also mop, but i've found that function is pretty rubbish.
It's in my kitchen/diner - there's steps all round my house, so that's the main drawback!
It's got LIDAR so maps out the area, and then follows a planned route, which is very satisfying to watch it neatly go up and down the room!
I set mine to go at 0830 every morning, and it's basically a great 'broom/duster', and picks up all the food crumbs, pet hair, and what not.
It does a pretty good job of cleaning carpet too, but it's not a deep clean.
If i had a way of it vacuuming the whole house (or even ground floor) each morning, i'd be over the moon, but am very happy with it cleaning the kitchen daily.
Would deffo get one again!
DrP
Robo vacs are great.
Until they munch the wife's knitting project!
I'm not pulling that out....I'll leave it higher authorities 😉
We’ve had robovacs for years. Several kinds.
Most are best suited to hard, fairly uncluttered floors ime.
I still miss our hard floor washing roomba. Sadly it gave up the ghost after a few years of sterling service
the worst, with no doubt at all, was the Dyson eye360. Fantastic suction, great brushing, excellent on carpets, utterly useless navigation, overly complicated tank tracks, and 80% miss rate on getting back to its charging station.
best, and currently in use, has been the Eufy X8. Its Amazon skill integration seemed to disappear a couple of years back. It was so handy being able to say ‘Alexa, tell robovac to clean’ for ad hoc clean ups. This one runs mostly in the kitchen and dining room and keeps dust and bits to a minimum daily. It occasionally wanders into the library and hallway, which it has previously mapped, avoids the wet room, and unless someone closes the door on it it gets back to charge as needed nearly every time.
