Meet Wall-E my Neato Botvac D5 Robot Vacuum
Isn't technology amazing - we are now in a place where we can have robots in our homes to do the jobs we enjoy the least or voice activated AI technology to remind us about our commutes or just play some music on demand - no more changing radio stations!
I managed to pickup a Botvac D5 Connected robot vacuum from Amazon when it was on a daily deal for around £299 - the bonus was that I could also use Amazons credit option of splitting the payments over 5 months as these toys are not cheap!
I had been wanting to get one for along time since getting into home automation and glad this came up on offer. I had been considering some of the Roomba robot vacuums but would mean having them shipped over from china via GearBest or similar Chinese websites. But with this shipped from within the UK and credit options the deal was too good to pass on.
Meet Wall-E
I decided to name my robot after my favourite pixar robot Wall-E just seemed very fitting! Setting up of the vacuum was very simple and most of it done over the Neato Android app available on the google play store. It was just a matter of hooking the vacuum up with Wifi and downloading a few updates and then it was up and running
How good is it at cleaning?
The vacuum can clean my ground floor in around 30 minutes so does take longer than had I actually just grabbed the vacuum and did it myself - however that's not the point! The benefits are I can run the vacuum multiple times a week and for the most part does a great job of picking up dust, hairs and bits of dirt so while not perfect spotless clean it makes up by maintaining keeping a clean house than just manually doing it once a week also huge plus the lines where the hover has run over your rugs can be quite zen! to see once its done.
No-go lines!
Once you have done a special room mapping clean - its possible to set no go areas on the app by drawing simple red lines over the bits in your house you don't want it to touch or places you think it will get stuck and for the most part it does very good at keeping to this. Note the no go lines are only available on the D5 and upwards models.
The Stairs!
Yup just like the dalek's stairs are it's weakness, however the vacuum is smart enough to know that's a bad idea and keeps itself from falling over, I put a no go line on my stair cases just in case it ever gets tired of cleaning up my crap and decides to give it a go!
It is a bit annoying to clean upstairs as you must put the home base unit in the same place every time for it to clean - you could buy another unit if you are cleaning very often but that's more $$$
Yarr! Maps!
Once the vacuum has completed its clean it sends you a map through the mobile app of the area it has cleaned and how long it took etc which is really cool.
What about Home Assistant Integration?
The Botvac vacuums integrate very well home assistant by just sharing your login credentials it can be setup with just a few lines in your configuration.yaml file
neato:
username: YOUR_USERNAME
password: YOUR_PASSWORD
Full instructions can be found on the home assistant botvac components page I would also recommend this cool botvac lovelace ui card on reddit made by naofireblade!
Thoughts on Botvac D5 Vacuum?
I do love this vacuum but I haven't had experience with other models to really give a fair comparison but there's lots of YouTube videos out there if you want to get the best bang for your buck. I do miss the fact that only the D7 model has zone cleaning which would allow me to clean certain high traffic rooms without having to do the whole floor - so worth considering this before jumping on the D5 or D6 models but the D7 is much more expensive! But I would still highly recommend this model to those interested.
This is how it starts - Roll on skynet!