Neato Botvac D3 Connected robot vacuum test and review: mid-range winner

Test results

Despite the fact that the Neato Bot­vac D3 Con­nect­ed is posi­tioned by the man­u­fac­tur­er as a device of the mid­dle price seg­ment, its cost in the Russ­ian mar­ket is still very high and amounts to about 40,000 rubles. At the same time, the buy­er will receive a well-equipped device and well-con­fig­ured nav­i­ga­tion, typ­i­cal of Neato devices. How­ev­er, he also shows some dis­ad­van­tages if the apart­ment is not “pre­pared”.

Neato Botvac D3 Connected test results

The most important thing in the device

This robot vac­u­um clean­er, at first glance, is the sim­plest of all that Neato has ever pro­duced so far. All con­trols are one but­ton and two sta­tus LEDs, while oth­er robots flash and light up dis­plays and rows of but­tons. With this key, you can man­u­al­ly start the robot or switch the clean­er to Spot mode by hold­ing the but­ton down for a while. In this mode, the machine will do a more thor­ough clean­ing of the sur­round­ing area.

Despite all this, the Bot­vac D3 Con­nect­ed deserves a good rat­ing in the Equip­ment cat­e­go­ry, as it does not suf­fer from a lack of func­tion­al­i­ty. The key word in its name is “Con­nect­ed”: through the WLAN net­work, you can con­nect to the robot and con­trol a large num­ber of set­tings in the appli­ca­tion. Here you adjust the suc­tion pow­er back and forth, pro­gram the clean­ing sched­ule or view sta­tis­tics. In addi­tion, if you wish, you can receive push noti­fi­ca­tions, for exam­ple, if the assis­tant has fin­ished his work or sucked on a thrown sock.

Abducts himself

Even if the robot is able to divide your apart­ment into square areas with the help of lasers on the “tur­ret” and sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly go around all of them, it does not behave in the best way when it encoun­ters var­i­ous small prob­lems. If he some­how still copes with thin rugs, although most like­ly after clean­ing you will have to straight­en them and move them into place, then he imme­di­ate­ly requires help if he encoun­ters scat­tered clothes, some­times car­ries Lego cubes on hard sur­faces, instead of just com­plete­ly suck them in, and can still capit­u­late to car­pets with a long pile.

Close pas­sages can also put him at a stand­still. For exam­ple, if he is clean­ing under a chair whose legs are only slight­ly more than the width of the robot, in most cas­es he will not be able to get out and will think that he is locked. More­over, if there is enough room for maneu­ver­ing, it moves con­fi­dent­ly and moves even through fair­ly high obsta­cles.

Almost half

We were once dis­ap­point­ed with the suc­tion pow­er of the old Bot­vac Con­nect­ed, and the D3 Con­nect­ed is a more decent device in this regard. And although the D3 has a weak­er motor when com­pared to the D5 and D7, it still col­lect­ed 38 per­cent of the scat­tered debris in one pass.

The mud is placed in a 700 ml con­tain­er. Here, how­ev­er, traces of small sav­ings are vis­i­ble: the mechan­i­cal fil­ter is thin, can­not be washed, and looks only of rel­a­tive­ly good qual­i­ty. It needs to be shak­en out and cleaned fre­quent­ly, which can be a real night­mare for aller­gy suf­fer­ers.

In addi­tion, when devel­op­ing this mod­el, Neato aban­doned the use of a rotat­ing side brush, which slight­ly lim­its the “work­ing radius” of the robot.

Neato Botvac D3 Connected test results

Alternatives:

iRobot Roomba 681

The iRo­bot Room­ba 681 robot vac­u­um clean­er rides blind­ly and is there­fore suit­able for clean­ing one or a max­i­mum of two rooms, but it demon­strates extreme­ly high suc­tion pow­er.

Already dur­ing the first pass, it pulls out a large amount of dirt from the car­pets. In addi­tion, it is real­ly not very expen­sive — about 26,000 rubles.

Samsung VR1GM7010UW/EG

The Sam­sung VR1GM7010UW / EG vac­u­um clean­er mod­el (costs about 24,000 rubles) is not as pow­er­ful as the Room­ba 681, but it is equipped with a cam­era and there­fore can cor­rect­ly nav­i­gate in space.

Its weak point is its speed: since it dri­ves slow­ly and cleans thor­ough­ly, the bat­tery charge drops to a dan­ger­ous lev­el after two or three rooms, so the device has to make a pit stop.

Characteristics and test results of Neato Botvac D3 Connected

A pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies