Runaround

Update: Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories and the rest of the books in eSpec Books’ 10th-anniversary Kickstarter have met their minimum funding goal, but there’s still nearly a month to contribute and get all sorts of bonuses and stretch-goal goodies!

And now, on with the post…

I decided last Friday morning to let my new robot vacuum run in pure Auto mode until it ran down and returned to the charging base, to see whether I could trust it to run unsupervised. I quickly figured out that I can’t. Rather than starting with the main room like it did the first few times, it made an immediate right turn out of the room and spent nearly half an hour vacuuming just my kitchenette and bedroom (I had the bathroom door closed to simplify things a bit). Every time it came near the edge of the living room rug, it turned back. It did manage to get onto the carpet once, but promptly went back out after a few moments.

So eventually I got tired of waiting for it to get lucky and manually drove it into the living room, then kept sentry and blocked its path with my feet when it tried to leave the carpet again. After 20-some minutes of that, I decided to let it go where it wanted (including the bathroom) so I could see what it would do when its charge ran down. It’s supposed to return automatically to the charging base when it hits 10%, but I didn’t remember what the percentage was, so I may have jumped the gun and hit “Recharge” while it was at 11%.) Anyway, it was in my bedroom at the time and just seemed to get lost under the bed rather than heading for the charger. I figured that might be because I interrupted its auto mode and restarted it away from the charging base. The instructions say to start it from the base or it won’t remember its way back.

Anyway, I gave up, just turned it off, and carried it back to the living room. After cleaning out the very full dust compartment (at least it was effective at that), I decided to turn it upside down and check the bits on the bottom. It’s a good thing I did, since the rotating brushes had a lot of my shed long hairs tangled around them. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with that anymore with this new vacuum, but at least it’s not as bad as it was with the old vacuum’s brush. And the rotating brushes are detachable, making them easier to clear.

I was worried at first because the app showed the battery charge draining really quickly, down to 75% in less than 3 minutes. But the draining slowed after that and it took about an hour to get down to 20%, at which point it dropped quickly again. Batteries are weird.

So anyway, surprised by how much hair the vacuum was still picking up after multiple cleanings, I decided to have a go with my hand-operated Swiffer thingy that you push across the carpet to pick up hair and debris on an adhesive strip. I still got a lot of hair, attesting to how inadequately powerful my old vacuum was and how inadequately often I’ve used it. But I tend to operate by Newton’s First Law — when I’m at rest, it’s hard to get me started, but when I do get my mind set on pursuing something, I can’t stop myself. So I went to even greater extremes — I got out my old hairbrush and ran it over the whole carpet in both rooms (Saturday night and Sunday morning, since it’s very tiring), and there was still a startling amount of hair and tiny specks of debris buried deep between the fibers.

Ironic — I got this vacuum to make it easier to keep the floors clean, and I ended up working harder at it than I ever have. Though hopefully it will be easier from now on.

Finally, I did another hour-long robo-vacuum session Sunday morning to clean up the debris I dredged up with the hairbrush, and it came out with relatively little hair in the receptacle and hardly any caught on the brushes, so hopefully I’ve finally gotten most of it. I’ll just have to use the robot more regularly to keep the carpets reasonably clean. (And it’s solidified my determination that if and when I move to a new place, it had better have hardwood floors. Shag carpets are nasty.)

This time, I was determined to let the robot run on full auto until its charge ran down, no manual intervention. Yet again it immediately turned right into the hall and refused to cross back onto the living room carpet for more than half an hour. Eventually I gave up and pushed it back onto the carpet with my foot, but I think that confused it, since it got stuck under my table for a while until I moved the chair blocking the front.

I suspect the reason for this has to do with the metal strip along the edge of the carpet reflecting the robot’s infrared eye beams and telling it there’s an obstacle or a dropoff it needs to avoid. Except it doesn’t have that problem with the edge of the bedroom carpet. I think it’s because it usually turns right to enter the bedroom while it comes at the living room head-on, so the reflection is more direct. The fact that the metal strip on the living room carpet is a bit more steeply angled might also contribute.

I looked around for my black tape to put over the edge strip, but I think it’s in the car. So I just scribbled on the edge strip with a black Sharpie… and it seemed to work. The robot crossed the threshold the first time, then avoided it a second time, perhaps because it was pointed at a less Sharpied part. So I marked up the strip more thoroughly and it crossed over again, but it did so at a diagonal, so I can’t be sure the marker was the reason. I also don’t know how long it’ll last. It didn’t rub off with a dry paper towel, but it did rub off some with a wet one.

So anyway, when I let the vacuum run down, it did indeed switch into charge mode as soon as it hit 10%. But it still had no memory of where to go. It had just turned into the bedroom again at that point, and instead of reversing course and heading back toward the charger, it just blindly groped around the edges of the room until it made its way back out, then tried to get into the kitchen until I took mercy and nudged it toward the living room. It was kind of painful to watch. I’m not sure if it’s designed to work that way, or if putting the charger underneath a metal bookcase is having a Faraday-cage effect on its homing signal. Unfortunately, there’s really no better place to put it.

Anyway, the conclusion is that I can’t depend on the robot to run completely unsupervised; at least occasional manual intervention is required. But at least I can trust it to run mostly on its own while I do other things, so I decided to schedule an automatic vacuuming every Sunday midmorning.

Meanwhile, I tried using my old vacuum in handheld mode to clean under the couch cushions, but the battery had drained completely after just a few days. I let it charge all day, but I was concerned at how hot the transformer got and didn’t want to leave it plugged in overnight, so I waited until the next day to finish charging it. Even fully charged, though, it had essentially no effect on the crumbs under the cushions. That’s probably why the carpets were such a mess — even when I did vacuum, it just didn’t do much good. So I concluded the old vacuum was a lost cause. It’s back in my closet now, but at some point I’ll take it to a recycling center.

Yesterday, I had an appointment to get new glasses, so afterward I went to the nearby superstore to get a new suitcase for the upcoming Shore Leave Convention. While I was there, since I’m on a cleaning kick, I decided to get a microfiber duster (which cost no more than a single box of disposable refills for the Swiffer duster I’ve been using, so it’s definitely a more economical choice) and a cordless mini-vacuum for spots the robot can’t reach, under the couch cushions, etc. The mini-vac is nicely compact and effective, except the thingy that’s supposed to hold the brush attachment in place on the crevice tool is too recessed and doesn’t lock it in well enough. Last night, I used it to vacuum my computer keyboard, and the brush attachment seems specifically designed for that, since it was just the right size to go over one row of keys. This morning, I did a long-overdue vacuuming of my car, and it did pretty well at that.

Incidentally, since the last time I got new glasses was before the pandemic, I was impressed by all the new eye-exam gadgetry and how it streamlined the process — like not needing eye drops to dilate my pupils anymore, so there was no waiting. I was wondering if they also had some nifty new technology that would let them complete the lenses in less than the traditional one hour. Instead, they told me they phased that out because the digital lens maker (or whatever) is too big to fit in the store, so they have to order it in and it’ll take a week to 10 days. This in a chain that, for as long as I’ve been going to them, has been defined by their “glasses ready in about an hour” promise. So progress giveth and progress taketh away.