A robot vacuum cleaner is a lot more complex than a regular vac, but with the right care it can last you for years. The truth is that you can’t just set one of these things up in the corner of a little-used room, empty it once in a while and leave it at that.
You’re going to have to do regular maintenance checks on the bot, change out pads and filters, and also prep the rooms so that the machine doesn’t get damaged. But if the robovac lifestyle is for you, these small tasks are easy, worth it, and can radically extend the life of your new housework buddy.
Don’t buy junk
Step one: don’t buy junk. While you might get lucky, a robot vac that costs you $30 from the junk aisle of your local supermarket probably isn’t built to last, and it’s almost certainly not built to be maintained or repaired. How can you know? Check reviews by sites that do long term testing, like Wirecutter, and only buy models which are known to still be going strong after at least a year.
Also be aware that even if the hardware is good, it might just die if any supporting software goes offline. Which is to say, that cool startup whose robovac has an amazing app that lets you see a 3D first-person view beamed to a VR headset might be tempting, but when they get sold to Google, or just plain run out of VC money, you might be left with a useless chunk of e-waste. Even established brands can go bankrupt. Anything that requires a regular cloud connection in order to function is a red flag.
Also important before even buying is to find a model which is repairable. At the very least you should be able to easily buy and swap in a new battery, and buy filters and any seals. Also check availability of parts like rollers, wheels, motors, and anything else that might break–including base-station parts.
My regular non-robot vac is a Miele, which is at the higher end of the price range in the US (although in its home country Germany, it’s just another reliable-but-not-fancy brand, price-wise). The advantage is that you can buy parts easily, and I have already replaced broken attachments. Readily available and affordable spares mean the difference between using your machine for decades, and having to replace the whole thing if one part breaks. iFixit’s got a bunch of robot vacuum parts. If we don’t have the part you’re looking for, AliExpress and Amazon are fine in the short term, but really, you want to see if there is an official supplier you can buy from, one that will be able to get you parts even for old machines.
Brushes, rollers, and batteries…
We’ve got robot vacuum parts for iRobot, Ecovacs, Dreame, eufy, and more.
Regular maintenance
The next part of making your robovac last for years is to look after it.
Change wear parts like filters regularly
Blocked filters make it harder to pull air through the machine, and can strain the motors. If nothing else, restricted air flow will reduce cleaning efficacy. You can extend the life of filters by cleaning them, perhaps with a blast of air. Some manufacturers tell you when it’s time to change the wear parts when using the app, but if they don’t, you can just set yourself a reminder to check every couple of months.
Clean rollers regularly, especially for hair
Rollers full of dust won’t be as effective as brushing up fresh dust, and hair can tangle and jam them partially or completely, possibly damaging the mechanism and straining the motor.
Clean the sensors
A robovac uses various sensors to see where it’s going, and to detect unexpected events. These include infrared sensors to “look” around, bump sensors that tell it when it has met an object, cliff sensors to detect sudden changes in elevation (like a flight of stairs) and back off, dirt-detection sensors, camera sensors, wheel sensors, and dirt detectors.
You need to keep some of these clean If it’s on the outside, and especially if it involves detecting light, you need to keep it clean. Check your machine’s manual to see what needs to be done here.
Check roller mop
Roller mops come in a few different basic types. The single flat pad design is essentially a damp cloth stuck to the bottom of the machine. Maintenance in this case is pretty much keeping the cloth clean, and checking to see if it’s damaged. Even these basic designs sometimes have features like auto-lift on carpet detection, so check for any blockages in those mechanisms.
Dual spinning pad designs obviously use motors to spin them, so check that those don’t get tangled with hair or whatever. If either of these pads extends on an arm for better corner cleaning, that’s another motor and mechanism to watch. One advantage of these designs is that their dock/base station doesn’t need its own fancy mechanisms to rinse the pads. It just supplies water while the robot vac spins them.
The other design is the roller mop. These spray a constant supply of fresh water onto the rollers, and rinse away dirty water. This makes them excellent cleaners, but also adds complexity. They will probably detect carpets and lift the rollers away, but any roller design is inherently excellent at getting hair twisted around it.
Check the floors to make sure there aren’t any hazards like cables that might get tangled.
I tease my sister-in-law about her robovac, because she spends as much time moving furniture, rolling up rugs, and clearing away chairs as I do vacuuming my apartment with my regular vacuum cleaner. All that prep work might seem like swapping one chore for another (because it is), but it’s also essential. Don’t leave anything laying around that could damage, tangle, or jam the robot’s mechanism. Sure, nowadays there’s AI obstacle recognition and whatnot, but better be safe than sorry, right?
Don’t let a regular robovac run over wet floors
Mop-bots use water. Robot vacuums do not, so keep them away from it. A bit of a damp patch mightn’t do much harm, but a spill will end up sprayed inside the guts of the machine and could end up killing it. It’s got a battery, after all, and batteries and water don’t go well together.
In general, the advice for keeping a robot vacuum ticking along nicely is the same as for any other tool. Keep it clean, avoid things that might damage it, and change any consumables (filters, mop pads) when they’re full or spent. Along with that, avoid non-repairable models, and check to see the availability and price of first- and third-party consumables and spare parts before you buy. You don’t want to be stuck with a dead machine because the batteries are too expensive.
iFixit has repair guides for robot vacuums from all the big brands, and many smaller ones.
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