I thought the good folks at Wyze were software experts as opposed to actually developing hardware. If so, can they not figure out an algorithm for the battery usage? If it takes 92% of the battery to do 50% of the square footage (and it knows the exact square footage of your house and each mapped room), why does it then only charge to 60%? Wouldn’t it make sense to tailor the amount of charge to the area already cleaned? Shouldn’t it start in the room furthest from the charging station to always insure it can return to home with minimal charge left? These are not difficult problems and should be able to be overcome in an afternoon of writing some very simple code, integrating it into the app and sending down a quick update.
I like the product but expected more from a group of software experts when it comes to the actual management of the device.
I dont understand what you are saying. My vac runs down so low that very occasionally it will have to go charge and then return to finish. But I have my rooms all broken out to allow an hour of cleaning roughly and the vacuum completes the areas and returns to charge without issue, sometimes the battery is very low but never completely out. I dont just let my vacuum do a whole house clean as it would never do it in one shot. Is that what you are talking about? In a nutshell I clean 2, 3 rooms at a time… several times a week. My carpets have never been cleaner.
I live in a relatively small house - the area being cleaned is about 1100SF (our of 1640 total) and is divided into 7 rooms. I want a whole house cleaning twice at week at 1:00AM. The vacuum should be smart enough to know that after it has done 550SF and is now down to 8% charge (the default recharge %) that it still has another 550 feet to go and obviously needing another 92% of a charge to complete plus the 8% to return to home, so 100% on the recharge. Then it could finish in two passes. However, the default recharge level is 60%, no matter how much of the house remains to be done and so rather than one more pass, it now must return for a second time to the charge station and recharge to 60%, go finish and then return home for the recharge to 100%.
It’s ridiculous programming when (a) the vac knows your total square footage since it mapped it to begin with), (b) it knows exactly how much it has done (c) how much remains and (d) should be more than capable of calculating how much charge it will take to complete the tasks. It should also know to start in the furthest room and works its way back towards the charging station. These are not complicated tasks, I could write the code in an afternoon if I was still into that sort of activity.
I’m glad that dividing up your house and doing it room by room works for you, I prefer a whole house cleaning. My Neato D4, with five year old technology, has a 5000mah batter and can easily do the whole house, Unfortunately, it doesn’t navigate as well as the Wyze and so it’s in semi-retirement until I decide whether to keep the Wyze or not.
And yes, even according to Consumer Reports, your carpets have been much cleaner if you used a conventional vac, they even recommend doing that every couple of weeks because no robot vac they’ve tested picks up all the debris that a conventional vacuum will (on carpet). The cleaning performance of the Wyze, for a robot vacuum, is good to very good and our house is 90% tile which it does a really good job on but the one room which is still carpet is the master bedroom and it does only a fair job on that, same as my Neato.
Hope that clarifies my issues with what should be a very high tech product without all these arbitrary default settings.