This bot also impressed in the battery department. It took two hours and forty-five minutes for the vacuum to charge fully, and about one hour and forty-five minutes for it to run down to 10% battery life, which is an excellent ratio of charging time to operating time. Before it could get down to 0%, it shut itself off and returned to the base to refuel.
It took the D5 one hour to clean 630 square feet in my home. I also brought it to a friend’s house where it cleaned 250 square feet in a half hour, so cleaning times appear to be pretty consistent. Neato’s claim that it can clean 4500 square feet would probably require several cleaning cycles, but it was adequate for our purposes. And the botvac’s slim profile—less than four inches tall—meant that it could clean under couches and cribs without a problem.
Paying the Piper
But such wonderful results did not come without a cost. We began to notice chips in the walls, couch legs and door frames, as the botvac bashed into them while figuring out the room’s boundaries. One time, the botvac bonked itself into an open door repeatedly, so hard that it closed the door and trapped itself in a bedroom. It does have a gentle navigation cycle, but it’s much slower and you can’t schedule it in advance using the app.
And the vacuum is loud. I measured it at around 65 decibels, which is almost as loud as a normal push vacuum. Between its propensity towhunk into walls and the constantwhoooom, this vacuum makes some unnerving noises. The calibration on the sensors is also a little strange. The botvac ran over feet and ate stray doll clothes without flinching, but a pair of dangling shoelaces in a shoe rack left it stymied.
I found the inconsistency regarding Neato's manual controls to be annoying. You can control the botvac’s direction via voice commands, but not through the app. There’s no button to push to tell the botvac to go home if you want it to stop cleaning before a cycle is over. Finally, sometimes the botvac will clean a room halfway, decide that it’s bored with the scenery, and move on to another room before coming back. This is frustrating, especially since the kit only comes with two magnetic divider strips. If I owned one of these, I would probably order several sets of them.
These hiccups might be deal-breakers, especially if you have valuable, delicate furniture. Also, if you're going to spend $500 on a robot vacuum, you might as well drop an extra $200 for Neato’s flagship Botvac Connected, which has all the features of the D5 but is more powerful, has longer battery life and a better command system through the app.
But if you find that $500 is a fine price, but $700 is lunacy and brings you to the brink of financial collapse (and you don’t mind scuffs on your moldings) then I'd say you should try the D5. It was so deeply satisfying to watch it run its meticulous vacuuming route, reminding me to empty its dirt bin two or even three times during a cleaning cycle, knowing that I wouldn’t have to get out the push vacuum anytime soon. Lenny, you will always have a home here, unless you kill someone, and I’m reasonably sure we can prevent you from doing that.
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