Overview of the Medion MD 17225 robot vacuum cleaner: almost perfect, but afraid of obstacles

At a price of about 25 thou­sand rubles, the Medion MD 17225 is one of the most inex­pen­sive robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers with sys­tem­at­ic nav­i­ga­tion from our respec­tive rat­ing. This is notice­able, first of all, when ana­lyz­ing the equip­ment, which, in com­par­i­son with such more expen­sive mod­els as the iRo­bot Room­ba 980, looks much more mod­est. In par­tic­u­lar, the dust con­tain­er of this robot can only hold 350 ml. Although this should be enough for sev­er­al clean­ings, this indi­ca­tor is sig­nif­i­cant­ly infe­ri­or to the vol­umes of com­peti­tors.

Test results

With the Medion MD 17225, the Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­er, after the TV and PC mar­kets, swung at the seg­ment of high-end robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers. Dur­ing the test tests, the device man­aged to sur­prise us with sys­tem­at­ic nav­i­ga­tion, good clean­ing per­for­mance and long bat­tery life. But with objects scat­tered on the floor, an inex­pen­sive robot does not cope well, and its equip­ment could be bet­ter. How­ev­er, the val­ue for mon­ey pleas­es.

Test results Medion MD 17225

This is espe­cial­ly annoy­ing because the Medion MD 17225 does not indi­cate when the tank is full. In addi­tion, the list of func­tion­al­i­ty of this mod­el lacks voice con­trol and ECO mode. There are also no restric­tive acces­sories with which you can deter­mine the area for clean­ing. But aller­gy suf­fer­ers can breathe freely: built-in dust and pollen fil­ters must reli­ably keep harm­ful par­ti­cles in the device’s con­tain­er.

At the same time, the func­tion­al­i­ty regard­ing the soft­ware turned out to be lux­u­ri­ous. The con­trol can be select­ed either by but­tons on the case, or via an inte­grat­ed WLAN mod­ule using a con­ve­nient free smart­phone appli­ca­tion. The lat­ter allows you to pro­gram the robot as you like and, for exam­ple, deter­mine a clear clean­ing plan. Man­u­al oper­a­tion is also pos­si­ble with tar­get­ed spot mode.

Medion has many enemies

It does­n’t get any faster: in our test room, the Medion MD 17225 took just 19 min­utes to clean. Only the Neato Bot­vac Con­nect­ed has been able to do this faster so far. The rea­son for such high effi­cien­cy in work is smart laser nav­i­ga­tion. After a short scan, the MD 17225 begins to move in space in straight lines and thus cov­ers almost the entire room. That’s just around the legs of tables and chairs, he cleans not quite clean. How­ev­er, this is dif­fi­cult for many robots.

In the dark, auto­mat­ic nav­i­ga­tion and a sys­tem­at­ic change of rooms also work great. Door sills should not be high­er than 10 mm, oth­er­wise an oth­er­wise good vac­u­um clean­er will not be able to move fur­ther.

In addi­tion, mov­ing inter­fer­ence becomes a real prob­lem. In par­tic­u­lar, the device will­ing­ly gets entan­gled in loose cables on the floor, drags Lego bricks around the room and can­not unhook from the fringe on the edge of the car­pet. There­fore, before start­ing the robot vac­u­um clean­er, the room must be prop­er­ly tidied up. But with obsta­cles such as table legs or thin car­pets, the device copes well, ele­gant­ly cir­cling them and not lift­ing up the edges.

High cleaning performance saves test results

Due to the round shape of the body, cor­ners and tight spaces between objects remain dirty dur­ing clean­ing, where the robot can­not pass. Except for this, the clean­ing per­for­mance of this device deserves atten­tion. Of the 200 grams of quartz sand we spread around the test room, the Medion MD 17225 was able to absorb almost 50%. Although at first these results seem insignif­i­cant, even com­pared to more expen­sive com­peti­tors, they look like the high­est achieve­ment.

Our advice: pro­gram the robot so that it starts on the road every day. Then all hard sur­faces and car­pets will grad­u­al­ly become real­ly clean and you will only need to fin­ish clean­ing with a clas­sic vac­u­um clean­er some­times.

Alternative with systematic navigation: Neato Robotics Botvac D3 Connected

The Neato Bot­vac D3 Con­nect­ed costs about $10,000 more than Medion’s robot vac­u­um clean­er, but offers sig­nif­i­cant­ly more advanced equip­ment and even smarter nav­i­ga­tion. Accord­ing to the results of the tests, there was not a sin­gle speck left that would have escaped Neato’s atten­tion. And although it also has prob­lems with scat­tered Lego bricks and socks, this robot vac­u­um copes well with loose cables.

Chaos Alternative: iRobot Roomba 681

The iRo­bot Room­ba 681 is one of the best chaot­ic nav­i­ga­tion robots we’ve test­ed. Despite the fact that the robot does not work sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, but moves around the space in an arbi­trary way, it achieves good cov­er­age of the room and shows the result as a whole even bet­ter than that of the Medion MD 17225. Although it takes sig­nif­i­cant­ly more time to clean than its com­peti­tors, it This mod­el does not have prob­lems with cables and small objects. For the price, the Room­ba 681 is about the same lev­el as the device from Medion.

Characteristics and test results of Medion MD 17225

Test results Medion MD 17225

Pho­to: Mid­ion, CHIP