i named the dust bunny and then i declared war

There was a dust bunny behind my couch on Saturday that was big enough to have a name. I named him Gerald. Then I swept him out with the cordless stick vacuum like a person who has learned nothing, and at 11pm that same night I ordered a robot vacuum, because apparently I needed to be humiliated by lint before I would act.

Gerald, if you're reading this: I'm sorry, and also good riddance.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part: I resisted this purchase for two years because a robot vacuum felt like something you buy when you've given up on vacuuming yourself. What I did not account for is that I had already given up on vacuuming myself. The stick vacuum lived in the closet by the door like a fire extinguisher, which is a lovely metaphor until you notice I was treating a basic chore as an emergency.

what it actually does, a list

The mapping run is genuinely fun. There's a little LiDAR dome on top, it spins while it works, and the map of my apartment built itself in one lap. The app then suggests rooms, which you can merge or split, and you draw no-go zones on the map like a tiny, petty city planner. I drew a square around the area under my desk where all the cables live. That square is my proudest work this quarter.

Dog hair is the real test and it passes. Noodle sheds like it is her entire career. Underneath this robot there are two rubber brushes that spin against each other, and hair does not wrap around them, which means I have not once had to sit on the floor with scissors performing surgery on a vacuum. Every machine I've owned before this demanded that ritual. This one doesn't.

5,500Pa of suction, and hard floors are where it shines. Under the couch, under the bed, along the hallway where the crumbs migrate. On carpet it's good, not heroic, and professional testers say the same: most of the mess comes up, a trace stays behind. For daily maintenance on my hardwood and rugs, that's exactly the job I want done, and it does it while I'm out.

The mop is a bonus, not a feature. It drags a damp cloth pad behind it. The water tank is gravity-fed, the pad never lifts, and there is no way to tell it which rooms not to mop. You can see where this is going. It ran onto the living room rug and dampened it politely. I have re-trained myself to clip the pad off before a run if I'm not in a mopping mood, and honestly the whole mop assembly is best understood as "the robot now also smears water."

It's loud in a polite, dishwasher sort of way. Around 65 decibels on full power, which is conversation-adjacent but not shouty. I run it when I leave for the office and come home to clean lines in the carpet like a zamboni did laps. There is a small joy in that, and I refuse to be embarrassed about it.

The bin is big and emptying it is gross but quick. This version ships with a plain charging dock, so nothing empties itself. You pop out the 770ml bin, tip it into the trash, and meet the face of everything you've been ignoring. The Pro+ with the self-empty dock costs meaningfully more, and I chose the cheap one on purpose, because I would rather have one weird moment a week than a tower in my hallway.

It has no camera and no fear. There's no obstacle-avoidance camera on the front, so it will bump a chair leg, push a slipper, and eat a charging cable if you leave one loose. The pre-clean tidy-up is real. Shoes up, cables squared away, Noodle's rope toy rescued from the middle of the floor. Honestly the tidying might be half the benefit, since it happens either way.

tangent: i sit on my couch and watch it work, like television

One Saturday, early, coffee in hand, I watched this thing clean for forty minutes. Just watched it. It went under the coffee table, bumped the ottoman, recalculated, and carried on with its little lines. Noodle observed it with deep suspicion for three days, and then something flipped, and now she follows it around like a weird slow friend that never throws the ball.

Here's the part I keep chewing on: a machine doing a chore quietly while I sit still and do nothing is the coziest possible use of technology. Not the gadget that demands attention, the gadget that removes attention. I've spent my career thinking about objects that ask for things. This one mostly asks to be picked up if it gets stuck on the bath mat, and I find that generous.

Anyway, moving on before I write a second essay about a vacuum, which the group chat has formally requested I not do.

the soft landing

The floors are just cleaner now, all the time, without me being the reason, and that small permanent improvement has quietly made my weekends better. If fur is a lifestyle in your house too, the cheap end of the robot vacuum world got very good while nobody was looking.

I keep meaning to set up the second-floor map at my parents' place and bring it over for a trial run, and I keep

Anyway. Gerald is gone. The floors are winning.

• ava 🧹