Meyoung robot vacuum cleaner

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good robot vacuum cleaner

I was sent this robot vacuum cleaner without charge for review.  I like it, although it does have some limitations.

The cleaner itself is a neat thing about 35cm (14") in diameter which looks smart - and rather cute in operation.  It seems solidly made and durable; I will edit this review if I experience any reliability problems but I'm not really expecting any.  It is nicely boxed and comes with a good remote control (you will need to supply two of your own AAA batteries) and a disappointing instruction manual.  It's adequate but for a significant purchase like this I'd expect something more thorough and in better English.  Nevertheless, I managed OK.

In use the cleaner is good.  It works fine on hard floors and shortish carpets - ours are all standard cut carpets and it copes well with them.  It does a decent job of cleaning; it makes random movements and passes across the floor, often going over the same place several times but it does get everywhere in the end.  (You can see it in action in the video with this review.)  The cleaner has two rotating brushes which gather dust and dirt toward the main roller-brush, which acts like a normal vacuum cleaner.  The dust tray is smallish but adequate for a decent-sized room and easy to empty, and the whole thing is pretty simple to operate.

It's possible to programme it to clean automatically at a set time each day (when you're out at work, for example), and it will find its way back to the docking station when the battery is low.  You can also press a button on the remote to send it home, where it will dock and charge automatically, as long as the dock is firmly fixed to the wall.

It is best suited to hard floors, I think.  The cleaning is decent, but it's not a substitute for a good vacuum cleaner on carpet.  It gets the bits up well and leaves things looking nice, but it doesn't really get the dust and grime from the depths of the carpet – our Dyson got a lot more muck out after I'd used this cleaner.  It also leaves a fair amount of stuff along the edges where the main rotating brush can't reach, so I'd say it was more for keeping things looking OK between your real vacuums.  The same goes for the mopping function, so I'm afraid this won't mean that you never have to clean a floor or carpet again.

A couple of other problems emerged:

- We have old, uneven floorboards in our Victorian building and the cleaner did get stuck on some of the more pronounced ridges.

- Long hair can be a problem because it wraps itself around the roller-brush and causes the machine to stop.  It tells you what's wrong with an error message and you can cut the hair off, but if you're leaving it on automatic, it might be an annoyance.

Overall, this is a good unit for low-effort maintenance between proper cleans.  It won't provide a complete cleaning solution but it will keep your place reasonably dust- and bit-free while you do something else and I can recommend it.