Neato Robotics Botvac D7 Connected Robot Vacuum - Laser Navigation, Wi-Fi Connectivity, Ideal for Corners, Pet Hair, Carpets & Hard Floors

Let me start by saying that dark wood floors and 2 small light-colored small dogs is a setup for disappointment. This wasn't a top priority when looking for a different home, and after the fact I was frequently annoyed by the nearly daily routine of using a floor duster to keep the dog dander and hair in check.For the carpeted areas we had already upgraded our push vacuum to a dual-motor hepa-filtered beast that is fantastic.<fast forward a bit...>This year we welcomed our daughter and her husky back into our home for a 12 month temporary stay. Husky? Yep! If there's a loud noise that causes the dog to stress you can practically see the fur leap from her body. Now, the Neato D7 allowed me to make peace with the husky and the other dogs.We have 2 levels, each with over 1,500 sq. ft., and mapping them out took several attempts. Basically the robot has to bounce around every accessible area of the floor map and record every portion of your floor. Pick things up, slide chairs up to the table, pick up toys, etc. Close doors on rooms that you don't plan to have regularly cleaned by Neato. You can still elect to have Neato clean an un-mapped room. It's just that it will be less efficient and it can't be scheduled.If you have furniture with legs (beds, dressers, etc) with enough clearance for Neato to get under, it will! Some of our beds have 4 outside legs with middle leg(s) to make 5-6 legs in total. Neato simply bounces around learning where those are. So, where you might see a bed in a room, Neato simply sees 5-6 small obstacles to navigate using it's lasers and front bumper/sensor.Because of child gates we didn't have to worry about Neato finding its own personal edge of the earth. But, be careful! I can imagine that a tumble down the stairs is going to be fatal, and you're not going to like what Neato does when it crashes into a wall.With the map completed, you can now create rectangular zones. The zones are used in creating a cleaning schedule, or for manual cleaning. You can only use one zone in a schedule. That's like saying, Neato clean the kitchen floor, waiting for it to return to base where it will get its next schedule command and then saying, Neato clean the dining room. To do the entire first floor on a schedule you need to create scheduling blocks. In my case I schedule things about 30 minutes apart to make sure that Neato has enough time to complete a zone and return to base. I don't have a room that takes more than 15 minutes. So, unless Neato gets stuck, a whole floor would complete in under 4 hours.Remember that dual-motor hepa-filtered beast I mentioned earlier? We used it to vacuum everything before the initial run with Neato. I was both impressed and disgusted with what I found in the initial Neato mapping run. I filled Neato's debris canister multiple times with dander and dog hair. We could have gained a chihuahua!Plus, there were multiple times where Neato had to have the roller cleaned. I'm still not sure if that warning is a result of hours of use or a resistance sensor on the roller that tells you there is too much long hair wrapped around the brush. But, not too worry! Neato comes with handy brush-roller cleaning tool. Every vacuum should come with one of these. It takes just a couple of minutes to clear up the roller. Put Neato back to where it left off, or within a couple of feet, and it generally reorients itself and continues on path.I prefer to use the app to manually clean zones. That way, I can make sure that things are picked up, chairs pushed up to tables, etc. and send Neato on its way. A larger room, say 15x17, still completes in under 15 minutes. Since I work from home, it's fairly easy to combine an out-of-the-office trip for snack, laundry, etc with a bin-empty on Neato or a roller cleaning. Then it's ready for the next command.Have we found vacuum utopia? Nah. We still have to power through the carpets with the dual-motor beast on occasion. But, I don't feel at all guilty about letting this go to every couple of weeks.The dark wood floors and pet hair. We're at least 95% improved. Neato reaches the corners very well. The roller combined with the crumb brush and the suction make a great combination. I hadn't even considered how handy this would be for a quick cleanup after the granddaughter has a snack. She's 9-months old and learning. So, with maybe 50% hitting the high chair and floor in the form of small crumbs, Neato makes quick work of this. Neato even finishes the cleanup in that zone (dining room) quick enough that I'm usually still cleaning the baby, the tray, and changing an outfit and diaper.This last week, my wife experimented with changing one of the rectangular zones to cover multiple rooms. She wanted to see if Neato would simply navigate doors and walls along the way to completing the multi-room zone. It was sort of mixed results with multiple times that Neato became "stuck". "Stuck" to Neato simply means that it's lost it's way or found an obstacle that it has failed to navigate. For us that's usually a 4-legged chair where Neato fits under the chair, but maybe not the chair and the table base. Or, a chair that is too close to another chair and not so close that Neato was able to move forward between the chairs and then became confused on turning to get out of there.**Update June 2021 after owning this for about 1 year.First of all, our dogs are still with us. At 17 and 14 years old, that's kind of impressive. The [visiting] Husky has returned home on a permanent basis. I think I heard Neato whisper, "WHEW!"Neato is generally doing pretty well. We've added a basement base station to make it a bit easier to handle both levels of the house.The roller and the side brush have been replaced twice. So, Neato is on the third set.It had a couple of issues:1. Probably the strangest one was seeing Neato break down into what looked like a short-loop cha cha dance. Three quick lurches forward and backward without going anywhere. I never found a reason for this happening. I had to give it a soft reboot to get it to take any commands.2. It seemed to get confused about the map, and never re-oriented. So, we had to recreate the maps on both levels.But, it's been just fine for several months with no issues.If I could make a change to future models, I'd love to have a larger dust bin.

