ILIFE V9e Robot Vacuum Cleaner, 4000Pa Max Suction, Wi-Fi Connected, Works with Alexa, 700ml Large Dustbin, Self-Charging, Customized Schedule,…

 We got this on prime day so it’s still pretty new. It does a good job getting up pet hair and dirt/crumbs on our hard floors. Haven’t tried it on carpet yet. It goes for a LONG time before needing to recharge. The cats like to chase it, punch it, bat at the bristles, and ride it. It’s pretty funny! It’s still too new to give it 5 stars yet, so I’ll update after we’ve had it for awhile.

Update: Had it for months and we still love it!

 Definitivamente cumple su objetivo, tengo dos gatos que tiran mucho pelo, de un día a otro ya esta lleno de pelo. Puse a Steve (así se llama) solamente 10 minutos y la canastilla se llenó una tercera parte. Recorre todos los rincones y tiene funciones para programarlo a cierta hora todos los días. La mejor compra de Amazon que he hecho!
Respecto al envío todo en orden y a tiempo.

 La barredora me encanta por que saca todo el polvo, la programo un rato y cada día me ayuda a mantener la limpieza, solo me voy preocupando de limpiar el filtro y el almacén de polvo cada 20 min. Objetos pequeños como un pasador, un clip, una moneda no aspira y ahí las deja, los cabellos, hilos o cosas así se le enredan en las rueditas y solo de estar vigilando para quitarlas, de repente se atora de estar limpiando un solo espacio, por decir no sale de un cuadro o choca con algún mueble y no cambia de rumbo. La batería le dura aprox 2 hrs continuas

My partner and I have pets and we both work and we have hardwood floors and we like a clean common space. We were sweeping 2-3 times a day and still getting frustrated in between. Then came Rosie. Our house is so clean, our life is so happy! We got her on sale. I can’t think of any reason to get a more expensive vacuum unless you just have to have the app integration. Or maybe if you want the mopping feature, because that would be nice.

She automatically turns on every morning and goes until she gets low on battery. She then docks herself to charge. The first few runs, we had to empty the container every 20 minutes, but now. It can hold a day’s worth pretty easily.

Keep it away from thinner (charging) cords! It really messed up a brush the first week we had her.

(The photo is her next to what she got over about 3 days)

Note: Definitely more effective on hardwood than carpet. She does get dust and dirt out of carpet, but she leaves bigger debris like strings and fuzz

I bought this two weeks ago and it has been in use on every weekday. I knew this was not SMART (no learning, no mapping, no internet, no app) and that this only had the horizontal ‘whisking’ brushes in front of a horizontal suction tube, not a downward facing tube and/or a roller brush. I have never owned a robot vacuum cleaner before but have owned/used a variety of other types.

We have no pets, I have long hair, the other person occasionally cuts their hair using clippers in one room and our floors are mostly oak to pale, with one room in terracotta red tile, one room in dark grey lino and rugs – two of which are dark grey and dark brown.
It vacuums for about 1h 40m for us before turning off suction and making its random way home. In this time it covers about 95% of the floor area of the ground floor or basically all of the first floor in our two storey 3 bed home with small kitchen extension and conservatory. It has made it back to base every time, although in one case it took 17m and was looking decidedly tired. It will never vacuum within about a 1m radius of the docking station as it actively avoids this area unless trying to get home (so don’t put the docking station next to an area you want cleaning!). Most of the time it is in random mode, but will occasionally decide to follow an edge and clean that.

I would recommend it for daily cleaning of tiles, lino and laminate (including dry food crumbs but not wet/damp spillages or e.g. vegetable peelings) and for light vacuuming (‘whisking’) of carpets and rugs.
• This may not be for you if you are going to be in the house while it’s vacuuming and would find it irritating or frustrating watching it repeatedly move round randomly and never learn or if you want it to do the whole clean quickly – it wanders around randomly until the battery starts getting low then goes home and doesn’t learn.
• This is not for you if you expect it to be your only vacuum and you have carpet or steps.

Detail from us that are others might find useful (this is the longest most detailed review I have ever written but covers things I was wondering before purchasing this).

Level changes
• It generally copes with most of our floor with no issue including joining strips between laminate/tile/lino/carpet at the same level.
• It has no issue with getting down minor level changes with or without joining strips.
• When going up, the ‘harder’ the level change the more restricted the angle it needs to be successful and so the more tries it usually needs to get up.
• It generally (3 times out of 4) gets up a join we have that involves a level change of 3/4cm with a 5cm wide joining strip that is pretty horizontal and has a 1/2cm gap between the edge of the joining strip and the lower floor. Once it appeared to get stuck on this while in its ‘go home’ behaviour pattern (see below for ‘go home’ behaviours).
• It usually (once in every 2 attempts) gets up a sharp step change we have in tile that is 1cm high.
• It occasionally (once in every 10 attempts) gets over a level change we have that is 1cm high with a joining strip that is 5cm wide at roughly 30 degrees.
• It has never fallen down the steps (but see steps section below).

