5 Reasons You’ll Never Find a Robot Vacuum in My Home

Robot vacuums are a $4.5 billion market, with new adoptees every single year. Here’s why I’m not one of them.

robovac illustrationKailah Ogawa

In 1997, Electrolux introduced the Trilobite, the first automatic vacuum cleaner, to the world. Featured on BBC’s Tomorrow’s World TV show, the Trilobite gave the public a reason to believe that they would one day own a piece of real-world sci-fi tech that would clean up all of their floor messes.

Decades later, robot vacuums, or “robovacs,” as they’re affectionately called, are now a $4.5 billion market, with models ranging from $100 to nearly a grand.

But no matter how advanced or intuitive these robovacs get, you’ll never find one in my home — and it’s not because I’m afraid of a full-scale robot invasion.

1. They don’t really work on carpet

Robovacs excel at cleaning hard floors. Don’t expect one to do very well at vacuuming your rugs and carpets, though.

It’ll do perfectly fine at suctioning up the debris on the surface level of your carpet. But the higher the pile and the longer the fibers, the more dirt and debris that gets stuck toward the base.

Robovacs have neither the suction power nor bristle length to get deep down into rugs or carpets.

Robovacs have neither the suction power nor bristle length to get deep down into rugs or carpets, making their cleanings purely superficial.

2. Robot vacuums get stuck all the time

Despite being designed to avoid furniture and walls, robot vacuums have a tendency to get stuck. And sometimes they get stuck in the most frustrating ways that make prying them from their trap even more annoying.

They’ll manage to navigate in between chair legs before realizing those chair legs are now the bars to their jail cell. Step away for too long and you’ll find your robovac has spent more time locked away than cleaning your floors.

3. Robovacs require your house to be clean already

Robovacs need a perfectly clutter-free home to properly run. They probably won’t register that there are some charging cables on the floor, so they’ll run them over and get stuck.

Before you even start your robovac, the onus is on you to remove everything from the floor to create an obstacle-free workspace, which defeats the purpose of having an automatic vacuum.

Many robovacs can’t transition properly from hardwood floors to carpets.

And even if your floors are completely bare (which can be nearly impossible), many robovacs can’t transition properly from hardwood floors to carpets.

4. Robot vacuums don’t mix well with pets

Your robot vacuum is supposed to avoid crashing into things, whether it’s a wall, your foot or a pile of clothes on the floor. But that turd your dog just dropped? Or the furball your cat hurled.

Yeah, they’re getting mowed down … and around … and all over the place.

Head to YouTube, and you’ll find too many videos of robovacs painting homes with feces. The issue is so prevalent that iRobot, maker of the popular Roomba robot vacuums, released a model that’s designed specifically to identify and maneuver around your pet’s business.

5. Robot vacuums take a long time

Without a doubt, you can manually vacuum a space faster than a robot vacuum can. That’s because a robot vacuum needs to run through its algorithms to decide where to go and how to get there — and that’s not including the minutes lost when the thing gets stuck somewhere. Plus, all that time spent trying to figure out where to go leads to faster battery drain.