Clean up your act with a robot
THE day I invited a robot into my house was the day my life changed forever.
I will never vacuum my floors again.
Sadly, this isn’t a robot that can climb steps, so I’ll still have to get the old hand-held out every now and again for the stairs. For now.
The world of robot vacuums was somewhat unconvincing to me, until I actually tried one for a month. The Vorwerk Kobold VR300 was a revelation.
It’s a pretty high-end machine, and is not cheap – but it comes with a host of neat features to help you keep your home clean.
It’s all pretty simple – download the Kobold app and link it to the VR300, then send it out on a test run around the area you want to clean.
The VR300 then sets off around your home making a virtual map of the rooms it visits – it will map everywhere it can get to, and sports a combination of sensors that prevent it falling off steps and help it navigate around objects.
The three ultrasonic sensors are even able to detect transparent or highly reflective obstacles before the robot reaches them.
The ultrasonic sensors are supplemented by contact sensors on the bumper, which means the VR300 only makes the slightest contact with obstacles before navigating around them.
Thanks to the infrared sensors, the robot is able to move along walls and recognise drops, such as stairs.
Once you have the map of your rooms on your phone, you can mark off areas you don’t want it to go – maybe you have an area full of children’s toys – and it will treat those areas as if they are blocked off by a wall.
Now you are all set to schedule cleaning. You can have the VR300 clean the area whenever you want – at the appointed hour, it’ll trundle out, sweep up, then return to its charging base.
And it does an excellent job. It always managed the whole area, and it features edge and side brushes to make sure it gets everything up.
It works well on both carpets and hard floors, and can easily tackle a combination of the two – it can cope with obstacles up to 2cm high, and climb over carpets and rugs that are up to 1.5cm high.
Any stray objects it encountered along the way, like chair and tables, cat toys and cables, were dealt with without incident – it just works round them.
The battery runs for 90 minutes, so it’ll deal with a decent-sized room. If it gets low on battery, it’ll head back to base to recharge before getting on with finishing the job in hand.
Once it’s done, it’ll let you know via a notification from the smartphone app.
It does take quite a bit longer to clean a room than it would if you did it yourself with a handheld, but that’s partly because it does a more thorough job, especially as, because it’s only 9cm high, it can get under furniture in a way you can’t if you’re doing it yourself.
It’s best, I think, to schedule it to run while you’re out – and when you return it looks like the cleaners have been round.
But there’s a special satisfaction in hearing it trundle round downstairs while you’re upstairs doing something else. It feels like you’re doing two things at once... and getting a lot more done as a result.
The Kobold VR300 robot vacuum cleaner from Vorwerk costs £949 – vorwerk.co.uk/kobold/ vr300-robot/