This Robot Vacuum Does The Job I Don’t Have Time (Or Energy) To Do
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Between my young children, cats and my over-zealous tumble dryer, my floors seem to accumulate a lot of crap.
I routinely find bits of Cornflake or Shreddies crushed into the carpet, then there are the wads of mud that accumulate by the front door, the clumps of black cat hair, the random peas or grains of rice that seem to bungee-jump off the table, the clumps of lint from said tumble dryer – and don’t get me started on the tiny stickers which seem to spawn from nowhere?!
In short, I could hoover every single day and my home would still be in a state of disarray.
But I work, then I collect my kids, then we spend approx 29049348745 hours doing bedtime, and then I’m ready to hit the hay myself, so I don’t really have time to hoover every day. I barely have time to do it once a week.
So, when the opportunity came knocking to try a robot vacuum cleaner – the Ultenic T20 Pro, to be exact – you can bet I grabbed the chance with both hands.
It’s been a few months now since the robot vacuum, which my kids have nicknamed Makka Pakka (after the In The Night Garden character), entered our lives – and he is very much a part of the family.
The cats chase him, the kids chase him, he happily hoovers up Cheerios and days-old peas, riding over the bumpy creases of our dining room rug like he’s surfing waves.
He puts me in mind of a more polished-looking Wall-E, tirelessly picking up dirt in my living room and hall, rather than random bits of rubbish on a lifeless planet.
Tell me more about the Ultenic T20 Pro...
The set up is pretty simple: you switch it on, let it mooch about your home so it can formulate a floor plan (of sorts) and then it goes about cleaning, usually doing the perimeter of the room(s) before going up and down like it’s mowing a football pitch – it’s actually pretty calming to watch.
It comes with an app so you can set areas in your home where you don’t want it to go, or you can set where you’d like it to wash the floor (yep, it does that too – although admittedly I’ve kept it on carpet mode as we’re a mostly-carpeted-home).
The Ultenic comes with a little black box where it goes to recharge and (admittedly, quite loudly) evacuate its collection of debris – initially it was having trouble getting back to it, which became a bit of a running joke with the kids that Makka Pakka couldn’t find his way home, but after we recalibrated it and moved the black box to a different area, it seemed to sort the issue.
The vacuum is fairly noisy, so you need to find a moment when the kids aren’t watching TV or sleeping to get it going – I usually set it off when I’m working from home. A minor point is that it also struggles with rugs that have tassels as they get trapped in its little spinning arm (so I usually pick up our hallway rug before it gets going).
But if you’re in need of a way to keep on top of dirt, hair, random bits of food and everything else that accumulates on your floors when you’ve got plenty of people/animals living under your roof, a robot vacuum is a no-brainer.
It doesn’t bump into furniture and seems to be pretty efficient at picking up all manner of bits that our carpet accrues, from food debris, to cat hair, to lint from the tumble dryer. Once it’s done the job, it takes itself off to empty and recharge – so, very little input from me is needed.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’ll miss the odd bit of fluff, but I can absolutely live with that. It helps me keep my floors in a state of calm. And you know what they say about a tidy home equalling a tidy mind...
Nowadays, I can’t imagine life without my vac-bot. Well, actually I can: it would be very messy indeed.