If you walk through Best Buy or even just visit Amazon.com, you will probably see robots that can vacuum your house or apartment. Of the bat, the idea of not cleaning – is satisfying for almost every person on this planet. Having robots doing it – it’s even more satisfying. The really big question is – do they work? Do they really clean?
In order to find out. We bought one of the best selling robot vacuum cleaners on the market, at least according to reviews on Amazon.com – Irobot Roomba 650. This is a fairly inexpensive one – only 299 USD. You can probably find some better cleaners but they are more expensive.
In addition to the vacuum cleaner, we bought the Irobot Braava Jet 240. This robot is priced at only 169 USD. This is not a vacuum cleaner but a mopping robot, with a water tank.
The idea is that – these to robots for under 500 dollars will clean my apartment while I am on the beach or watching TV. The idea and the concept with these robots is that they should enable you – to use your precious time on other things then cleaning.
In order to test these robots in all ways that are possible – we tested them out over a 4 weeks period in a family of 5. The main tasks for the two robots were to keep the livingroom, kitchen and hall clean. The robot is also expected to vacauum one bedroom and office that is one the same floor.
In order to get best results as possible, we try to make it as easy for the robots as possisble. We lifted the chairs up from the floor and also made sure that there was no clutter on the floor.
Our experience of the robots
These vacuum robot takes a bit of space, because it needs a place to charge and is also a lot bigger than the little cleaning robot. We choose to place the robot in the kitchen so it did not “disturb” the interior and atmosphere in the living room. The cleaning robot needs to be charged manually so it does not have to visible at all.We choose to place both of them in a small corner in the kitchen.
After 4 weeks with these two robot cleaners, we have found them to be very helpful with keeping the house clean. After only one day, we realized that they will not be a substitute for cleaning the house every week, but they do help in keeping the house clean. The house is CLEANER than it was before the robots invaded. There are however some weaknesses:
- Popcorn – the vacuum robot tends to crush the popcorns and not vacuum them
- Missed spots – both of the robots miss a few spots
- Carpets – Carpets seems to be the vacuum robots worst enemy
- Stains – Some stains did not clear after the Braava Jet was cleaning the floor
We solved these problems by learning the capabilities to the two robots. If the floor was filled with popcorns after a Saturday with the kids, we used the normal vacuum cleaner. Every week we went over the floor with a cleaning mop to manually remove any stains. We also tried to remove the carpets while the vacuum robot was doing its job.
Our conclusion is – the robots can not replace the manual labour of cleaning the house but they can defiantly make it an easier job. They do save your time and for under 500 dollars, the team of the two robots is actually worth every penny.