Rugs
We have 4 rugs.
• It will get on to the low flat grey and black heavy duty rug (woven textured top, rubberised back) although it will occasionally back away from it and it won’t pick much up. But our normal vacuum doesn’t either so we generally shake it out the back door.
• It will get on our 2cm thick brown coconut fibre mat but won’t pick up much and there are bits of this rug in its collection box when we empty it. But our normal vacuum doesn’t either so we generally pick off any hair and shake it out – and when we shake this rug out we get far more loose fibres coming out than I find in the collection box.
• It will push around and fold up and climb on top of our white bathroom rug with short squashed down tassels and a partly rubberised back – it’s brushes get under the rug but then there is clearance for the rug to go under the cleaner so the rug ends up concertinaed around the front of it until it all gets too much and it mountain climbs over it. As the rug is normally hung on the side of the bath rather than on the floor we don’t mind this.
• We haven’t let it near our very long haired reindeer skin rug

Programming the schedule
This is quite easy once you know what’s happening but I needed to read the instructions carefully and they are not that clear, also see accessibility section below.
• You can only program something to happen daily – it doesn’t distinguish between days of the week.
• Make sure the vacuum is turned on (switch on the side)
• You need to tell it what time it is. Press the ‘clock face’ button then use the up and down arrow keys to set the hour, then the left and right keys to change to minutes, then press the ‘clock face’ button again. It’s a 12h format with am/pm so watch out for that.
• You need to tell it when to start vacuuming. Repeat the above step but press the button with the ‘Alarm bell’ icon inside a circle in it instead of the ‘clock face’at the beginning an end. The vacuum will beep to let you know it’s got it.
• The remote control will now show two times – the current time and the vacuuming time.
If you turn off the vacuum cleaner using the switch on the side it will forget this programming when you turn it back on but confusingly the display on the remote won’t change. This is what the instructions say will happen, and is the way of getting rid of any schedule.

Sound
Whether you’re happy with this depends on your reaction to sounds. Doesn’t bother me, but the other person in the house prefers turning it off when working at home.
• The volume on hard flooring is about as loud as a hairdryer on a medium power setting and when on carpet as if the hairdryer is on a low setting.
• The suction noise is pretty constant.
• It makes some clunks as it goes over level changes and when it bumps into things (see ‘obstacles’ below).

Obstacles
In principal it moves around quite rapidly, and keeps an eye out. If it sees anything it slows down and then stops just before hitting it. I’d say this works about 95% of the time and the rest of the time the bumper comes into play (it knows if it’s hit something with the bumper and the bumper is spring-loaded). Areas where it doesn’t stop before bumping things don’t seem random (ie it has the issue repeatedly) and are:
• Anything that is 1m away from its charging point in a straight line – the only time it will reverse any significant amount is when coming out of the docking station at the beginning of cleaning, and for this distance it can’t see behind it and the bumper is in the wrong place.
• Any furniture in the conservatory – not sure if this is because of brightness or heat or both.
• Plastic in matt silver grey when approaching at right angles (washing machine, bin, fridge).
• Very black polished marble edge (hearth).
• Dining chair legs – from certain approaches doesn’t seem to stop in time (but does slow down so knows there’s something there, just not exactly where).
• Black size 7 trainers – note these are light enough that even when it hits them the bumper doesn’t trigger so it pushes them around until they reach a wall and the bumper does trigger.

It doesn’t damage any of these obstacles, although it might if they were fragile.

We didn’t manage to make it suck up a cable. By itself it just pushed them out of the way. We could feed one under but they didn’t get sucked up or wrapped round the axle and after a time the random moves ended up with the vacuum wandering off and leaving the cable behind.

Steps
It reliably stops at the top of our stairs (medium pile light coffee colour carpet), but to us it isn’t worth risking it falling down the flight, hurting itself and potentially damaging the floor at the bottom. We tend to leave it in one upstairs room at a time and move it after 20 mins or so and just vacuum the landing with the old vacuum at the same time as we do the stairs. Any method we have thought of to ensure it will never fall off involve putting something physically across the top of the stairs which doesn’t seem sensible when we might forget to take it up and fall over it!

Loose laminate beading
Ahem… so we may have not got round to sticking the beading down around the edge of our living room’s laminate floor. When it cleans around the ‘external corner’ around the hearth (the bit you’d worry about a child falling over and damaging themselves on) it lifts the beading, pings it out of the recess its in and then pushes the beading around. It doesn’t do this in any of the rooms where the beading is stuck down.

