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How the map gets made, what confuses one, and the upkeep nobody mentions before you buy.
A vacuum maps a floor once and works from that map afterwards, which explains most of what it does well and everything that confuses it.
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Run daily, one keeps floors in a state your upright would only reach at the weekend. That is genuinely useful, and it is not the same claim the box makes.
What it will not do is deep-clean a carpet, reach a stair, or manage the corner behind a door. Households that expect that are the ones who stop using them by March.
The real cost is preparation. A machine that has to negotiate cables, socks and chair legs will take an hour over a room and finish stuck under something.
In detail
Navigation is the difference between a machine that works and one that bumps around. Tap each to see how it behaves.
How does yours find its way?
What that means appears underneath
A description of how these systems are built to work. We cannot see your particular machine.
Worth knowing
Almost every failure has one of a handful of causes, and most are fixable in an afternoon.
The single commonest cause of a stranded machine. Phone chargers, lamp flexes, the cable behind the television. A brush bar takes hold and does not let go. Clipping cables to skirting is dull work that pays for itself immediately.
Most machines will climb something under two centimetres. Above that they either refuse or beach themselves on top. Rugs with tassels are worse than thresholds, because the brush pulls the tassel in.
Many machines carry a cliff sensor that reads the floor's reflectivity to spot a stair edge. A very dark rug can read as a drop, and the machine refuses to cross it. That is not a fault, and no setting fixes it. The sensor is behaving exactly as designed.
Four legs at a spacing slightly wider than the machine make a trap that is easy to enter and hard to leave. Lifting dining chairs before a run is the usual answer, which rather undermines the automation.
Worth knowing before you buy. A robot vacuum needs a bin emptying, a brush bar clearing of hair, filters changing and sensors wiping. None of that is difficult, but it is regular, and it is the part nobody mentions. A machine nobody maintains stops working within months.
Practical
Worth understanding before it is the reason you choose one model over another.
A robot mop drags a damp cloth across the floor. On a sealed hard floor that lifts dust and light marks perfectly well, and doing it daily keeps a kitchen respectable.
What it does not do is scrub. Dried spills, sticky patches and anything that needs pressure will still want a mop and a hand. Machines that lift the pad over carpet solve the obvious problem of dragging a wet cloth onto a rug; machines that do not, will do exactly that unless you fence the carpet off in the app.
Before you buy
Tap a question to read the answer.
Better than most people expect on hard floors, less well on carpet where hair works into the pile. The limiting factor is rarely suction. It is the brush bar, which wraps with hair and needs clearing regularly.
Households with a shedding animal should expect to clear the brush weekly rather than monthly, and should look specifically at how easy that is on any machine they consider.
To use the app, yes. Most machines will run a basic clean from a button on the body without any network at all, but scheduling, mapping, no-go zones and room selection all live in the application.
They sit on the floor and send very little, so the slower Wi-Fi band suits them — and that is what most support.
It is stored, usually both on the machine and on the manufacturer's servers. A floor plan of your home is not nothing, and it is worth knowing which company holds it and what their policy says.
Our privacy guide covers what to check and how to remove a device properly when you sell it.
For most households, yes — it turns emptying a small bin every run into emptying a bag every month or two. That is the difference between a machine that stays in use and one that does not.
The trade is a large dock that must live somewhere permanent, a noise like a hand dryer for a few seconds after each run, and bags to buy. Some models take a bagless canister instead, which removes the consumable.
Keep reading
A vacuum sends a map home, which makes it one of the hungrier devices in a house.
Read the Wi-Fi guideHow we checked this
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Written reference material about connected household equipment, published independently by DIGITALDOTS TECHNOLOGIES of Ontario, Canada.
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