The Robotic vacuum cleaner has been around for well over a decade by now, and just out of curiosity, i found out that the first Roomba was selling for US$199.95. Since the market for such a product is well established by now, i can finally buy one without breaking the bank.
As the title suggests, i bought from Qoo10 instead of Taobao. Moreover, i bought from a local brand – EuropAce, because of the warranty is backed by a real service centre. I’m a big fan of EuropAce tower fans (pun unintended), so, even though i know they probably didn’t do their own product R&D for a robotic vacuum cleaner, there’s better assurance that my money doesn’t go down the drain in case something actually goes wrong. In fact, i placed my order during their pre-launch promotion without doing any research. I presume that, by now, any robotic vacuum can’t possibly perform poorly given that the technology is widely available.
Charging base and virtual wall device on the right
When turned on, the robotic vacuum cleaner announces some status report in Chinglish, which you can safely ignore. Operation is quite simple – just hit the play button. I left it running unsupervised and when i checked afterwards, it was powered down, under a sofa! Probably got stuck there while trying to return to the charging base. I will have to use the virtual wall to prevent it from going under the sofa next time.
Anyway, here’s how it performed:
I flipped it around and was pleasantly surprised to see dirt stuck near the vacuum inlet. I didn’t add water to the water tank and even then, the mopping pad also managed to pick up some dirt.
The dust box – I totally didn’t expect the floor to be so dirty!
All in all, happy with the purchase.
