Just got the vacuum delivered last weekend and tried it for two days now. Some early thoughts about this product. Note I had a Roborock S5 Max model so this is something I will be unavoidably comparing to from time to time.
PROS:
Nothing can beat the price! A robot vacuum with LIDAR and mapping for <$200 (tax and shipping included)? You must be kidding me!
Adding it to the Wyze app is smooth.
Get the work done as expected after some initial struggles.
Extra side brush and filter included in the package.
Noise level is ok.
CONS:
The charging dock design is bad. It is unreliable and the robot has difficulty docking back to the charger on carpet every single time. Everytime it has to try multiple times before docking back successfully. The Roborock design is much better with the charging contact on the bottom. It is weird that the robot has charging contacts on the back so it has to turn around before docking and retrying took a lot of works because it will have to turn around multiple times. But at the minimum I think Wyze can try to fix from the software side by having the robot to move closer to the dock before turning around for contact.
It had constant connection problem at the beginning, but it seems that the problem was resolved after upgrading to the new firmware.
The initial mapping is very inefficient and it kept jumping back and forth between different rooms. It had to do a charge in between to finish up the mapping. And if it failed to dock more than 3 times when trying to charge the map will be eliminated and had to start over again!
It is very easy get trapped under low furniture. The robot can tilt when moving and it doesn’t detect the height of furniture bottom properly when going in. I hope that Wyze can fix their software so that the LIDAR can be used to detect the height. Right now I have to put in virtual wall to make sure the robot doesn’t get trapped into those places again.
There is no way to customize the room division. Not a big problem for me because it actually divided my rooms into smaller pieces but I can image it could create problem for other people if it merge rooms into one bigger room by mistake.
The lights (home button and power button) on the robot are too bright at night. I put the dock in my bedroom so it bothers my sleep. I had to put something to cover it at night.
I understand that this is a new product so it is not perfect, but I am hoping that Wyze can help to fix or mitigate the problems as soon as they can by new firmware update. BTW I have been a loycal Wyze customer for 1.5 year and I have >10 Wyze cameras at home and a bunch of other products too!
I really appreciate your feedback on the new vacuum. I too was one of the lucky ones who received my vacuum last week. I haven’t experienced some of your issues - for example the robot connects with the charger perfectly each and every time (its been used about 10 times now) but I will agree that height sensing would be valuable for furniture.
The area that I agree with you most strongly about is the lack of room management at this time. My house has 4 rooms on the ground floor and 4 plus a hallway on the 2nd floor. Yet after mapping the 1st floor it only labeled it as 2 rooms which makes scheduling specific rooms impossible right now. Also with the apparent lack of multiple floor plans, the second floor is out of the question right now. I am sure that Wyze will correct these issues with future updates, just hoping it will be sooner than later.
I taped a couple of dead Wyze contact sensors on the back of the dock, and that helped immensely on the docking issue. The problem is (as best as I can tell) is that the doc is sitting at a slight angle because the carpet against the wall is lower than the rest of the carpet. Putting something on the back of it makes it more level. But hopefully this will be addressed in a future firmware release.
I had connection problems the first day, but it’s been fine ever since.
Hopefully map editing is coming soon. It’s treating my whole house as one big room, And it’s clearly not. So this would be a nice feature to have.
Agree totally on the light issue. I have one in my bedroom too, and I had to move it to another wall so that it wasn’t causing me sleep issues.
A couple more issues to add to the list after a few days of use:
It has been too aggressive trying to drive on the flat metal feet of my desks, and got stuck there a few times.
There seems to be some software bug related to scheduled cleaning. I set up a schedule to clean only some of the rooms at noon, but today it was started to clean the whole floor.
I just found maybe another big issue with the robot vacuum:
When doing the initial map scanning, if you have some movable furniture (e.g., a chair) or other stuff on the floor, the robot vacuum will record it as a permanent obstacle into the map. Meaning that even you move them away to other location later, the robot will still not try to clean the area that was occupied by it during the scanning. Basically the robot will always try to calculate the cleaning path based on the very first map recorded. So you will need to make sure the floor is as open as possible with all the movable stuff removed! Otherwise some of the area will never be cleaned!
The weird thing is that the robot does try to rescan everything in every new cleaning run. I can clearly see that the map was updated with the new scanning every time. But still the cleaning routes are still calculated only based on the FIRST map. It seems that there is a hidden first map information store somewhere.
This is quite a big issue to me. Wyze, if you see this, please help to fix it as soon as possible. Thanks!
I haven’t really seen this happening. I have 2 chairs in my bedroom, and I wanted to get the carpet underneath them cleaned, I moved them out of the way, and those areas got cleaned. I have now moved them back, and it’s picking them back up in their original location and working around them, per usual. And the area I had temporarily moved them to is now being cleaned again. Even things I have placed against walls that get moved around, it is taking those changes into account each time I run it.
So, I’m just not seeing it do what you’re saying.
I think it depends how the robot has recognized the obstacle, It seems that If it recognized my stuff on the floor as a piece of wall it will be stay there forever.
I’d really hope not. I would consider that a serious design flaw. Or a defective robot vacuum. But thankfully, I’ve not seen that happen with my 2 units.
After a week of use, I would like to summarize the problems I have found so far related to clean planning and routing.
It seems that if some movable objects/obstacle were recognized as wall during the initial scan, It will be treated as always being there at the original place even they are removed or moved away later. Some examples below:
– a door that can be opened at different angles; The robot will always do the cleaning based on the original door angle, even it has been change later.
– A closet door that is closed during scan. The robot will never try to go into the closet to clean it even the door is wide open.
– On-the-floor boxes. Even they are moved away later, the robot will still bypass the area where the item originally sit in.
The robot really has problem finding the route to the rooms that it has to go around a long route to get to it. For example if the room to be cleaned is right behind a wall and the robot has to go around to get to it. It would just wander around the room where the dock is, get completely lost, and get back to the dock a few minutes later without any cleaning done.
When navigating to a specific room that it will need to go around to get to for area cleaning, the robot seems to ignore all the virtual walls and real walls. It seems that it will always try to do a straight route and will keep bumping into wall until it finally get to a place it can do a straight route to the destined room. This problem actually may be related to the previous problem, but just lighter symptom because in this case it can still get to the room eventually.
