I own a Neato Robotics Botvac Connected, and with Neato shutting down, my robots cloud-dependent functions will be useless(remote start, iphone app etc) Unfortunately it’s incompatible with Valetudo.
The Chinese $Mi bots I’ve come across lack the suction power I loved about the Neato. I’m in search of a no-nonsense replacement. Any solid suggestions? Dyson one seems nice but way to expensive.
Last year I did a lot of research on Reddit and other sites and finally settled on the Roborock S7 Pro Ultra. Some learnings I had along the way:
- Software quality is crucial, and new models are often iffy. Badly programmed vacuums (and almost every brand has those) are incredibly annoying, because they get stuck constantly, fall down stairs, leave dirty areas, can’t find the way to the base station, etc. Roborock seems to be one of the few who nails this.
- Suction power should be maximized, or you’ll spend time cleaning up after the robot. The S7 I bought has 5100Pa and I think that’s acceptable, but I still need to do two runs sometimes (which is low effort for me, but it means more noise).
- Since we wanted a vacuum that also mops: Those mops, if not managed well, get moldy and start to stink after just a few days. Build layout and engineering quality are big factors here - ours almost never stinks even though it has no drying fan (some do).
- A base station is needed for real hands-off usage, and those are damn expensive when bought afterwards. And do change the water tanks regularly, they can get quite smelly, fast. It’s the one non-negotiable maintenance we have to do every week.
- I was looking for vacuums with explicit mention of HEPA filters, but it seems the more expensive ones have decent filters without ever mentioning HEPA. I’m still not sure what grade the S7 filters really are, but it seems allergy friendly (likely also owed to the mop and the usage of a filter bag in the base station).
- Even if the manual says to wash the filter, don’t; they will often degrade. Better to use compressed air (carefully) to clean instead.
Overall, we are still happy with the S7 Pro Ultra after a solid year of usage. It’s been a time saver rather than a time sink, and apart from getting stuck sometimes laying around, it has always done a solid job.
1. We have HEPA bags - each bag acts as HEPA filter.
2. We found that more than suction power, the brush roll is more import for effective sweeping and vacuuming. It picks the dirt way better… so we have designed first of its kind to hair tangle-free brush roll. It is designed to be effective on all kids of surfaces.
3. We further improve efficacy with actuating cleaning head so it adjust the height for each type of surface with diff thicknesses.
4. The HEPA bags last a month if just vacuuming and about a week if daily vacuuming and mopping. It collects both wet and dry messes. It even has version of diaper salt and charcoal powder so it doesn’t smell or get moldy.
5. But the most important is completely Vision first perception with precision 3D system so that it doesn’t get stuck, chew wires, etc.
Indoor world is entirely built by humans, for humans, to fit our vision first perception system. So we have given it a very similar perception system.
6. Private by design. It was built to work completely w/o internet connection.
Looked very promising, but there are some hard blockers:
1. It's not shipping yet, meaning there are no trustworthy reviews.
2. It will be shipped to USA only.
3. It needs apple device for (full) control.
Similar price point as a S8 Pro Ultra, but without a dock. The dock is actually really nice cause it stores water / dirt and more importantly... cleans the mop after use. Membership is also a non-starter for me.
I think you're going to have a hard time competing against the S8.
The choice of lack of dock is deliberate one -- when we did research with our target audience -- familes and working parents with kids/pets, we realized that they actually do not like the large dock for few reasons:
1) It's ugly - family homes are very carefully decorated and most don't want the big dock in the room.
2) It's extremely loud -- again, it's a matter of preference but it's like rocket taking off every time it vacuums the vacuum. And, even the self-cleaning mopping is noisy. It still doesn't cover for the fact that it just drags dirt around between those cleaning cycles.
3) We heard from familes that they hated the smelly dirty water and did not know where to throw it.
Again, I'll refer to back to noise but for lost of pets and kids, the noise of dock and the robot are very scary. I know because my Golden hated it and my 3-year old would cry everytime the rocket took off.
Based on the response so far to pre-orders, we're very optimistic that it's resonating. Thanks!
1) agreed, it is bulky and a bit ugly, but it also fits perfectly under the sink in my kitchen, so this isn't an issue for me. It isn't like a regular vacuum isn't bulky and ugly either.
2) it is loud for about 30 seconds as it sucks what is in the robot into its own bagged storage. not a big deal at all.
3) it is a lid sealed container of dirty water that you just pour down the sink or a toilet after it is done cleaning. this isn't rocket science here.
4) I'm not worried about someone in China seeing me in my underpants. My house and images and what I paid for it are already listed in MLS. This is classic making a big deal out of something that really isn't a big deal.
5) Do you know how many S8's have been sold? That would be the real comparison with your pre-orders. My bet is that they are orders of magnitude higher.
Also, families care a lot about privacy, and right or wrong, there's an inheritant mistrust of cloud based disc bots and especially those coming from China. We do not beleive anyone of the disc bot companies have wrong intentions or anything, but I know that I wasn't comfortable with our home data going to cloud.
Hence, we started with the premise that we shouldn't have to compromise our privacy to keep our floors clean. Thanks!
Ultimately, we're striving for great user experience which we can do with the bags. Our goal is to make bags as cheap as possible and already it's a $3/bag which is way cheaper than any other robovac bags if we're not mistaken.
That's also why we have all-you-can-clean membership plan -- it's optional and users can purchase bags a al carte, but with it's unlimited bags. mop rolls, extended warranty, and accidental coverage it's really a great peace of mind for our users.
Our goal is to provide great customer experience first and formost with a higest quality product. Thanks!
Hi, I'm in the UK and interested in knowing more about Matic. Do you have any plans to ship to the UK any time soon? You mention the device is private by design (this is a huge selling point for me). Does Matic support MQTT or any other open protocol to allow integration with Home Assistant?
We will ship to UK as soon as we can - just starting with the US for now. In terms of integration with Home Assistants -- again zero problem in doing this. We will eventually get there, but we want to make sure that we do it in a way where privacy is still maintained. We do not want to enable it if it means sharing private data of any kind with home assitant companies.
Thanks, Looks really nice and exactly what I am looking for. I want to mention that my first reaction was “it’s huge, where do i even put it?”
And make sure you ship outside the US!
In terms of size, it's ~1x1 feet and far smaller than some of the docks that come with disc bots these days.
The reason for 1 feet height is that we are giving it a same top-down vantage point that we humans have. Flat designs will give ant-like vantage point which makes seeing what's in front it rather hard.
Human like vantage point also means it builds maps that both the robot and humans can easily understand and recognize all the objects. Thanks!
For the mop getting moldy problem, I recommend to simply get a pack of replacement mops from aliexpress for like $5 or something. After a cleaning cycle, throw the used one in the washing machine and replace it with a new one, it only takes 10 seconds of work and your floor remains bacteria-free.
I have an S8 and it's a real life quality improvement, I love that thing
They have slightly different sensors - we actually wanted the MaxV so that we could check up on the apartment/cats in a pinch. It’s not as simple as “just buy the next model up” - my recollection of researching this was that there are a number of very similar models with different features - mop base, sensors, suction power. Even with buying a “flagship model” there were local maxima with other models.
Great learnings, thanks for sharing. I have been eyeing the roborock series as there seems to be some sort of consensus on them being slightly better than the others, yet I get this review astroturfing vibe when reading reviews and posts.
And like you mention in the learnings; mop gets moldy, dust bag emptying, huge basestation etc just misses the point somehow. I will probably end up getting one slimmed down version from roborock
The mop doesn’t get moldy for me. What I meant is that there are such reports for other vacuums. The base station is sizable, yes, but tbf it does carry a lot of liquid and dust storage.
Similar for my proscenic. While the company exists in theory, the app can't register a new device on Android anymore. Since my last phone update I'm just left with hoping that I never need to change the schedule and it will keep running until it dies.
I'm on the same boat. My neato is already a bit old (needs new battery and I had to replace a broken belt) but I've been procastinating in finding a replacement as there's just so many options, most of which suck.
I've generally been happy with roborocks, and a few are compatible with valetudo. I haven't used it yet, though, because the rooting process is incredibly complex.
The Chinese $Mi bots I’ve come across lack the suction power I loved about the Neato. I’m in search of a no-nonsense replacement. Any solid suggestions? Dyson one seems nice but way to expensive.