If there is one job in my house that I loathe, its vacuuming. Actually add to that list ironing too, but at least you can watch a film whilst you do that. Vacuuming to me is a thankless and tedious task, and anything that makes life a little easier when it comes to jobs like this, is something to try out I think. Technology in the vacuum industry seems to have progressed so much in the last 5 years. With cordless and Robot Vacuum cleaners being two areas I’ve seen much of the progress. I’ve been asked to try out and review a Robot Vacuum cleaner. They are the ones that you leave to do your vacuuming for you. Well this in itself I was excited to try, one less job for me!
The model I tried was from the Neato range -D75. Neato robot vacuum’s use the company’s patented Neato Botvision™ technology which combines laser scanning, room mapping like Google’s self-driving car and real-time object detection to plan the best course to clean a home. Cool huh?
Set up:
Set up was Tall Dad’s job, and you can imagine how quickly he volunteered for that job! It described as quick and pain-free, and the box contained really clear diagrams and instructions to follow.
There are two protective films that need to be taken off the robot and base, you then plug the cord into the charge base, open up the dirt bin to press the battery on/off switch. The next step is to find a suitable place for your robot. This means clearing 1 metre to the front, left and right of the unit, at a available socket. Next up is charging, you must do this for 12 hours before you use it.
In use in our home :
We have tried it in lots of areas of our home now. I have been reviewing it for two weeks, so that I could give a thorough review. It in actual fact works for us upstairs the best, as we can turn it on, and let it do its thing. Downstairs however we have several very tall thresholds which it can’t get over to move to the next room. Another observation for our home, is that rather than set it up to do a clean at say 12 pm every day, it worked better for us, to manually set it to clean. I think with small children and a dog, I tended to spend 5 minutes beforehand picking up items, and moving the dogs water bowls out-of-the-way when I needed to vacuum, I would do this anyway, so no different there really. Not necessarily the way for everyone, but it worked best for us.
The other very neat thing is you can set up boundary markers, which are areas you don’t want the Robo Vac to go over. When we used the D75 upstairs this was great for the stairs.
Overall Efficiency :
We all found it fascinating to watch, it really had the novelty factor. Most importantly though, it did clean well. Close to the edges and it definitely covered all of the areas we wanted it to, navigated things like shoes, chairs and the dog (yes really) but also cleaned all the way under the sofas and beds….Hurrah! It worked well on wooden, tiled and carpeted floors. I didn’t notice a difference in performance on any of those surfaces.
The Patented laser-guided technology scans and maps the room, it forms a plan to then methodically clean. It moves from room to room once the other one is finished. Its an upgraded model with a 50% larger brush, big dirt bin, extra-large filter, and a edge cleaning brush pick up more dirt and debris. I love that once its completed the task, it then takes itself back to the charging dock.
A Neato robot vacuum is truly a ‘bot with a brain,’ said Giacomo Marini, Neato’s chairman and CEO. “Neato knows where it’s been, where it’s going and how to navigate an entire house. No other robot vacuum has this kind of intelligence. The addition of a Neato to a home means one more task can be taken off the household chore list, leaving the owner with the gift of time to do other things.
For specifications see THIS link.
This video gives you a little more insight :
I am also going to do a video of the vacuum in the next few days and add it to this post, as I think it would be an interesting thing for someone considering buying it.
Price : Around £399 and can be purchased at various places including Amazon, Argos and Tesco.
I seriously need one of these *adds to christmas list* xx