I've waited a few weeks before writing this. The most important thing I have to say is my wife and I are so completely 100% happy that we bought our new Rosie the robot (the app makes you give your robot a name..so for us it's Rosie).We have 2 cats, and I really don't want to be that "cat couple" with the house that smells like a catbox. When we redid the floors in our kitchen/guest bath we very quickly realized that walking in bare feet on hard floors with cat litter sprinkled all about was just not going to work. It felt gross and picking out cat litter from between your toes is something that nobody wants to do again after then do it once.So research time came. I spent hours and hours looking at reviews, youtube videos, downloading and trying out the apps, comparing price/features/performance you name it. iRobot was a very close competitor but this one won me over because:1 - largest dustbin size. I plan to run this thing a lot and if I have to empty the tiny bin halfway through then I might as well do the vacuuming myself.2 - Design. The way I see it, vacuum cleaners have evolved over 100 years. And every one of them has a square front end with a large roller to get in there and aggressively sweep up the floor. The round design of all the other ones may help it navigate and look cool, but I want my robot to be a vacuum first and foremost and a robot second. So I like the traditional form follows function shape of the D with a large roller.3 - Performance. All the reviews I found say that it's' a good sucker upper.4 - Features. I really like that this robot has zones, because I really need this thing to focus it's efforts on my catbox area. My cats poop and pee several times a day so I need the robot to do it too. Being able to create a catbox zone put me over the top I'm going to have it clean several times/day and I don't ever want to have cat litter between my toes again and the D7 lets me designate a zone for our box and Rosie hits it several times a day.5 - Company. I hope the company making this thing is going to be around in a few years. I can't afford to buy a new robot every year so for us, this is a huge purchase and I need a company that stands behind it. There was one thing I read that told me that perhaps Neato was in this for the long haul: They apparently started with the D3, D4, D5 and then later came out with an app in their top models that gives the user NOGO lines so the robot avoids bad areas. The that caught my eye, was when they introduced this feature, they not only put it on their top line model, but they also retroactively upgraded the lower D3, D4 etc. models to have it too. Many companies would have taken an approach and charged customers for this or not let old customers have it. But they didn't do that, they pushed out a firmware update or whatever and the older models now have it too. That one thing really stood out to me as a sign the company is looking at the long term and cares about it's customers...so right or wrong that won me over.OK, so that was then...we bought it...we own it. How has it been doing you ask. Well I'll tell you.The first experience of getting Rosie to run it's first full pass and create her little memory map took several tries. I simplified our house furniture a bit, picked up the floor and gave her the room I thought she needed, But, alas, I'm not a robot so Rosie did get stuck a few times in areas that surprised me. As I learned how this robot navigates, I was surprised and she easily handled things that I thought were a big challenge and then got stuck on some of the simpler areas. In one case, she maneuvered all around our house, made it into a back corner that I never thought she'd hit and she did it fine, but then for some strange reason got completely lost and couldn't figure out how to drive back home.To her credit, I was asking her to take a very long twisted path going around the couch, around the coffee table and behind the chair and she actually sailed straight UNDER the chair. Wow, I wasn't expecting her to go under, but she did and did it with style. But, with patience, I worked out where her trouble areas were and I used the magnetic strip to avoid them and a few cleverly placed cardboard pieces to block her and she managed to map out the house on a single run. Whew! OK, yes, it took several hours, but hey, I was willing to invest the time to get this thing dialled in.One thing that surprised (shocked) my wife and I both...was how much dirt this thing found. Holy cow, I know we don't have a show house, but wow, clearly we need to vacuum more often. Welcome to the family Rosie. It took at least 5 full passes before Rosie came back with a less than packed to the gills dustbin. But that's great, boy I'm glad I didn't get the smaller robot, clearly we need it. Now Rosie is filling it's bin about 1/3 - 1/2 on a single full pass and we simply empty it in the morning when I get my morning coffee.I did run into a glitch. the firmware on this robot I think is still a bit of a work in progress. I think that's OK, but just know that it's nor perfect. I discovered that if you have a lot of zones and nogo lines (I went crazy on 5 zones, when I really only needed 2) and I laid out nogo lines in every danger area. Probably about 20 small lines everywhere. After several support tickets and emails to their tech support later, we find out that the more zones+lines you have, you start cutting into the robot memory somehow and if you plan to create a complex schedule. You can not have (for instance) 10 scheduled appointments going back to that catbox area (zone) every day of the week. There is clearly limited memory space. I need my robot to clean multiple times, every day of the week so that means I had to reduce the nunber of zones and nogo lines.OK, learning curve. I think this is something they can work on and the guys were very responsive when I sent emails and requests. I have a chain of at least 20 emails back and forth. Try this...what happens when you do that, etc. etc. SO I'm very happy with the support even though there is still a bit of an issue. It's not 100% resolved, but they did help me find a work around and that's really not a bad thing at all.Also our Rosie could do a little bit better navigating herself out of very tight spaces. Specifically we have a tight spot between toilet and tub. Rosie just squeezes in and sometimes can't quite get back out and yells for help. If only she would just throw herself into reverse and back up she'd be good, but she keeps trying to run around and jams herself in tight. Area to work on, but that's ok, I have no doubt the team is probably always refining the smart algorithm. overall the navigation is very surprisingly smart and it's pretty fun watching her deal with obstacles!Now finally the bottom line. We got Rosie for the catbox. She is not disappointing in that respect. I lvoe waking into my kitchen and having spotless floor with no cat litter. Whew! But as a bonus, I have Rosie doing a full pass around the house every morning at 4AM and oh mu gosh, our carpets feel just fantastic. We have medium pile carpet in our house, and you can really feel the whole carpet everywhere is just "fluffy" and "soft" It's a real thing...and last week, I had company come over and they said the exact same thing, so I know it's not just me being biased. Also when you look down and see the vacuum patterns in the rug from Rosie, you just feel like the whole house is so much cleaner...all I can say is wow, it has really made a huge difference and my wife has told me that Rosie is now a permanent part of the family.Weekend before last, my wife vacuumed the stairs (the one spot Rosie can't hit) so we decided to give Rosie and my wife a test. See who can get more dirt, Rosie, or wife and her fancy expensive Shark Vacuum. I have to report, that Rosie actually did a better job on the overall carpet than the shark did. The shark canister had almost exactly the same amount of dirt, but when Rosie went back after the Shark, Rosie still came up with about a cup of dirt that the Shark didn't get. However, Rosie did it with a single push of a button and she got every square inch of the house. The shark had to be done the sweat and labor method.So, that's my review. I hope it helps you all decide. I know I rambled on a bit here and I probably repeated myself more than a few times. I just wanted to let others know my experience and a few of the pros/cons. Overall we are really happy. I think we will probably get another one for the upstairs. We currently take Rosie upstairs and push the manual button up there. We reserve downstairs for her permanent home because it needs the nogo lines and to do the catbox zones 5 times/day. But I probably would just get a standard D3 unit for upstairs. The heart of the unit unit (the vacuum) is very good, and the design, a "D" shape I now believe even more than ever is the perfect compromise between silly round with a 4 inch square hole in the bottom (that style just doesn't inspire me with confidence) and a big old school Kirby or Hoover vacuum cleaner.No, I was not compensated in any way for this review. I just wanted to do my bit and share because I rely heavily on reviews, when I make big purchases so this is my contribution. Now I'm going to hit the submit button and pray that this web browser doesn't gobble it up and throw an error message at me because I am not going to retype this thing! LOL Here goes...1...2...

