Occasionally I bump up against something that makes me say, "Wow, I am totally middle-aged. My younger self would have wept if she had known this was her future." Last month I met an old friend for a hike, and she said, "I drove below the speed limit to optimize my gas mileage!" I burst out laughing when I imagined how her 20-year-old self would have greeted that dispatch from the future. But here I go, writing an entire blog post about vacuum cleaners.
Three years ago my husband the Mighty Bargain Hunter found a Xiao Mi robot vacuum on super-sale. It worked really well for more than two years, and then its performance began to decline. It complained about its new filters. I bought different filters and it complained about those too. I turned the volume down so I didn't have to listen to its complaints about perfectly good filters. This did not work at all, because the volume would be minimized for warnings I actually wanted to hear -- "please rescue me," it would whisper inaudibly, "I am trapped beneath the bed" -- and then it would override the app's volume control somehow so it could grouse about its filter at the usual volume. "I don't like this filter! Clean it! Or fetch me a new one! Not that new one, a better new one!"
It didn't affect the vacuuming, so we all just learned to tune it out. But then it came time to change the main brush. And you guys, this vacuum cleaner just could not deal with its new main brush. I bought the replacement parts from the recommended vendor, but something was badly wrong in Vacuum World. "I can't do this," it would whimper, "there's something STUCK in the main brush."
Now the first 47 times it told me that there was something stuck in the main brush, I rushed right over to sort it out. But there was never anything stuck in the main brush. You think I'm exaggerating about the 47 times, but it started happening every five minutes. What is the point of having a robot vacuum if you have to leap off the couch to manage its hypochondriacal discontent every five minutes for an hour?
"It was really cheap," said my husband, after a factory reset failed to improve matters and I pondered my other options. "You could just buy a Roomba." So I bided my time and watched for a sale, and bought a Roomba.
If I were grading them, I'd give the Xiao Mi an A- for its first 2.25 years of service, the span between when I figured out how to get it to stop berating me in Chinese and when it started to believe it was being done in by its replacement parts. I'd give the Roomba a D+. It will just decide randomly that it's done, nine minutes into a cleaning, and return to the charging station. Or it will fail to notice that it doesn't have enough battery to return to the charging station, and die in the middle of the floor. It prefers to have its charging contacts aligned just so, and it may or may not charge if it's not perfectly situated.
The Xiao Mi would draw a map as it cleaned. I could view the map inside the app, so I could tell approximately how soon it would be done. I could pull up the map of my house and tell it just to clean the dining room, or to clean under the dining room table in MAXIMUM SUCTION mode. The Roomba's app tells me that a comparable zone cleaning option is Coming! Soon! but it is not coming soon enough for me.
This problem could not possibly be any first-world-ier, but that's what's on my mind tonight. Please regale me with your robot vacuum stories and advice.
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