Accessibility
None of this causes me issues and I’m not an expert but I couldn’t remember other reviews commenting specifically on these areas.
• Remote control buttons. The direction buttons are black, other buttons are medium blue and the images on the buttons are in white. Decent size buttons which are fine for thumbs.
• Remote control display. The time display is about 7mm tall. The alarm time display is about 6mm tall. The am/pm on both of these is about 1.5mm tall. The display is not back-lit, and has about as much contrast as a typical calculator.
• Emptying the vacuum. You can open the vacuum to access the collection box with one finger by pressing the lid on the top. You can lift the box out with one finger using the plastic handle but it feels more secure using two hands. Opening the box is much easier with two hands than one. You’d have to be a lot more dexterous than me to remove the filters with one hand (you need to remove the main L-shaped filter to empty It). Emptying it can be done with one hand but is easier with two. Cleaning the filters is much easier with two hands (one to hold the filter, one to use the brush). Reassembling the collection box can be done with one hand as can putting it back in the vacuum and closing it up. It’s helpful to have a surface near your bin to put things down on while doing this. It is possible to put things back together wrongly or put the box back in the vacuum the wrong way round but if you do either the box won’t fit in the vacuum or the lid won’t close. A careless type could break it by trying to force it rather than fixing it.
• Noise. Both in vacuuming mode and getting home mode it makes enough noise so you shouldn’t accidentally stand on it unless you have the TV or music on at a level that covers the noise up or are hard of hearing.
• Vacuum colour contrast. It is shiny white with highly contrasting good size black sections on the side and on top. There are small blue LED lights on the top but these aren’t always on.
• Speed. It doesn’t travel too fast, but someone who’s wobbly on their pins would need to be careful of it.
• Getting in the way. If it bumps into you/your foot it will take a few moments to get out of the way, and because it’s random, it might be up to about 30 seconds in a normal worst case unless it’s trying to get home (see below) or is in one of its edge clean moments (it will go in circles around the obstacle for a bit until it decides to change back to random) when it could take a lot longer. It feels very odd if it bumps into your toes (but doesn’t hurt).

Security
• We have not had to connect it to the internet. It doesn’t seem to have it’s own built in internet (if it does its not always on). So in our opinion the risk of it sucking up data about us and beaming it back to the manufacturers for onward sale is acceptably low.

Manual/special modes
You can rotate it with the left and right buttons on the remote (it rotates a specific amount, not just for how long you hold the buttons down for) and also tell it to move in its forward direction with the up arrow. This does work but can be frustrating as it carries on doing it’s thing while you’re doing this. You can tell it to rotate right, but it might immediately decide to rotate right again. And when it does make a random decision it feels like it stops listening for instructions from the remote for maybe half a second.
Spot clean and edge clean seem to work but not relevant if you just stick it on while you’re out. But could be handy in some circumstances.

Get home behaviour
Understanding the ‘get home’ behaviour seems key to whether it will be able to get home!

It vacuums randomly until it thinks it’s battery is getting too low. Then it turns off suction and carries moving. This seems less random and is basically a mix of random/edge following (more edge following than normal) with occasional long straight line moves if it hasn’t found home yet. Once it gets into a zone that’s within about 4m of the docking station and is within 45 degrees of directly in front of it and is pointing it’s sensors in the right direction it suddenly changes what it’s doing! It slows down, and moves towards a point that is directly in front of the docking station. It then straightens up and moves slowly towards it. When it reaches it it gives a happy beep and goes to sleep. Points we have noticed:
• If the docking station is positioned so it’s unlikely to come within 4m while pointing at it (ie in a corridor pointing towards the nearest wall) this reduces the chance of it finding home before it runs out of power.
• If there is an obstacle in its way once it’s doing the last approach it will back off and try again, but it will keep doing exactly the same thing – this isn’t random any more – so if it didn’t work the first time, it’s not going to work. Our example is a dining chair that had been pushed back so the leg was directly in the way.
• If you have a level change on the final approach it has to approach from an angle to get over it it’s gonna just sit there beached on the level change trying to slowly approach the station – none of its sensors are going to tell it anything is wrong and it doesn’t seem to realise it isn’t getting closer so won’t back off and make another random move (which it would do in normal cleaning mode).
• If it is under a dining table when it gets tired it can spend a long time trying to get out as the ‘get home’ behaviours don’t seem very effective at getting it out from under a table with 4 times 6 chair legs.

For info, after trialling various locations the docking station is currently under an 80cm wide cupboard next to a pair of weighing scales with a clear space of 3m in front of it (this space is a corridor) and the vacuum gets home reliably. It does mean we have to get it out to empty it though.