Wyze Vacuum First Impressions

 As an early adaptors I received my Wyze vacuum just after Christmas.  I was excited to test out the vacuum as it was the cheapest robot vacuum to include LIDAR that I am aware of on the market. The unboxing was simple, as well as the setup on the charging dock straight forward.   I already have the Wyze app for several of their other smart home device, so adding the vacuum was  straight forward process that included nothing more that holding down one of the buttons, and then walking through the easy steps in the app, not something i will dwell on since really you only have to do it once, and the rest of the functionality are the items you will have to deal with on a daily basis.

Letting the vacuum learn the layout of you house for the first time right after Christmas may not be the ideal time since there are numerous items out around the house unique to this time of year, especially the Christmas tree, but then again maybe this makes it the best time for testing, lots of obstacles, and probably a need to seeing how it reacts to changes in the rooms and furniture location as a result.

The first time you run the vacuum it is probably ideal to let the vacuum run for the full time that it takes to scan you house (or really just one floor of you house since it can't do stairs).  This is as simple as pressing the clean button in the app and leaving the device alone for an hour, or however long it takes to scan you home, which is mostly based on your home's size. Of course that is not what I did, I hovered over it like a helicopter parent, wanting to see what it did and also, let's face it the biggest concern people have about robot vacuums is them sucking up items you don't want it to, or destroying some area rug or other item that we never thought it would tangle with. I also was concerned about vacuum banging it my furniture repeatedly in the past, but since this vacuum has LIDAR that should not be a concern right?  To address the last concern first, I will say I was pleasantly surprised how little it ran into things, and when it did it was just a light tap, much less that what I am sure happens when others are running the vacuum around my place in my absence.  In addition, my concerns about it sucking up items and getting jammed were also mostly unwarranted.  Really the main concerns was for my kids who leave Legos scattered around the house, and my informing them, that this vacuum will not be picking up for them, instead your Legos will slower disappear into the bowels of the vacuum which I have yet to figure out how to empty, something I will leave to figure out on another day. Actually I am curious what happens if it fills up completely, will it give me some kind of alert?  Time will tell.

Back to the initial mapping, it doesn't have a feature to map the home first, and then go back and vacuum or identify rooms, something that would be nice, but not necessarily necessary should everything go as planned on its initial run.  So I wandered around the house after the vacuum and I am happy to say, it does a VERY good job of mapping out the rooms, and in fact you can watch in real time in the app to see it build the floorplan.  I maneuvered the sofa and chairs (along with the Christmas tree) in my living room quite effectively, and was able to get under the chairs in my dinning room (the main purpose for which I bought the vacuum) as well.  In fact I am not sure if there is some international standard for chair leg separation distance (I suspect not) but it was just able to get between the dining room chairs, and the coffee tables with only millimeters to spare, which I was thrilled about. Something I cannot say for the rest of the family who watched me follow it around the house with some suspicion.  I suspect however when i ask my older son to vacuum under the dining room table in the future, he will fully embrace the ability to ask Alexa to vacuum the dining room, and continue on with whatever video games he was playing before I so rudely interrupted him. 

I located the vacuum between an easel of my son's to see if the manuals requirement of leaving 14" of clearance around the charger was accurate, but I have had no problems with it being tucked in under the easel.

So back to the mapping of the first floor.  Once it got to the master bedroom, I got some feedback on the volume level of the vacuum from my wife who was thinking of watching TV.  While I will say the vacuum is quite quiet, certainly when compared to our regular vacuums, it isn’t quiet enough that you would want to be in the same room with it when it is cleaning. With that feedback from my wife, I decided to see what happens if I instruct the vacuum to stop and head back to the charge.  This was easy enough, the vacuum actually cruised back to the charger without event touching a wall, and waiting for its next command.  This also gave me an opportunity to investigate the features in the app now that it had mapped most of my first floor.  The app had a fairly complete floorplan of my home, minus about half of the master bedroom, and had gone ahead and tried to section off each of the rooms giving them generic names like Room 1, Room 2, etc.  I have seem marketing videos showing the rooms in the app labelled with actual names like Kitchen, but it appears that that functionality it either no currently available, or still being developed, as I could not find any way to rename the rooms, nor any instructions from Wyze on how this can be accomplished. I am one of the first customers to receive the preorders so I assume this will come in one of the way updates Wyze issues to all their products.  You can still select one of the Rooms, like Room 5 in my case which happens to be the kitchen and tell it to clean just that room. It performed this without any issues and returned right back to the charger once finished.  Now I still have a master bedroom that is partially mapped, so I wondered how to best complete that task.  I saw some comments from early users online about having to delete the floor map/map and reinitiated an initial cleaning but wasn’t willing to give up that easily.  Since it already knew of the master bedroom, I decided to tell it to clean Room 2 in my case, of course after my wife has left the area, and watch what happens.  Much to my delight it cleaned what it knew and continued to venture into the previously parts unknow to it and mapped the rest of the room, whew, that was easy. 

Once the floor was completely mapped I did experiment with the virtual wall feature, and it works just as you would expect.  I blocked off an area in the master bedroom, now serving as a remote office, as there are numerous power cords and cables in that area, and also decided to be mice to the youngest son, and virtually wall off the area around his bedroom Lego table.  You cannot do irregular shaped virtual walls, something I have seen as feedback from other early adopters, so they may add this in the future, but in my case the rectangular shape worked just fine. Now if he only would start to pick up some of his clothes on his own, I may actually trust it to go in there in the future without its helicopter parent.

Now for the most obvious feature that is still missing but initially promised, the vacuum cannot be controlled by a digital assistant like Alexa yet, but this is apparently planned for 2021, so we will have to wait and see when that comes, but until you can give the rooms names that make sense, it won’t much matter, no one is going to remember to say, “Alexa, go vacuum Room 7!”.

UPDATE: I recent Wyze/Vacuum upgrade has added room naming to individual rooms, so now we just need the Alexa integration, and full usefulness will be enabled.