our gadgets
vacuuming is one of paul dimer y‘ s bugbears , so he ’ll be hoping the sco ut, a ro bot vacuum cleaner , can do his dirt y wor k. di b, di b, di b!
The T3 staff get down and dirty (kind of) with some top tech – namely, a Miele robot vacuum cleaner, a Motorola pet cam, the Pebble Time Round and the Loewe Reference 55 TV
Specifications
PRICE £489.99 url miele.co.uk DIMENSIONS 80 x 20 x 80mm WEIGHT 2.9kg capacit y 0.6 litres power 22 watts oper ating radi us 150 metres batter y Li-ion, 2,200mAh batter y run time 120 minutes NOISE LEVEL 60 decibels
To my mind, there are only two people who’ve ever enjoyed vacuuming, and that’s the woman from the 1980s Shake N’ Vac ad, and Freddie Mercury in Queen’s I Want To Break Free video. To the rest of us, it’s a ball-ache of epic proportions; half an hour of wrestling with cables and trying to manoeuvre one of your home’s most cumbersome gadgets around the sofa, coffee table, cat, etc.
So why wouldn’t I want to do a long-term review of a robot vacuum cleaner? Here, surely, was the answer to all of my Hoovering headaches and Dyson disasters. If all of the reports were true, this little baby would glide around my house, happily sucking up dust, hundreds-and-thousands or whatever else it could find, while I sat emptying my nostrils and watching Countdown.
The model I plumped for was the Miele Scout RX1, and for no other reason than I liked the look of it and thought it had a cool name. And this thing does look good – imagine a set of bathroom scales designed by Darth Vader and you’d be close. That compact size already gives it a major advantage over the Dyson I’ve got shoehorned into my linen cupboard along with its snake-like plastic sucker tube. You could leave this little chappy in your living room permanently and it wouldn’t be an eyesore.
So who exactly are Miele? Well, they’re a German company who’ve been making high-end
“With all of its sensors built into the unit, you don’t need to place anything around the room” Futuristic, neat and compact, this robot can live in my house any day – I just hope it cleans as well as it looks paul dimery, production editor NEXT MONTH i’ll be sen din g the sco ut on its first cle anin g mission around my lo unge
domestic appliances since 1899, so you’d expect them to know what they’re doing. And reading through the promotional bumf, it certainly sounded impressive. With all of its sensors built into the unit, you don’t need to place any additional devices around the room – although the Scout does come with a magnetic strip that you can lay down in front of a door to stop it going AWOL. Sadly, it only comes with one, but you can order more from Miele, should you have more than one door to protect.
The dock plugs into a mains socket, and there’s a box at the rear of the dock for stashing away any excess cabling. Fully charging the cleaner itself takes two hours, and that’ll be enough to see the robot pootling around for an impressive two hours.
Now, there are numerous obstacles to navigate in my living room (sofa, footrest, TV cabinet, fireplace), so I’ll be interested to see how this robot copes with cleaning up my debris. I hope it manages it, else I’ll have to do it myself!