Designed to make life a little easier, robot vacuums are not as bright as you think. They can be wonderful additions to a cleaning regimen but can also be quite frustrating. I have gone through 3, and none were that impressive, but one’s a keeper.
The iRobot S9+
The iRobot S9+ was a replacement for the Shark I will expand on below. The model robot vacuum was the highest rated by Consumer Reports. So we had a go with this one. The shape was designed to get into corners and had 2 rollers to sweep up everything. This worked the best in getting the floors clean. The issue I had with it was that the mapping was not good, in my opinion. On its first run, it took 8hrs, yes 8hrs to map a 2100 sqft home. Even after all that time, it still did not get the entire house. After moving it around to get a better map, as the instructions stated, it still did not map everything. It also kept trying to jam itself under a piece of furniture and getting itself stuck on others all the time. You would think it would notice it was not a clear path and that it was riding up on something. One time I sent it home, and it just kept going back and forth on the carpet. After that, it was bye-bye and set up the return.
Bobsweep- Dustin
This was a model I had not considered. It was a blue color, a nice change from black, which most robot vacuums come in, with an occasional white one here and there. I wanted to like this one I really did. It did a great job of mapping. Cleaning was not as good as the Roomba, but it was decent. I loved the Dustin model because it was the quietest one we tried. I thought we could run it at night, and it would all be good. It killed me that it had such a small dustbin and did not go to its base when full. It only returns home when it completes its cleaning run. This means it gets full fast, so most of the house will not get very clean. It does not sense when it is full to return home and empty out so it can continue cleaning. It only has options to empty after every run or every other run. This is why we said bye-bye to this one and returned it.
Shark RV1401ZWUS
This is the one the previous 2 were trying to replace. We had this one for over a year. We kept getting the error message that there was an obstruction, which there was none. We kept cleaning it, restarting it, and resetting it to factory settings, but nothing worked. Online forums did not help much. We noticed a lot of people said to replace the battery for all sorts of issues, which we found odd. So, my wife ordered a battery, and at first, it did not work. Kept getting the same error message. After a few attempts, Fred, yes, we named our Shark robot vacuum Fred. He was off and running. I really like the mapping feature, and it’s low enough to get under our bed. The vacuum power is not as powerful as the other 2, but it does alright.
Thoughts
Here are the links if for the iRobot S9+ and the bobsweep Dustin if you care to take a look at these. I will say that if Fred dies again (yes, we named our robot vacuum Fred), we are going with another Shark. It seemed to us, that it was the best overall for the money and frustration level. As I said before, robot vacuums are not as bright as you think. Ways to go to make them smarter. Well, at least they are not smearing pet shit all over the house anymore!!!
