I'm getting happier with the performance of this vacuum. I still think flashlights for the camera would have been a good addition. I have problems with the app still not consistently letting me divide areas. Also, I've had to remap the house several times. The latest time I walled off the living room where the vacuum has the most problems navigating. I finally got a decent map of the rest of the house and can send the vacuum out to individual rooms. The latest revisions of the firmware seem to have helped. The vacuum does a good job cleaning around the legs of chairs and tables and makes quick work out of a room. It really will vacuum for hours continuously if your space is large enough. It's not quite perfect yet but it's getting better. Virtual boundary work well. Also, I seriously hope they didn't abandon the self empty charging dock and upgraded mop. I bought this vacuum because it was advertised as having self empty accessories.
I have a lot of problems with the vacuum going under the couch and getting lost. There's a cloth skirt around the couch and if the vacuum goes under it can no longer see and it bounces around under there on the support legs and sometimes it comes out and sometimes it gives up and goes to sleep. Now that I have a functional map generated of the rest of the house, I plan on mapping the living room and then use virtual boundary to wall off the couch. The app still has some problems with not letting me divide a room along the horizontal axis. The vacuum hasn't pushed a throw rug around in a while. I'm overall pretty happy right now with the purchase but really need that self empty bin feature soon.
Edited out angry post.
Day, uh, 6? Still goes under the couch and thinks it's found Narnia. Does not avoid Nerf darts. No light to illuminate things so the camera can see under the magic couch. Floors are very clean, though. I can definitely say the best way to map a house is to send it out to clean, immediately pick it up and carry it to the opposite corner of the house and hit the recharge button in the app. Then every time it tells you it can't find the charger, just press the button in the app again.
Day 3: Still having a problem generating a map. Once the vacuum goes under the couch and comes out it gets confused. We have a doorway between the kitchen and living room and a doorway from the kitchen and living room into the hallway. Hard to explain in text, but the vacuum goes into the hallway, sees the other door to the kitchen and thinks it's found a whole new room. The vacuum then remaps the house at a 30 degree angle to the first map. This time it missed the bedrooms. Map making is terrible while it's vacuuming. So, what I did tonight is reset the crooked map it made, drove it in the app to the other side of the house from the charging dock and told it to charge. It took a couple times telling it to find the charging dock, but it made a decent map of the house since it wasn't trying to clean at the same time.
Edited out irrelevant content
Whatever you do *DO NOT* press the glowing power button on the top of the vacuum to resume cleaning if you're building a map. This might get sorted out soon, but for me, right now, that resets the map the vacuum is working on. If the vacuum needs to be picked up, emptied, unstuck or whatever you should use the phone app and press the pause button. When the vacuum pauses, you can do what you need to do then - very important here - press the resume button on the app. I successfully picked up the vacuum, moved it a couple feet and resumed without losing the map. Also, sometimes the app will not let you resume cleaning, but if you go back and then press smartclean or whatever again you can resume. Just a couple bugs you can't work out in the lab is all...
I bought this vacuum from Ecovac directly. I thought after the first round of cleaning I would post a quick review since there are no other reviews to go off of if one is thinking of purchasing this vacuum.
This is my first robot vacuum, so I have nothing else to compare it to. What I noticed right away is it did not avoid my speaker wires under my computer desk. I tied them out of the way and it won't be a problem again. Second, it got lost under the couch and I had to fish it out. Also, it found all the small things I didn't know were in dark corners. I took several feet of dental floss, a spring, two Nerf darts, candy wrappers and beads out of the beater bar over the cleaning period. These are things that won't be there the next time the vacuum cleans.
My biggest concern after reading what was available for reviews on this vac was it had a hard time learning a house. Tonight was only the first time out and it did not get into the bathroom or bedrooms. I had to pick it up about 8 times to take things it found out of the beater bar and untangle it from the cords under my computer, plus the time it spent under the couch just resting, basically. I can say, even with it being seriously disturbed with all the handling, it found the charging dock when the battery got low.
I like to imagine the vacuum is training us as much as it's training itself our house layout. I don't blame it for snagging on stuff that's been lost under the couch for a year. I plan on uploading video or pictures and an update in a couple days, but I wanted to get on and say that it cleaned for several hours, got picked up and moved around a bunch, got antagonized by curious kids and an angry dog, and still found the charging base after a nap under the couch.
