Every weekday morning at ten, something in our living room beeps twice and starts to hum, and Hank gets up, sighs and moves to the kitchen. That's been the routine for a month now, ever since I bought a robot vacuum on sale on April 11 for $279, down from its regular $399.
I'd resisted for years. Our house is old, our floors are original oak with uneven thresholds, and I assumed a robot would spend its life stuck under a radiator. That turns out to be partly true. Here's how the first month went in a house with a 68-pound golden mutt and a gray tabby, both in the middle of spring shedding.
I'm leaving out the brand, because model lines change every year and the features mattered more to us than the name. Ours is a mid-range model with a rubber roller instead of a bristle brush, a single side brush and an app that maps the rooms. It is not self-emptying. The self-emptying versions on sale that week were still more than $500, and I decided I could empty a bin.
The rubber roller was the feature I cared about most. Bristle rollers wrap long dog hair around themselves until they stop turning, and I've spent enough time cutting hair out of our upright vacuum with scissors to know I didn't want that again.
What it picks up
On bare oak, it's very good. The fine drifts of undercoat that roll along the baseboards like tumbleweeds are gone by lunchtime. It handles kibble crumbs around Hank's bowl, little flakes of dried mud that made it past the back entry and the litter Mabel kicks out of her box.
On our washable living room rug, it's decent. It gets surface hair but not the stuff ground in deep, so I still run the real vacuum over the rug once a week.
The rubber roller held up its end. In a month I've cut hair off it twice, both times only a little. The side brush is another story: long golden hairs wrap around its base every few days, and I pull them off with my fingers.
Where it gets stuck in a 1948 house
- Under the living room radiator. The clearance is just tall enough for it to drive in and just low enough for it to wedge itself. I put a strip of wood trim along the front as a bumper, and that solved it.
- The bathroom threshold. Old houses have raised wooden thresholds, and ours is about an inch high. The robot tries, fails, backs up and tries again. I marked the bathroom as a no-go zone in the app.
- Cords behind the bookshelves. It ate a phone charger cable on day two. Now the cords are clipped up off the floor.
- Hank's water bowl. It bumped the bowl and sent water across the kitchen floor. The bowl now sits on a rubber mat that the robot treats as a wall.
- The back entry. It tried to climb the boot tray and got high-centered on the lip. The back entry is a no-go zone too.
Upstairs gets nothing. It's a main-floor machine, and I'm not carrying it up and down the stairs. The basement door stays closed while it runs, so I haven't had to trust its cliff sensors with the stairs.
The emptying problem
This is the real tradeoff. In shedding season, the bin is full after one pass through the living room alone. I've set it to run the living room first, come back to the dock, wait for me to empty it on my days home, and then do the kitchen and dining room. On my workdays, Caleb gets a text reminder. Some days he remembers.
The filter clogs fast too. I tap it out over the trash every couple of days, and the replacement filters and brushes will run about $30 a year, which I've added to my budget.
The cat
For the first two weeks, Mabel hated it. On day one she puffed to twice her size and fled upstairs. For the next week she watched it from the top of the stairs, low and furious, and once she came down, swatted it on the bumper and ran. Then, somewhere around day fourteen, something shifted. She started sitting on the back of the sofa while it ran, tracking it back and forth across the room, and now she supervises every run like it's a contractor she hired and doesn't quite trust.
Hank still leaves the room. Once he lay down in the middle of the living room floor during a run, and it bumped gently into his side, turned and bumped him again. He looked at me with deep disappointment and moved.
Is it worth $279? For us, yes, as a way to keep the tumbleweeds down between real cleanings. It doesn't replace the upright, and I wouldn't have paid $399. It's ten o'clock now, and there go the beeps.
