It was great, while it worked.

I’d seen friends have fun with their early Roombas, spending ages fettling them and keeping them running. I decided to leave robot vacuum cleaners until they got a bit smarter.

In April I took the plunge and bought a Neato Robotics D650. It seemed the best reviewed of the mid range ones (I paid £439.99 for it, though they are currently > £500, the prices seem very volatile).

It is smarter that the earlier robots (and also smarter than some of ones still on the market). It doesn’t just do a random walk and it does always know where it is and what shape the room is.

It uses a spinning laser to map the room, along with bumper sensors and drop sensors. It cleans very effectively, making deliberate parallel runs, dividing the room up into chunks, deftly navigating around things without bumping into them etc

It is great at picking dirt up, I can vacuum manually, then send it round the same room and it will still come back with plenty of new dust/fluff/grit in the bin. It has a side brush that is reasonably good at getting stuff out of wall/floor edges and its D shaped body makes it more effective when vacuuming along a straight edge (and it will run straight along the edge, as it knows where it is going).

It cleaning wasn’t perfect of course, it could never get right into a 90 degree corner.

Fettling wasn’t too bad, it was quick and easy to remove the brush and clean it.

The app is ok, it shows you a nice map of the room when it has finished cleaning. You can schedule stuff etc

Watching it navigate back to the charger from a couple of rooms away through various obstacles was very pleasing. I got a second charging unit for upstairs, cleaning the house was kind of fun.

It was great and I loved it.

Until about a month ago, when it started playing up. It started showing the “I’m stuck, pick me up and move me message”. Which normally means it has run over something that has tangled, or it has started pushing something around the room which has upset its inertial location stuff (as the wheels would have slipped, confusing it as to where it is).

In this case there was no obvious problem. Pressing start again fixed it.

Then it kept doing it. But pressing start again would just make it reverse to the left through 30 degrees and then stop again.

Restarting it would some times fix it. Until it wouldn’t.

The forums suggest maybe dodgy bumpy switch or the circuit that senses it. Some people suggest replacing the switch fixes it, others say it does not.

When I bought it, I was aware that support/parts in the the UK wasn’t great. And also, the design doesn’t lend itself to DIY fixing as well as the Roombas. But I hoped it wouldn’t break.

So, it was great, now it is useless. I need to get onto Neato support and then if that fails Amazon.