4 min read

I bought a robot vacuum, here's why I'm not an asshole

As the title suggests, we recently bought a robot vacuum to help us out with, well the vacuuming and take some pressure off us, as new busy parents. But yes, I am fully aware that having a robot vacuum kind of makes me a bit of an asshole and I’m going to try convince you that’s not the case.

I’ll begin with the point that it frees up time from having to do the vacuuming and the pressure of not doing it which can mount upon you quite quickly especially when you’re dealing with a very young child and the demands of a full-time job.

It’s as simple as pushing a button. I can start a cleaning cycle by either pressing the start button on top of the device, using the app on my phone, integrating with Alexa so using a voice command or program a schedule so no input needed. Once a clean has been triggered it will fire up and begin manoeuvring around the space mapping the area as it goes. Ours does not save the mapped area which at first I was disappointed by, but now see it as a bonus because one it’s not saving that map and sending it to China (a common misconception with these things) and two, there’s no chance of it getting confused about the space if you move the furniture as it’s a fresh map each cycle.

Note: careful of light objects in its path because it will bulldoze right through them with the lusty vigour of a bitch in heat – it does not give a fuck. “Oh, your laptop is charging and the cable is in my path? Fuck you. Yeet.”

Autonomy is and will be increasingly so a great productivity unlock. What does that mean? Well by delegating tasks such as vacuuming to an autonomous machine you unlock that time and thus create value. I plan to dive deeper into automation in a future article.

In this case, if I price my time at £40 an hour and I typically spend 20 mins a week vacuuming, which is definitely more now that I have a bigger home, a baby and we’re in a lot more, but I’ll be conservative and keep it at 20 mins. With those numbers in mind this vacuum will effectively pay for itself in 19.5 weeks. That’s less than 6 months to pay for itself and over 6+ hours of vacuuming. 6 hours I’d rather spend doing something else like playing with my son.

Lastly, I’m not gonna lie, it’s fucking cute the way it zips around going from corner to corner, up and down doing straight lines bumping into everything. We’ve named ours BB-8 even though it looks nothing like BB-8, the name just fits.

So there you have it, that’s why I bought a robot vacuum. To help us out, to reclaim our time and to unlock value by offloading unpaid work to an autonomous system.

If you now find yourself considering the possibility of getting your own, let me tell you some of the caveats.

  • Your robot vacuum will not open doors however hard it tries to create it’s own opening so be sure to leave doors open to rooms you want cleaning
  • Your robot vacuum is likely to close the door on itself if your doors are easy to move and light like mine therefore locking itself in
  • Your robot vacuum will not climb the stairs so unless you jerry rig a grappling hook to it you’ll need to carry it up and down the stairs and do the actual vacuuming of the stairs yourself
  • Your robot vacuum, depending on model, will not empty its load without assistance so warm up those hands 😏

Here is a link to the one we have, by no means the best one but BB-8 serves well, if you’re interested in at least looking into one.