Neato Botvac 75 Robot Vacuum

I'm a bachelor who lives mostly on one floor with all hardwood everywhere except the bathrooms where it's tiled. It totals around 1000 square feet or so on the main floor. The Neato 75 has done a pretty amazing job keeping the dust bunnies and kitchen crumbs away. It took me a few times to learn the kinds of situations that can trip it up, like too many chair and table legs all close together. I now leave my dining chairs about six inches back from the table and all is well. I also learned that the Neato's low power meter is a bit off for the layout of my home. At first I had the charging dock placed in such a way that my whole house was more or less a linear progression for vacuuming. It would get to the far end and be low on power, then head back to the base station to recharge. A few times it ran out of power just a few inches away from the dock. I moved the dock to a more central location and haven't had that problem again. It does a good job of navigating door sills that I thought would be a problem. The raised marble sills into the bathrooms turned out to be not an issue, due to an ability the machine has to lift itself up on its drive wheels by an inch or so; I had no idea it could do that when I purchased it. I did learn to prop one particular door open, because the layout of the room makes it such that the vacuum can end up closing itself in when trying to vacuum behind the open door. It is a bit louder than I expected, so I don't run it while I'm home. I do have it run on Tuesdays and Fridays while I'm at work.A small update: I've learned that cobwebs/dust can obscure the downward facing sensors on the front corners that tell the vac not to go over the edge of stairs or the side of a stair well. Fortunately for me, the railing caught it from tipping over to its doom. I came home to see the vac cantilevered over the edge of a five foot drop onto a tiled floor. I now make sure to check the downward facing sensors each time I clean the dust compartment, which for me is about once a week, or every two vacuumings.Update two: I've had this for a good six months or so, now. My unit was still having trouble with a stairwell where the railing was at just about the same height as the range finder, but could still fit under. It would often go past the edge and end up stuck, hanging over a five foot drop. I finally decided to use the magnetic wall along the edge of that stairwell, and it's been working fine ever since. I had to hot-glue it in place, as otherwise, the vac would just push it around. It would be nice if there were colors other than black available for the magnetic tape. One of these days I'm going to paint the top of the strips brown to more closely match the hardwood floor.Overall, I'm very impressed with the intelligence of this device's programming, and the quality of its cleaning.

Loved this product for the first five months, worked great, was a little loud but it still got the job done. In September, it started giving problems, the screen kept reading "please put my dust bin back in". After this continued to happen for about a month, I called customer service asking what to do, they said maybe the battery is dying and suggested we order a new one. We did. After putting in the new battery, it was fine for about a week until that same warning kept coming up "please put my dustbin back in". I called customer service telling them this happened again, after changing the batteries, they said this happens and is common in the Botvac 75 model, and told me in NOVEMBER that in about a week they would send me instructions on how to send it back and once I send proof of purchase they would send me a ticket number and i would ship the neato back and they would send a replacement. It had been three weeks and I called back tell them I hadn't gotten any instructions to send it back or any ticket number, they said the neato was on back order and would send me as soon as possible. It has been five months and NO ONE has contacted me about any instructions to send it back, I think they're waiting for my warranty to end or something because this is just ridiculous. And now I find out that they have discontinued this model. I wish I can give less than one star, their customer service was terrible and slow and this model has some major defects. If they had atleast been courteous and responsive I would have waited, but this is unacceptable. I had a terrible experience with Neatorobotics and I am still waiting for my replacement.

Overview: I did a lot of research between the Neato Botvacs and the Roombas, and the Botvac seemed to have a much better approach to cleaning a household. Considering my place is on the larger side, I needed a unit that would be able to continue after the first charge of battery was depleted. The Botvac is perfect in the sense that it maps out your place (as best as it can), returns to the charger when its low on juice, and then continues to finish the rest of the job. The Roomba isn't capable of that and just stops when it's out of juice.Efficiency: I found my hardwood floors (and some carpet) to be much cleaner with the botvac, although it did continually get stuck under my bed (not the botvac's fault). However, I did find that the unit did get caught in dining room chairs or in random corners, but more often then not it seemed to do the job as I'd expect. Like any robot vacuum you do have to move things off the floor.Reliability: My botvac would no longer charge after 3 months of use (4 times a week). Unfortunately the Botvacs still use NiMH battery packs which are inferior battery technology, which may have contributed to this issue. I believe other reviewers also indicated that they ran into simillar issues. The batter is under warranty for 6 months, but that gets me to the next point.Customer Service. This was the worst part of owning this product. I emailed for support which was promptly answered, but as I continued I realized how disjoint their Customer Service Representatives were in that different people would pick up my email and half the time didn't know the current state. On top of that, they were slow to give instructions for sending back the unit (their site says it takes several days), but when I asked about getting a prepaid shipping label, they went radio silent. This was about 3 weeks ago, even after sending subsequent emails. To this day I still never got a response. I was happy to get a replacement at the time, but after seeing how bad their customer service was, I wouldn't buy their product again... Fortunately Amazon customer service was stupendous and gave me a full refund and a prepaid shipping label to return the defective item.Summary:Pros:+ Better technology than Roomba+ Returns to base to recharge and goes back out to complete the job+ Cleans wellCons:- Horrible customer service- Older battery technology (NiMH) that's not as durable and reliable

I found a french website where they compare honestly all the robot vacuum cleaner on the market http://www.whichrobots.com/ or if you speak french http://www.kelrobot.fr/ .. This website as a lot a videos so even if you don't speak french it's easy to understand and they provide tutorials also. I chose this model because of the ratio performance vs price. I can tell that I am very satisfied so far by the results. This is my first Robot Vacuum cleaner so I can't compare but I can tell you that the pattens the robot is using for cleaning seems to work quite well and the bin get pretty much full each day ( not as much as the first time I used it ). I can see the difference on the cleanliness of the floor since before I was not vacuuming every day !!!

Does its job well, haven't gotten stuck yet! It is load so preferable to run it while you are outside. I haven't owned any robotics vacuum earlier so don't have much to compare to but as it matches my expectations, I'll give it four stars.

The best vacuum ever