Easy to set up and a champ at cleaning. This D7 is on my 5ghz wifi, with the older D3 still in daily service working great as always on my 2.4ghz wifi.They share almost all parts that are easy to clean or change out when needed. Very happy with the ability to clean and the fact that the air filters available for these bots are of such high quality as I deal with lung issues. And for those wondering, yes the tiny little side brush does help in most situations on the tile and wooden floors that we have. When I first bought the D3 Pro when on sale a couple of years ago, I thought great deal and that the side brush was not a deal breaker. When I bought the D7 some weeks ago as I write this, my thoughts and apprehension about having the added brush with the known tendency to have belt issues after prolonged use were alleviated after numerous weekly or so visits with a broom to get stuff out of corners etc. This is less frequent now in areas where the D7 is let loose. Yes, Neato is now starting to sell the newer updated D8, D9 and D10 models, but aside from a newer phone application that promises an even easier setup, the basis goodness of the Neato design remains.Our D7 and D3 continue to excel at doing what they were originally purchased to do, clean the floors and improve the indoor air quality by reducing the amount of dust that was left over by manual vacuuming and sweeping. Even in a pet free home, we all shed skin cells and human hair, with crumbs from toast or whatever food ending up on the floor.These machines just go and get it clean. There is only one small carpet mat at an outside door here that they have both done a great job of cleaning and fluffing up some how. Because all the floors are hard I doubt that the little drive belt will take an undue amount of punishment in our home. Too much carpet can be bad if you have breathing issues.Neato are known though for the great suction and ability to groom your carpets leaving nice lines, in the case of the D7 I'd welcome it into your home, but if you have carpet everywhere I would likely just pop the little sidebars off, and only use it in your kitchen where you are likely to set it up as a separate zone.Just ordered a replacement battery for the D3 today which will extend the cleaning time to match the D7 I understand. While my talk of the side brush was largely influenced by other reviewers, my personal experience with the D3 Pro influenced me to buy the D7 as an addition bot that was needed. After who knows how many years down the road an actual replacement will be needed I don't doubt I would go for another Neato.

