yeedi vac 2 pro Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Mop 3000Pa, 2 in 1

 

TLDR : great hardware but the software needs work

I spent a week of trying to get this robot vacuum to understand the map of my house.

I call mine RT which is short for R-tard because it regularly got stuck trying to go through a door that wasn’t there. Even though it has a full map, it sometimes has a little trouble when it gets stuck. A loop counter trap to make sure it does something different if it’s tried 10 times to go somewhere and it hasn’t been able to would be helpful.

It can go to a particular room that you tell it to easily but getting back, it regularly gets lost even though it has a lot of battery left and just a couple more minutes of doing what it was doing would result in it finding the station. I think it needs a bit more updating in the firmware for how to find it’s way back. An elegant solution would be to have a remote control page on the app so that you could drive it back to the station and it will remember the route it took, in fact, you could do that in the beginning to save trouble. Just drive it around the whole flooring to each room and the map is created. All it really needs is to know where each rooms doorway is and then it could discover the layout of the room on its own.

It uses a camera onboard the device to recognise the walls and uses them to build the map of your house, It’s not so great if there is bright sunshine outside or if the room is dark so be prepared to close the curtains and switch the lights on while it maps.

At first it got all but one room and it wouldn’t go back into the final room no matter how many times I tried. I saw on the support pages that it is a good idea to put it in the middle of the house so it doesn’t have to go too far to the extreme end of the house. I did that and it was able to map all the rooms.

It can only store 3 maps in its memory, I thought a good way was to make a separate floor map for each room but you have to replace the third one with the new map. You can merge sections of the room, but it would be helpful to merge different floors into one floor using the doorways of each room to connect.

The place where the station was able to discover all the rooms was a bit inconvenient for me to walk past with my walker so I had to make a new map but it turns out that if you move the station a little bit, it will update the location of it in its current map.

It needs to be on auto to discover new areas to vacuum and it will give you a prompt to update the map if it does. It only does this when there’s new walls to add to the map, new areas to vacuum in an existing room will just be absorbed into the new map without a prompt.

If it gets lost and you have to take it to the station or you pause it and put it back manually, it will lose all memory of where it discovered, if it gets lost or before it goes back to try and find the station it should transfer the map of what it had discovered before it does so it can be updated in the app

Now that it has a full map of my house and is able to talk to my Alexa, I can say “Alexa ask robot yeedi to vacuum the master bedroom” etc. depending on the labels, you give each room in the map app. It does this very well and can get to the room easily based on the map.

It uses a unique scrubbing motion when in mopping mode, which does a really good job of cleaning the floor, even with marks on it, just like being on your hands and knees and scrubbing the floor effect.

Now I don’t have to deal with the frustration of it losing the memory of the extra room that I wanted it to discover because it got lost on the way back it is a very useful piece of kit for my house and does a great job of cleaning both vacuuming and mopping.

It needs to be given a little more time to find the station if it gets lost and the app needs a bit more work with regards to the map it makes but overall I am quite pleased with this device. It is better than my previous by a large amount.

It has a long battery life and can do my whole house (It’s a bungalow) on one charge with plenty to spare.

It can be a little bit frustrating at first while it discovers the rooms but once it has, it’s a joy to have.

Overall, I am very pleased with my purchase and I am sure the app will improve with a bit more development and feedback from users.

Great price for this level of detailed mapping, I hope it lasts

 

First impressions with this vacuum cleaner are good as it comes in well-designed, eco-friendly packaging together with a printed Quick Start guide and Instruction Manual, both of which are easy to read. This is reassuring as I had not heard of the Yeedi brand before and was unsure what to expect.

There is no assembly required — you just plug in the power cable into the rear of the recharging station and place the Yeedi on the contacts. The station has a useful cable tidy system at the back, which prevents excessive cable cluttering the floor. The recharging station has to be installed in a position than 0.5 m from side walls, with more than 1.5 m in front to allow clear access so the Yeedi can return to base easily.

I then attached the edge brush, switched on the power and downloaded the accompanying app by scanning the bar code on the vac. The Yeedi spoke to me in clear English, which simplified the next stages of registering the vac, connecting it our home WiFi network and updating the firmware from v1.5.4 to v1.6.9.

Before starting the Yeedi on its first mission to map and clean, the app recommended that I lift obstacles from the floor and ensure that the room was well lit as only Basic Obstacle avoidance is supported during mapping. I removed shoes and other easily liftable objects on the floor but left chairs in place.

I then pressed start and the Yeedi vac explored all areas of our dining room, mapping and vacuuming as it went. The noise was lower pitched and at 69 dB was less noisy than our usual Shark upright vacuum cleaner. My Bang and Olufsen H95 noise-cancelling headphones were able to completely eliminate its noise, making it easy to listen to quiet classical music whilst sitting near to the Yeedi. Our Labrador was interested in the vacuum cleaner but was not bothered by its noise or its movement and was content to let it do its job.

Having mapped the Dining Room, it then moved onto the hall, kitchen and living rooms. Fortunately, our house is open plan on the ground floor which made it easy to go from one room to another. It is just the right height to get under our L-shaped sofa, which is impossible to reach with a standard vacuum cleaner. We left our dining and breakfast room chairs in place. It had to do few complex manoeuvres to get between the legs but did not get stuck and was able to work out how to get past the obstructions by rotating and moving back and forwards.

It took 1 hour and 20 minutes to build a map and complete its first clean, which measured 48 square meters. Once it was finished, it found its way back to the charging station and parked up for the night.

We were really impressed by the quality of its vacuuming, even on the default settings with normal power and once-only vacuuming. It also did a good job of cleaning the mat in our hall, which is usually quite difficult to clean. My wife is very house proud and was delighted that it had done such a good job. It is particularly good at picking up dog hair, which is ideal when you have a Labrador in the house. The dust bin has sufficient capacity to collect dust and pet hair for an entire ground floor vacuuming session before needing to be emptied. This is easy as you just press the red button on the side of the bin whilst holding it over a waste bin. It even comes with a special brush and tool to cut away any long hairs that are caught on the roller or edging brush.

Our subsequent vacuums have been even easier. We just ensure that the floor space is relatively uncluttered, press the “start” button on the app and leave it to its own devices.

The Yeedi vac has a high efficiency filter which should be useful for allergy sufferers, which will need to be cleaned each week and replaced every 3 to 6 months, as will the edge brush whilst the main brush should be replaced every 6 to 12 months. These parts of available from the Yeedi store on Amazon, with a pack of 1 roller brushes, 2 edge brushes and 3 filters available for 25, which will last for a year.

The Yeedi is energy efficient, with a total annual energy consumption of 31 kWh if used twice per week and kept connected to WiFi. This compares favourably with mains powered vacuum cleaner – 2 hours of vacuuming per week with an 890 W Miele Cat and Dog vacuum cleaner would consume 92 kWh. From October, electricity rises to 52 p per kWh, which makes another great argument getting the Yeedi!

I was really impressed by the quality of this robotic vacuum cleaner and have no hesitation in recommending it.