The life changing magic of a robot hoover

We have had a robot hoover for a few years now, and apart from family members it is quite honestly one of my favourite things in the house.

Our first robot hoover was an Eufy brand, an early model which worked very well for several years. It took a random approach to cleaning, heading out into the room and bouncing off the walls and furniture until it was satisfied, then it would go through a doorway and into the next room and so on. When it had finished it would wander around aimlessly for a bit because it struggled to find the dock, especially if it was at the other end of the house, and I would have to go and rescue it to take it home. 

When the battery eventually died we decided to upgrade to a more advanced robot hoover, this time a Roborock, and this was a complete revelation. Our new hoover (which is itself now a couple of years old - they are even fancier now!) creates a map of the home so that it can clean systematically. It does the edges first then makes nice even rows across the floor. You can follow its progress on a map in the app, and it always finds its way home. 

One of my favourite features is that you can clean individual rooms. Often the kitchen will need a second go over in the evening, and if we've had friends round eating biscuits it's an easy way to clean up the living room. I use it upstairs too (once I had got over the fear of it falling down the stairs!) and it does a great job, it's also a good way to get the children to keep their bedroom floors clean.

You can programme a scheduled daily clean, although I don't trust the hoover to clean without supervision. Once it got hold of the loose end from a spool of thread in my sewing basket and ate the whole reel before I noticed, it often tips up the washing basket and gets stuck underneath, and we usually have too many abandoned charging cables on the floor to risk unsupervised excursions.

The reason that I love my robot hoover so much is that it has made a huge difference to the cleanliness and tidiness of the home. Every morning I open up all the doors on the ground floor, do a quick walkthrough looking for loose items, then I set it off. It takes about 45 minutes to clean all the downstairs rooms and I love the way it just gets on with it. Because it's hoovering regularly the floors never feel dirty, and we keep the floors clear because we don't want to risk any possessions being eaten. Not to mention the fact that I can get on and do other things while the hoovering takes care of itself. 

I know that they aren't always cheap, especially the newer models, but for me it's worth every penny!