Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra week 1, man today’s been odd
There were some very weird things that have happened in the space of 24 hours at the end of week one with the Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra. One I bizarrely caught on recording, the other not so much.
Keep in mind with the below this unit is getting more of a workout every night than most vacuums/mops will get in a month (or three.) Unless you have several hundred people visiting your 5000 square foot house daily, you’re not in the same category as this test is.
This is at one week into a very large stress test. I discussed some of the mapping oddness yesterday, which appeared to resolve itself completely on subsequent runs. But I had three rather interesting things happen today.
Last night at some point the unit, after steadfastly avoiding the robot trapping chairs for the week, decided to strand itself on a tiny little chair. I was not there when this happened, sometime around 1am, nor there to grab a photo of it trapped, but I was told it had pulled what the other vacuuming robots had and beached itself on a relatively common chair at our office. Eh, not a huge issue, but odd that it came on the heels of the mapping issue (which I can now reproduce after I wrote this article, and I videod it).
Tonight I wanted to see what was going on and why the unit was sticking underneath a coffee table for inordinate amounts of time. I’ll skip the build up, it was a power cord dangling down underneath it that for some reason it could easily pass going one direction but not another. Something I learned with being able to watch it on the camera fail and fail again and finally succeed at getting out. I can move the cord, tape it down, or whatever… not a big issue, not the S7 MaxV Ultra’s fault really.
I swear, that’s the only reason I was recording. OK, I’m boring and fascinated by how this is handling the job.
Roborock kills Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra (or bizarre coincidence)
At about 10:30pm while I was still watching it the unit went dead. Just stopped. Notification was that it disconnected. I was still recording and suddenly got a notification about Roborock posting a new video, for the unit I was currently in. As I couldn’t see anything in the app, do anything, I decided to watch the Roborock v Poop ad.
Afterwards the unit was still offline, but came online about 10 minutes later claiming it was in a new room, had cleaned for all of two minutes, was lost, close to out of battery, and could not find the charger. It was running when it disconnected. There’s no reason for it to have lost the map and restarted.
When I managed to remote in finally it was in the atrium, had wandered into a no-go zone underneath the stairs. The map was gone but I recognized the area. I had to manually remote drive it out, park it in view of the charging base, and then it returned to the charger.
Last night it had successfully mopped the two main areas. Tonight it did one. Both nights it’s ended up dead in the atrium area.
What is so bizarre is the timing on that disconnect. I start feeling that Facebook notification I got was maybe not Facebook / pushed through Roborock? Looking at notification history in Android my Facebook has 12 notifications, none of which were that video or at 10:30. That said, Roborock didn’t have any notification history at that point either. Eh, bizarre.
To summarize all of the fails to date at 30+ hours of actual cleaning time of a huge office building’s first floor:
- One stuck on chair
- One area blocked off as a no go zone because it’s a robot trap
- One mapping error where it lost 12 feet or so
- One bizarre reset caught on video (see above) where it ended up driving itself into the robot trap and losing the map
That is still impressive. From 9-6am this unit runs, pausing occasionally to recharge, fill up and clean the mop, etc.
Oh yeah, if it sounds like I’m down on this robot, I am not. This thing is so far the best little beast (other than my beloved Rhonda,) I have worked with.
Plans for week two
There’s too much to clean in the time the robot has free range of the building. One of the things I’ve noticed is it appears that when any mopping is done a timer kicks in to go and wash the mop. With a couple of rooms that are both carpet and mopable surface this is causing some long walks back to the mop washing station for one little patch. At least I think that’s what’s happening as I’ve seen notification while vacuuming that it’s heading back to clean the mop.
I think I’m going to set up two schedules as I believe a good 15 minutes of observed unneeded mop washing time could probably be cut out if I had vacuuming done first and then just hit the mop areas. I suspect this will save a significant amount of time and battery, but might be mistaken.
Previous/future Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra coverage
Day 1- The Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra I’m initially impressed
Day 3 – I’m more impressed
Day 6 – find some issues and wants
End of week 1 – some strange oddness
Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra ends week 2 like a lion
The end of week 3 / start of week 4
Week 4 – end of most testing
Product links: Roborock site. Amazon.
