Back in 2003 I bought the very original Roomba. They had just come out a few months earlier and the idea of a robot vacuum cleaner fascinated me. It was around the same time I was fascinated with Sony’s robot dog, the AIBO, but unlike the AIBO, I could actually afford the Roomba back then.
I was still living with my parents when I got the Roomba so it really only had to clean one room, my room. It was fun using it at first, but I eventually got bored and sold it since I stopped using it. Looking in the comments of that for sale post I found a comment of mine where I explain to a reader why I sold it. I was basically too lazy to use the Roomba since it had to be started manually. This meant I had to be in my room to use it or I had to remember to do it before I left the house for work. It also meant that it would keep going until the battery died and then I had to plug it in and charge it again. It was a chore that defeated the whole purpose of getting a robot in the first place. In that same comment, I mention that if they ever came out with “a version that cleans every day at a certain time without me interfering” then I’d get it another one which brings me to the Eufy Robovac.
One of the first things I did once the pandemic started was to tell my housemaid to stop coming over. This meant I had to clean my place myself which gave me a reason to get a new robot vacuum cleaner. I looked at what was available locally and found the Eufy RoboVac 30C at Blink. I hadn’t heard of Eufy before, but on Amazon it had a 4.5-star rating and over 4,500 reviews. Blink was selling it for 92KD which was around 5KD more than Amazon not including tax or shipping so a pretty good price and so ordered it.
I’ve been using the RoboVac on a daily basis and even though the first few days were a bit rough, it’s now been a few weeks and I’m loving it. The RoboVac 30C has a few cool options, it has Wifi, a 100+ minutes battery life, it can find its way back to its home station and recharge the battery when it’s low, you can schedule it and it also works with Alexa and Google Home. Thee 30C is considered to be a dumb robot in the RoboVac world. There are some RoboVacs that are a lot smarter and can draw and map out the whole room digitally and even recognize different objects on the floor (like actually be able to tell if its a shoe or a basketball). But those RoboVacs are a lot more expensive with some of the more expensive ones costing an upwards of 300KD. The way dumb RoboVacs work is a lot simpler, they clean the room by moving around it randomly with no specific pattern. They’re less efficient in that sense but at the end of the day they still get the work done.
I have my RoboVac clean my lower level of my apartment every night at 8PM. I’m in my TV room upstairs at 8PM so having the RoboVac work at that time doesn’t bother me. I don’t even hear it except for the beep when it wakes up to start cleaning, and another beep 90 minutes later when it calls it a night and comes back to its charging station. I mentioned earlier the first few days were rough and that turned out to be for a variety of reasons. The biggest issue I had was that the RoboVac dust storage was filling up very quickly and the rolling brushes underneath were getting clogged up with carpet hair. If that wasn’t an issue by itself, the RoboVac when low on battery shuts of the suction and heads home. But because my RoboVac storage was full it would cause it to leave a trail of dirt and dust balls on the way back to the charging station. I was having to clean after the RoboVac which was super annoying and was making me regret buying it. BUT, it turned out this wasn’t the RoboVacs fault. The reason it was filling up so quickly is because of the amount of dust and virgin carpet hair it was sucking up from under my large couch. My normal vacuum cleaner can’t reach under the couch but the RoboVac is low enough to get under there and clean properly. After a few days the dust container stopped overfilling and the RoboVac is working perfectly now. Every morning as part of my routine I now just empty the dust container which is usually around half full. The other issue I had when I first got it was making my place RoboVac friendly. It didn’t need a lot of work, I just had a few cables I needed to tuck away nicely so the RoboVac wouldn’t get stuck on it and I had to move one side table slightly away from the couch so that the RoboVac would have easier access. The RoboVac comes with strips you can stick on the floor if for example you don’t want it to wander into the kitchen or you want to keep it away from a certain area.
During this 24/7 lockdown my RoboVac has been my companion of a sort, kinda like how Tom Hanks had Wilson the Volleyball on Castaway. I now yell at my RoboVac and call it an idiot like I used to yell at my dog when it used to do something wrong. My RoboVac has a habit of knocking down my skateboard which I’ve got leaned up against the wall and then starts pushing it around like it’s playing with it. It’s kinda cute when it wants to play but noisy. I’ve only had my RoboVac get stuck once so far and when that happened my phone App notified me. It has no issues climbing carpets and even low objects. A lot of times it might get stuck on something and then it starts trying to push over it but after a while it gives up and goes backward freeing itself. I’m very impressed with it and I don’t regret getting it at all. I don’t even regret getting a smarter RoboVac since the 30C is doing a really great job. My black tiles tend to show dust easily but now they’re shiny all the time I love it.
If you’re interested in getting one, I got mine from Blink but it’s showing as sold out but A Store who are the Eufy dealers still has them in stock also for 92KD.
