While we were in San Antonio, I was impressed by how diligent my sister’s army of robot vacuum cleaners were. Seriously. They were scurrying around each day keeping things tidy, emptying themselves, mopping, and just doing their job. When I compared that to our robot vacuums at home, I was left feeling like the models I got really weren’t pulling their weight. (And let’s face it: they don’t weigh that much.)
So when we got back, I did some poking around into why that was. Were ours too old? Had I skimped on cheap models? Were they broken? It’s not that they didn’t work, but they took a lot of work to actually use them. Dog hair constantly clogged the brushes, we had to move all the furniture to let them have a chance at cleaning things, and they didn’t do anything automatically.
After some back and forth with Chat, I decided that we could do better, and I ultimately settled on the Roborock Qrevo S5V. It could mop and a vacuum (when all I really wanted was a vacuum), but it was more economical than getting one that just vacuumed. This one was supposed to handle pet hair with ease, it’s got a base station that lets it clean itself (you just swap out a bag every few weeks), LIDAR and AI to control its movements, and it was on sale for around $500.
My ultimate goal was to have something that took care of vacuuming so the rest of us didn’t have to. Something that could do things on its own, so it didn’t feel like we had an extra chore just to take care of the thing that was supposed to be taking care of a chore.
I have been extremely please with the results.
The little robot can map out your entire floor plan all on its own. It automatically sense what parts of your house have carpets (and shouldn’t be mopped) and what parts don’t. It navigates around obstacles easily. It cleans itself with no problems at all, and it was super easy to set up. The mopping has proven to be way more useful than I thought it would be, and it’s worked like a charm.
Best of all? They pass the Denisa test. That’s a very strong recommendation, folks.
The house is definitely cleaner, and all we have to do is move the chairs out before the robots run at 1 each day. (If we don’t do that, it doesn’t really matter. The floor just doesn’t get cleaned under those chairs that day.) The fact that they run every day makes a big difference. The house never really gets that dirty, and it always looks freshly mopped.
Is $500 a lot to pay for this? Perhaps? Paying for a maid would be . . . I have no idea how much, since I’ve never priced it out. Even at $20/hour, that would be around $60/week, and I think that would be at the extreme low end. Seen in that light, after 9 weeks, the robot has already paid for itself. (Yes, I get that robots don’t clean everything maids do, but if they clean enough so that you don’t feel like you need a maid, then that’s a big enough difference.)
Anyway. Two big thumbs up from me. We could have gotten one robot and just moved it manually between floors, but I ultimately thought the automatic nature of them is the biggest asset. (That robot army, people!) If you’re on the fence for getting one of these, I suggest you get off the fence. I’ve even bought a little ramp now so that the one on the main floor can navigate into other rooms. (I’ve got a couple of thresholds that are too much for the little robot to manage. You can buy ones that could do it, but that would be a thousand dollars more. No thanks.)