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1. The iLife V3Pro
The iLife V3Pro is available at the start of 2024.
With a tangle-free pet hair care technology, it focuses on picking up hairs, dirt, debris on hard floors. It’s ideal for hardwood, tile, laminate, or stone. Apart from self-cleaning, other benefits are scheduled programs, easy use and very suitable for cleaning under furniture, due to the reduced design.
2. Neato Botvac Connected
The Neato Botvac represents the ideal combination of features for sturdy and steady performance. It collected more debris from hard flooring than any other vacuum we tested and was second to only one in carpeting suction tests.
The Connected model is very powerful and durable. It has a 4200 mAh lithium-ion battery, which provides up to 110 minutes of run time. A high-power suction system and sophisticated brushes allow the robotic cleaner to produce high-quality vacuuming. To provide better suction power, engineers developed the Turbo function.
When using it, the vacuum cleaner operates at a maximum power level. Also, the device has a mode with reduced power – Eco mode, which allows you to save battery and carry out the cleaning of the maximum area without additional recharging. In this mode, the device does not reduce the quality of floor cleaning, while significantly reducing the level of noise.
It was almost unstoppable, too. We were amazed at some of the obstacles it would climb over to keep cleaning. It rolled right over a dramatic transition from one type of flooring to another in the test house that stopped most competitors. Many avoided it the same way they avoided walls, and some that attempted to go over got stuck and required human intervention to get going again.
The Botvac Connected got over the top of that threshold, and in and out of other obstacles with equal ease to keep cleaning an entire floor of our test house. We’d also like to note separately the special case of the robot, namely its characteristic shape of the letter “D”. Tests prove that at the moment, this is the most productive form among all existing. Despite rather large overall dimensions, this shape and high maneuverability help the vacuum cleaner cope well with cleaning in hard-to-reach areas – corners, baseboards, spaces under furniture.
This robotic vacuum also plays well with humans. The interface is the easiest by far to understand. It features menus that you can scroll through and error messages that you don’t have to look up – something that got annoying fast with other units. And you can control it from anywhere using your phone app, so you can run it from your desk at work if you want to return to a cleaner home. It was also the fastest and most comfortable for essential maintenance tasks.
Pros:
- Cleaning power on hard floors was unsurpassed
- You can run it remotely using an app on your phone
- It is the fastest and most comfortable for essential maintenance
Cons:
- It tied for the second loudest in our reviews at 72 dB
- There is no mopping function
- Lacks an actual remote control
3. Ecovacs Deebot M82
The Ecovacs Deebot M82 removed more debris than almost half of the competitors, and it costs well below the average price of the robot vacuums we tested.
The M82 also has a low profile that helped it get under furniture (where some competitors could not go), and it was better at getting debris out of corners than most. This unit struggled to remove pet hair in almost every setting, though, so it will do best in a pet-free home. It also seemed to avoid rugs and other obstacles at times, even when competitors rolled onto the same carpets and cleaned them. But it had good suction generally – recovering respectable amounts of kitty litter, sawdust, and cereal. The power of the device is quite decent too. The battery lasted for more than two hours! 2500 mAh guarantees up to 150 minutes of run time.
For orientation in space, the robot uses cliff and obstacle sensors. So, it can easily avoid dangerous areas, collisions, and falls. The significant disadvantage is the lack of more accurate navigation and management support through the application. It entails a lack of forming a well-thought-out cleaning path. But despite the randomness of the movements, the vacuum cleaner covers the room satisfactorily and, in a coordinated way, some analogs.
We can still control the cleaner using an infrared remote control and buttons on the body. For different cleaning tasks, we use different modes: Auto, Edge, Single Room. For heavily polluted areas, the Ecovacs DeeBot M82 offers the Spot mode – it’s a cleaning program that sets the restrictive boundaries of cleaning.
The M82 does not have the most sophisticated display – there is just one light on the top. More elaborate displays have codes and graphics that make it easier to know the status of a machine. But this machine costs so little; it might be worth the extra effort to figure out when it needs to be changed or restarted. You will have to figure it out on your own because Ecovacs did not have very responsive customer service, in our experience. Read more information about this robot vacuum in this blog, “Robotbox.net“.
Pros:
- For sale online for well under $300
- Side brushes help recover debris in the corners
- Low profile slides under a range of furniture types
Cons:
- Not good on pet hair
- The display is confusing at times
- Ecovacs customer service is hard to access
Conclusion
Neato Botvac is one of the best if you are ready to invest in a robot vacuum. How do we know?
They crafted a custom vacuum track in our lab that allows testing robot vacuum cleaners on carpeting, vinyl, and wood flooring, spreading debris like kitty litter, breakfast cereal, flour, and sawdust in their path to see how they would perform. Then, they took them into a real home to see which ones could navigate around chair legs, under couches, and over flooring transitions on their own. We also considered how easy they were to set up and use and hundreds of hours of testing later, we had a winner.
The Botvac combines excellent suction with great agility – an efficient cleaning partner for your home.