Excelente producto, hace una muy buena limpieza y aprende rápido a moverse dentro de la casa

Fantastic robot vacuum, gets round the house well, with the square face running well along the edges. The no go zoning works great as well for keeping it out of trouble spots.

Si tienes que tomarte tu tiempo en entender cómo programarla sobre todo el mapeo y para delimitar las áreas que quieres que no pase . y si es muy alta no cabe debajo de mi cama ni en los gabinetes de la cocina y justo es dnd se acumula más comida y tengo que como quiera pasar la escoba .... pero lo que si alcanza a pasar limpia súper súper súper bien si notas la diferencia cuando estas descalzo.

I've had a neato XV21 for the last 7 years. I was satisfied with it but it was always struggling with cat litter and didn't have a side brush.So I got a deebot to use in alternance with the XV21 so it can clean close to the walls with the side brushes. The thing doesn't avoid anything. It rams into everything in its path but is somewhat quiet. Doesn't do well with cat litter. The brushes spin so fast it scatters it. So while I still had intact baseboards I bought the D7.Just like my XV21, it doesn't ram everything in it's path. It's a tad noisy but hey, it's a vacuum!The app works great. Love the fact that you can set it to clean only part of the house (like going around the litter box every day) and it does great at sucking up the scattered litter (eco or turbo mode,doesn't matter, it's getting in the bin). Cat hair aren't a problem.With the XV21 I had to empty the bin every 2 runs because of all the cat hairs but with the D7, once every 3-4 runs.Doesn't clog as easily as the XV21 as the hole in the bin is a tad bigger.Doesn't require any magnetic strip but will still avoid them.The entire setup was pretty easy.Had to run the floor plan thing twice because the first time it didn't do the entire house but as been flawless since.