It’s incredibly simple to start things off. After a couple of hours charging, the display on the top flashes ‘full’ and then you select the mode, and press Start. There’s a remote control so you don’t have to bend down.
Brushes to the front...
Cleaning is done in a fairly systematic pattern, rather than just wandering around as some other robots do – though reintroducing my kitchen stools seemed to confuse it when it was returning to the charging base.
...brooms to the side
There’s an Auto mode which will clean and then stop; Edge mode for getting right to the corner of the room; Spot mode to go over a small area; and Max, which runs the robot until its battery is flat.
'The way to dusty death. Out, out...'
Admittedly, my flat is very untidy, and I sent the NaviBot into corners that hadn’t been vacuumed for months, but even so, as the photos show, faced with this kind of filth, the NaviBot does seem to give up a bit quickly. You may need to be done a couple of times if you’re particularly squalid.
Next page: NaviBot in Action
COMMENTS
Good God, man!
Testing that robot in your apartment is like running a Citroen C1 in the Paris-Dakar rally. I was going to say that you needed to clean, but I've revised my judgment - you need to -move-. Just give up on your deposit, take only things that plug into the wall, and leave. Please.
Take off and nuke the apartment from orbit
If those pictures are anything to go by, its the only way to be sure
I must say...
That if I ever visit your house, I mustn't forget to wipe my feet on the way OUT...
Robb
Get Kim and Aggie in there
Looks like there's enough for a 30 minute episode.
+1 for the Roomba
We've been running an iRobot Roomba at home for nearly a year, and despite my initial sceptiscism it's turned out to be worth the money. We've got laminate downstairs, and on hard surfaces you really notice the tiniest bit of dirt or grit, so scheduling it to run every other day ensures that the floor is always spotless. Once a week I set it off upstairs as well, which is carpeted, and it does an excellent job on that too.
I think the key thing with robots like these, though, is that they don't need to be as good as a Dyson - they're meant for regular, scheduled cleaning, not a once-a-fortnight deep clean. If you schedule the robot to clean at, say, 9am every day, or every other day if you don't have kids/more than two people in the house, then dust and dirt won't have a chance to build up - it'll only ever be cleaning up light amounts of dirt, which it will do quite happily.
They're not cheap, but like an e-reader, the convenience factor will make them worthwhile to some people - now if they'd just make one that will do the stairs as well...!
