Still, if you’ve never had the great privilege of ceding the vast majority of your cleaning to a respectful electronic gadget, any robot vac will be a huge improvement. These bots are effective cleaners, with powerful motors, easy-to-replace filters, and functional apps, but they’re not as effortless to use as some of the other ones on this list. As more and more companies have begun making robot vacuums, the kind of bots without these advancements, that would have been considered higher-end models in the past, have become relatively affordable. Something like advanced mapping technologies is a lot less useful when you’re in a small studio apartment with very little to actually map. Not everyone needs a robot with all the most up-to-date technologies.
After setting them up according to their instructions and the included apps (and connecting them with the smart home Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa when possible), we made sure to run the vacuums through several full run time cleaning cycles. To find our favorites we called in several models from a few reputable companies and tested them in staged home environments (read: our apartments). The best robot vacuums are both decent robots and decent vacuums-a robot that deftly darts around corners and tables is useless if it can’t pick up a Cheerio, and a robot that could pull sand out of carpeting is useless if it keeps threatening to tumble down the stairs. For most people, a robot vacuum that cleans four days a week automatically will create a much cleaner environment than simply running a spot vacuum whenever you spill enough that you can see. To get things perfect, you’ll still have to take out a more powerful cordless or plug-in upright vacuum, but the robot vacuum will get you 95% of the way there.
It’ll do the vast majority of work needed to get you to the pristine image in your head by picking up the easy debris that just accumulates, like dust, allergens, pet hair, random snacks, dead skin cells. If your apartment is a marble sculpture, think of the robot vacuum as your hammer and chisel. They still aren’t powerful enough to be the only vacuum you own, but a good robot vacuum will significantly cut down the amount of time you have to spend using a conventional vacuum. Thanks to functional apps, better sensors, and some healthy robo-competition, these vacuums are now a pretty great experience in most homes, regardless of floor type. Those bots were somehow more annoying than just vacuuming on your own.īut that was then.
(What up, DJ Roomba?) They were hard to set up, not that effective, and made everyone who entered your living space uncomfortable-especially after they’d been bouncing between the legs of your couch for half an hour. At their inception, even the best robot vacuums were reserved for futurists and the Skymall market.