marcicat | adventure recap part 2

aka My Very Scattered Review Of My New Robot Vacuum Cleaner

*I can see why people bond with them — there’s a certain ‘cheer on the underdog’ enthusiasm that builds up when you watch them navigate out from tight spaces, combined with a sort of charmed exasperation when they start beeping error messages at you.

*Very easy to talk to. If it was a parrot, it would surely already be able to say, “There you go, you got this!” and “Hey buddy, where are you?” (Along with “How many beeps was that?” Different numbers correspond with different errors, so my instinct to make it stop beeping as quickly as possible is sometimes counter-productive.)

*Not really prone to getting stuck? Maybe I have a lucky combination of furniture that is either plenty tall enough to go under or too short for it to try, but so far so good. I thought I was going to have to rescue it from under an end table when it couldn’t seem to find the angle to get back out, but it was ultimately victorious on its own.

*Pretty quiet. Quiet enough that I wouldn’t worry much about running it during quiet hours,* at least, and certainly far quieter than my regular vacuum. (Also less powerful.)

[*There’s technical quiet hours, which go from 10 pm to 8 am every weekday, and then there’s ‘what everyone expects,’ which is more like midnight to 6 am. I’d be fine with running it at 7 am, not so much 2 am. But honestly it’s probably not louder than walking on the treadmill.]

*Very good at dust. Struggling a bit with cat hair (a problem for sure), which is clogging up the roller brush. “Cleaning the roller brush” rapidly moved from ‘something I should do at some point’ to ‘something I need to do all the time.’

*SLOW. It’s got a turtle-like approach to cleaning, which is basically the opposite of my usual approach of let’s get this done as quickly as possible. Not really a problem, just a shift in planning. Instead of doing All The Vacuuming in an hour on the weekend, it’s more like ‘ask the bot to clean for an hour a few days a week , and then power through anything it missed on the weekend.’

*No very dark floors — not an exaggeration. It will not go on the black runners I have by the front door. Downside: it’s not ever gonna vacuum those. Upside: perfect place to put stuff you don’t want it to bump into while it’s trundling around.

*Does not bump into things with any real force. It’s very gentle! Seriously, a dust ruffle would stop this bot, which makes it super easy to keep it in a designated area.

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.