Robot vacuum cleaners – our new overlords?

The Which? review system for the robots is flawed. As a simple example they compare the robots in the Conversation with the percentage of dirt picked up from carpets by normal vacuum cleaners – that is 50% compared to the 8O%+ on carpets.

You might be interested, and I am interested in the efficiency on tile or wooden floors. Do we have a comparison figure for that. No. I am willing to bet that the dust extraction is substantially higher but why should I bet surely Which? have that detail. And it is relevant.

Secondly we do not have a maximum swept area before returning to base for a recharge which surely is of interest. Is it 20 square metres, 50 or 100 ? How soon will the dust container need emptying, every two days, every three hours? Can the machine do multiple rooms in a morning for light dust removal?

If this seems picky it is been known for several years that hard surfaces like timber laminates and tile have been taking market share from the carpet sector. I know of a house tiled completely downstairs with a total floor area in excess of 100 square metres.

“Hard floor cleaning
Hard floor
★★★★★
How effective the robot is when cleaning large debris from hard floors. This should be a robot vacuum cleaners bread and butter, but some vastly outperform others.”

Whats with the large debris test? How large is large? How does this compare with normal vacuums? What is the dust uptake like?

What we do know is the Dyson is better than the other robots but apart from one statistic we have no hard figures comparing other aspects of the robots to the standard vacuum cleaner.

Regarding VH’s point. My mother-in-law in her prime vacuumed daily but I suspect that not many people do that now. Now I am curious whether sending your robot cleaning daily results in an overall cleanliness level higher than a human hoovering weekly of bi-weekly. If I limit my activity to light dusting of skirting-boards and higher once a week plus using a robot for daily cleans, will I have a cleaner room than provided by a human?

And what is the time saving over one month …..

The testing does not really seem to answer the quite reasonable expectation that robots are competing with cordless and corded vacuum cleaners and this testing by restricting itself primarily to robot vs robot ignores the bigger picture.

Incidentally I saw nothing about air filtration which in an era of allergies would be something of interest you might think.

A supplementary question that entered my head while thinking about the test room is – has anybody assessed how much influence Which? has actually had on product design and performance, and more to the point home design, layout and convenience, through all the decades of testing? Product testing for consumers is essentially a reactive process and no doubt contributes, in a sub-Darwinian way, to a process of natural selection and fitness for purpose through the elimination of weak performers from the market place, but could it go further than this and become a creative force for improvement? In the natural world there is an instinctive determinism that drives evolution; in the commercial world it is the profit motive; is that good enough?

So, you’ll need 2 robots for a normal house, one downstairs and one up stairs, plus a best buy £200 Miele proper cleaner for the stairs, skirting, carpet edges, behind the tv, and other nooks and crannies. £1800.

A robot takes 32 minutes to clean one room (incompletely). Which say with a normal vacuum it takes 38 mins to clean a whole house (properly).

A best robot picks up half the dust in a carpet, doesn’t deal with hair well. Even a best cordless picks up 83% of dust. So how can you possibly give 5 stars to a robot?

How much more electrical energy does the Dyson use when it takes maybe 6 times as long to do its partial job?

I think the concept of “Best Buy” needs a rethink. Products doing a particular job should be compared with all other products doing that job – in this case robots vs. corded and cordless. I also think price should be taken into account, not on its own but in relation to the likely life. For example if two dishwashers – one at £1200 and one at £600 – perform equally well, have similar build quality and are likely to last just as long then I would say the £600 one is a better buy. Perhaps another criteria should be “value for money”; an assessment that would be useful would be cost per year of likely fault free life.

This would avoid seemingly silly comparisons like the Dyson hair drier at £300, given a best buy when it only scored 1 star for low speed drying, whilst a Remington best buy at £35 scored 5 stars. Which is better?

I have had various roomba models over the last 7-8 years as we have a house rabbit so lots of hairs and bits of hay etc near his food dishes. (Replacements have just been to upgrade not because they’ve conked out). The Roombas do a fantastic job keeping the area looking great on a daily basis , and I do a ‘proper’ vacuum once a week to do bits it can’t get into etc although the side brushes do a pretty good job anyway. I had noticed that you have the Best Buy as a dyson, but the capacity is lousy and wouldn’t last me 5 mins never mind a full clean. I think this should be accounted for in your next scoring system. I appreciate that just for household dust this will be less of an issue but add in pet hairs and it will make a huge difference to user friendliness. And mine covers the area completely by using the control towers to restrict the area to just my (large) L-shaped hall. I guess if I extended to the whole downstairs given the size and layout this may be more of an issue, but I’d just do each end of my house on alternate days if I needed to. I have a roomba 780 which was designed for pet hair and picks up the rabbit hair from my carpet tiled floor brilliantly…. And other carpeted areas if it escapes into other rooms and tiled floors if it gets in the kitchen, which it does occasionally if the batteries in the control towers have run down and I’ve not realised. And rabbit hair is very soft and fine so a real challenge even for my Dyson v6 ( I’ve had to buy a special head for the Dyson which is very small so hell to do a large area clean). Roomba also is Time programmable so it sets itself sets off hoovering on its own every day. – are the others? It means if I’ve gone away leaving the rabbit with pet carers popping in, the hoovering has still been done. The other issue not covered in your review is ease of cleaning the brushes etc, and the cost and availability of replacements. I can clean the brushes and dust bin in the dishwasher if I remove the hairs first) and get replacement brushes and filters easily and have even replaced the battery once. No idea with your other models if this is possible. So I will be sticking with Roomba unless there is a really good reason to change, as I know it well so can maintain it easily myself, and to switch to a small Dyson is a very expensive experiment and given my Dyson v6 doesn’t like the rabbit fluff I doubt the robot will be better than my Roomba.