My Robot Vacuum Is My Only Friend

Every single day—weekend, weekday, rain or shine—whichever robot vacuum I’m currently testing starts running at 9 am. It’s always a good sign. I heave a sigh of relief and continue with whatever else I was doing, content that at least that f*cking chore in my house is getting done.

When I first started testing robot vacuums eight years ago, it sometimes seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I cleaned up the floor. I meticulously maintained the different sensors. Now I just don’t care. (I mean, yes, I do care, robot vacuum manufacturers, I just care slightly less.) Even if it gets tripped up on my daughter’s latest knitting project, or it can’t mop the kitchen because I haven’t emptied the water tank. Just go, little soldier, go.

Robot vacuums are so much smarter now. They can navigate through many more surprising minefields of Lego bricks, stuffed animals, or piles of shoes than you might have expected even two or three years ago. As a working parent with two elementary-school-aged kids and a dog, I need all the help I can get. Maybe it will clean the whole house; maybe it will only clean up 50 or 65 percent of it. But as someone who is constantly fighting chaos, consistency is what counts.

It’s a Miss

It took a while for me to reach this Zen state (and also to collect enough robot vacuums to have an army running in every room and floor of my house). Based on my years of talking to many families (and trying to foist used robot vacuums on them), these are a few reasons why a robot vacuum might not be worth it for you.

• You live in a small space. If it only takes you an hour or so to vacuum, why bother?
• Your home has a complicated layout. A lot of 1970s homes have strange, complicated designs—a sunken living room, a playroom that’s up a few stairs, bedrooms upstairs. Although stair-climbing vacuums are on the way, for now, it’s not worth carrying a vacuum from room to room.
• You have rugs with weird tassels. The 1970s were bad for robot vacuums. Shag carpeting is also bad, as is a lot of low furniture.
• You hate maintenance. You really can’t stand emptying the fussy little dust bag or refilling the water container. I’m going to say here that you probably have other problems that need addressing before getting a robot vacuum.

Even I don’t rely solely on a robot vacuum to keep my house clean. I also have a Dyson stick vacuum, a carpet cleaner, and a regular broom and mop in a closet. If my kid spills a bunch of flour under the counter while she’s making pancakes, I’m not going to pull out my phone, open the app, and watch a robot vacuum slowly trundle over to spot-clean it.

It’s also not great for deep-cleaning. No matter how much a company hypes up a robot’s suction power, it will just never be as thorough as even the smallest hand vacuum. It’s just physics. A robot vacuum’s motor and battery are smaller.

Even the best navigation system cannot accommodate everything that happens in a crazy, dynamic environment with a bunch of gremlins and animals running around. If I have people coming over, I still have to walk around and do things like put away cushion forts and pick up the shreds of a log that my dog decided to pluck off the woodpile and bring into the house to gnaw in the warmth and comfort of the living room.

And finally, like any household appliance, especially one that deals with the grossest parts of your floor, robot vacuums require constant maintenance. I do have to occasionally change the filters and cut strands of my long hair off the roller and dump dirty water down the drain, if it’s a mopping vacuum. A robot vacuum isn’t perfect. But then again, nothing is.

Always There

But if you live in a place with varied floor surfaces and a relatively simple layout, there is no appliance that I rely on more than my robot vacuum. Oh boo-hoo, it doesn’t clean as thoroughly as it would if you were cleaning by hand. Sometimes it leaves schmutz under the sink or by the door. Waa, waa, waa.

You know who else leaves schmutz under the sink? Everyone else in my family, while I’m struggling to keep up with chores. My life is a constant battle against the forces of anarchy. Every day, the kids have to go to school. The dishwasher has to be loaded, then unloaded. The dirty clothes go in the washer, come out, get folded, put away, then washed again. The food has to be bought and cooked, then bought and cooked again.

You know what I don’t have to do? Start the robot vacuum. Right now, I’m running a Mova Z60 Ultra Roller Complete ($1,599). It has smart control and can tell the difference between carpets and hardwood. (I have about 800 square feet of floor space to clean on my first floor, with a mix of carpets, hardwood, and tile.) By keeping it running more or less constantly, I can still work full-time and keep my house at an acceptable level of cleanliness.

I run it once every morning, and then as needed during the day. If my kids spilled a lot of crumbs during lunch on Saturday, I can push the chairs aside, start the Mova, and still make it to my daughter’s dance class. If it gets stuck halfway through cleaning a room, I shrug, unstick it, and put it back on the charging dock. Fifty percent of a room getting cleaned is still better than 0 percent, and now I have a helpful reminder to pick up the rest of this room tomorrow.

There is a palpable (and smellable) difference in the amount of dog hair when I have not run the robot vacuum for a day or two. I realized we had reached full robot vacuum dependence one day, when I had swapped out one robot vacuum and had not yet opened the next one. “Where’s the robot vacuum?” my husband asked, when he had wiped up some apple juice that my daughter had spilled. When I said I hadn’t set it up yet, he irritably went into the garage and got the old one and put it back. We couldn’t be without a robot vacuum for more than 24 hours.

It’s not for everyone, but I personally couldn’t live without a robot vacuum. Even if I’m just throwing things behind a virtual boundary line or cleaning one room (or one mess) at time, that little island of sanity in the chaos of my home makes it worth it.

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