Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSurprising little powerhouse for a great price!
Reviewed in the United States on December 5, 2023
Wow, I've got a lot to say about this vacuum. Buckle up - this is going to be a long one, but I hope to be thorough and honest!
I've written a lot of reviews about smart home products because I'm pretty passionate about them and tend to share about the products I have extremely strong feelings about and this one doesn't disappoint. I've got a two story home and on my main floor I've got a Roomba J7+ and a Braava M6 to handle the vacuuming/sweeping and mopping but upstairs I don't have anything but a gaggle of kids doing chores to handle the sweeping and Swiftering and they're honestly terrible at it, so I've been looking for a solution but didn't want to spend another thousand dollars on the Roomba pair, but also didn't want to get a cheaper model in a brand I'm not familiar with.
Enter SwitchBot.
I've got a ton of SwitchBot products so I was instantly interested in this one and had my eye on it for a couple months. At around $500 with the ability to both sweep and do wet mopping (more of a swifter/wet rag type than proper mopping) this one seemed to really fit the bill for me, but I still wasn't sure. I waited until it had a couple reviews and it seemed really positive so I pulled the trigger. I’ve used it for about 3 weeks now to get a good understanding of all of its features, functionality as well as the drawbacks and issues so I could give a fair and honest review.
The Vac arrived and I was kind of shocked at how much smaller it is than Roomba - this was not expected and not a reason for purchase, but ended up being one of my favorite features unintentionally. Upstairs, we’ve got so many tiny places that I wasn’t really thinking about like under the bed, around small crevices under desks, under couches, etc. that it can easily navigate around because of it’s smaller size.
The other thing that is really advantageous is that it uses a laser for all of it’s navigation and mapping as opposed to Roomba’s camera/laser combo - Roomba wants you to have lights on for it’s optimal navigation which would be really difficult in an upstairs/bedroom area as well as our movie theater we have built where the windows are blacked out and all the lights are low. With the laser system this little guy has, it has no problem handling low light and navigating pretty flawlessly.
The precision of its mapping from that laser system is incredibly impressive - it’s actually SO much better than my big expensive Roomba. That’s something that legitimately blows my mind. It makes me incredibly happy with this purchase (and honestly a little frustrated with Roomba after seeing how great this is to know how good Roomba could be). As it goes through and maps your house/floor, it will automatically add in dividers for rooms where it thinks the rooms are and does a pretty good job - and you can adjust and fix these yourself if it gets it wrong. When it did my initial mapping, it got one room confused for 2 or more and it was easy to merge them into a single room and update it, or split a single giant room it didn’t understand into two, etc.
After it maps the room, then you can add labels and name the rooms so you can tell it “vacuum the bedroom” or “vacuum the whole house except the bathroom” and so on and this works extremely well. The only downside here is that sometimes the room labels seem to kind of randomly bug out and change rooms - like in my attached image you can see where it shows my bathroom randomly in my hallway, my kid’s room became the closet, etc. The only way I found to fix them is just legitimately relabeling them.
You also have the ability to use “RC mode” and control the vacuum like an RC car and drive it around to clean and vacuum the room which is pretty cool and fun. I haven’t found a real functional purpose for this other than to play around with, but it’s very cool nonetheless. I think if I was using the vac on my main floor where my kitchen is, I’d have a better use for it as I’d use it to drive around and clean up things like food spills near counters or do spot treatments here and there instead of doing a whole room.
When it comes to actually doing a sweep of a room, it does really awesome straight lines back and forth and creates beautiful vacuum lines on a rug/carpet. It also does a hard stop between rooms and won’t go any further than what you’ve requested - you can see that in one of the pictures I’ve included where it stopped exactly at the end of the hallway and didn’t enter the loft area. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s pretty sharp considering the Roomba is not nearly as accurate and often finds its way by still bumping around even with its mapping system.
When it comes to the “mopping” system, it comes with a few wet pads that are very similar to the Swifter wet wipes - they’re basically like moistened wet baby wipes that snap on the SwitchBot on a special little plate that locks in over the brush and will mop around on the floor until the wipe runs dry. It will still mop when it’s dry, but it’s just less effective. You can buy more wipes when you run out, but they also include instructions on how to cut down a rag/towel to make your own which I really appreciate. It’s not often a company does this when they can just as easily try to sell you more products instead.
The brush it uses to sweep is a traditional brush - a single brush. It works really well, but definitely gets tanged up every now and again and needs to have the hair, strings, carpet fibers, etc. cut free so it can spin (and they do include a little razor/slicer tool that stores in the dust bin!) so it can spin freely. It picks up EVERYTHING and does a really good job of collecting and over time I’ve noticed that the amount of debris that it’s gotten picked up has gotten to be so little that it has very few clogs and issues where the brush needs cleared.
Overall, here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons:
Cons:
* Brush needs clearing frequently in the beginning
* Vac can struggle with running over loose, smaller cords
* Room labels sometimes randomly mix up and change rooms
* Some surfaces can be clunky and loud
Pros:
* Mapping system is absolutely excellent
* If there’s an issue/error, the vacuum speaks out loud and tells you what’s wrong with words - not beeps/codes. It will literally say “help, I’m stuck!” Or “my brushes need cleared!”
* Map is very accurate and you can look at it on the phone to see exactly where the vacuum is
* Navigating around corners and under and around tight spaces is really great and the vacuum seems to have no problem getting wherever it wants to go.
* Excellent suction power and does a great job cleaning floors
* Has both a wet mop and vacuum option
* RC mode is a cool little feature for spot cleaning
* Can set “clean zones” and “stay out zones” to have it clean specific areas that may encompass multiple rooms or stay out of specific areas in rooms. For example: I have it clean my whole loft, but have a “stay out” zone around my computer desks so it doesn’t spend a long time trying to navigate around my chairs and weird desk leg situation.
* Battery life is excellent and can do almost my entire top floor in one charge
* Map is constantly updating and shifting based on real life changes
Summary:
This little thing is amazing and absolutely worth the cost. When it’s time for me to buy another robot vacuum, I’ll absolutely be looking to SwitchBot for my next one. I 100% recommend and endorse this little guy and would strongly recommend anyone who is considering a robot vac to take it from someone who has plenty to give this little guy a shot.