D5 Connected

My XV-21 still works somewhat. I replaced a bunch of bump sensors but they still go intermittant. My D5 is very dead with the ribbon cable for the lidar burned. The thing that killed them for me was the run around support gave me. Playing up a language barrier to close my case and throw out my effort. Never again.

My old Neato D5 is now based in my garage and still does an impressive job.

One problem with D-shape designs is that it makes it more difficult to turn in corners and tight/busy spaces, and it tends to made the robot appear more clumsy.  This is one of the major drawbacks I won’t regret about my Neato D5. The black plastic of the robot left marks everywhere on my white-painted skirting boards as it was bumping against them quite a lot.  I suspect that while it has other advantages this is why most manufacturers aren’t going for a D-shape design. 

My D5 died recently (after about 8 years) and I was fine with it, not having tried anything newer.  But I have to say the Ecovacs T80 I got as a replacement is clearly better in terms of navigation (the Neato had a tendency to bump against skirting board and furniture and leave marks). And also the extra roller mop really makes a difference and my tiled kitchen floor looks visibly cleaner). Pure vacuuming performance seems pretty similar on my laminate and tile floors.  I do have lower expectations from the Ecovacs (and most other current brands) in terms of lifespan though, but honestly it clearly does a better job at cleaning than the Neato.  I definitely got value for my money with the Neato though!

I've had 2 neatos that have lasted a long time. both D5 models, basic but get the job done. Surprisingly even the batteries have held up. I would stay away from roombas, owned 2 in the past and they always had problems, also they have the worst tech and the highest price out of all the competition.

I have both a robo vac (Neato D5 that's going to get "jailbroken" to run without the app/cloud connection Neato shut down recently) and a basic robot mop that's basically just a swiffer wetjet that drives itself around (Braava Jet 240). They aren't going to replace deep cleaning, since an actual vacuum, mop and bucket, or even just a swiffer wetjet absolutely gets things cleaner than the robots. But that doesn't mean the floor isn't cleaner than it was before the robot did it's thing, and they only take a couple of minutes at most to set up/start. Basically they do a good enough job to keep things clean enough that you don't need to manually vacuum/mop as often. You can also just spend a couple of minutes manually cleaning the "bad" high traffic areas that the robot would struggle with, and let the robot do the rest.

I have had robot vacuums going back to the Neato D3. The progress from D3->D5 to Roborock S7 to 10R is impressive. D3 would get stuck almost daily and would need to empty the bag at least once. D5 did not get stuck as much but would fail at least 25% of the time and the bin need emptying every day. S7 was a huge step up and would need maybe an intervention once a week. Still had to empty the bin daily and then fill the water tank once a week and clean the mop pad. If I wasn't on top of the maintenance it would run for maybe 2 days at the most. 10R made it that daily runs without intervention possible. In the year of owning it, I've had to help it out maybe 5 times total out of 300 runs. The maintenance is basically emptying the dirty water once a month and filling it with fresh water twice a month. The bag can go a couple months but I replace them sooner just to keep the restriction down. Prior to the 10R, I had two of each unit that would split the house. With the 10R, it handles the entire house and takes turns on which half it vacuums and mops depending on the day of the week. Overall, they do a good job of lessing the amount of dirt and hair in the house to a significant degree. If I pull out the big vacuum, it collects much less dirt and hair if the robot runs daily. This was the biggest thing that I saw going from the older units to the 10R with the dock. Some days I would just not have time for maintenance and then it's an uphill battle. With a unit that docks, I don't skip days unless intentional which leaves little hair for a weekly full clean with an big vacuum.

A used Neato D3 through D7. Should be on eBay for almost nothing since the cloud was turned off. They still work if you push the button and they have lidar. If you push the button and it doesn't start cleaning, open and close the dust bin. The dust bin reminder was cloud based so you wouldn't realize they are waiting for someone to check the dust bin.

I run 11 Neatos 90 minutes 5 days per week in our house while we swim in another part of the house. Been doing it for 10 years. Not always the same Neato's though they are very repairable and I've made many repairs on them through the years.

Neato was the first with lidar. It was D shaped so it got edges and the aggressive brush was full width. Unfortunately it was over engineered like they were building a rocket ship with all kinds of sensors to make sure everything was working perfectly and sometimes sensors went bad throwing an error stopping it from running when it was perfectly fine. Company was purchased by a German company that destroyed it and they went out of business 2.5 years ago but kept the cloud servers running until recently. They can still be used manually by pressing the start button. But lots of features are gone. We use 11 so they are all done while we are swimming. We are retired and don't want to listen to them running for 8 hours per day if we just ran 1 per house level.