

Shark AV911S EZ Robot Vacuum with Self-Empty Base, Bagless, Row-by-Row Cleaning, Perfect for Pet Hair, Compatible with Alexa, Wi-Fi, Gray
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KDW
> 3 dayWe have 3 dogs and they bring in a lot of mess. Especially when its rained and wet outside. The app is pretty good. It has some trouble mapping -- better to start it off in broad daylight with all the lights on. It will randomly stop (sometimes to recharge, other times to completely forget to do the kitchen, even though mapped) and will also get stuck on some apparently easy obstacles. (The robot texts me when its hung up, so glad I gave it a good name!). But it also magically gets out of some pretty tough spots. Grab a beer and sit back and watch. I set it to run it 6 days/week; more often is better for us (it wont do a major vacuum, but it will keep up if ran frequently.) I thoroughly clean it weekly. On the robot, I shake out the filter (or replace it) and rinse the collector. I also run the beater and the beaters keeper under water until clean. On the mother ship, I pull and rinse the dust bin, which gets bad if wet outside. I also soap and wash the two filters (or replace them). Its clear a lot of grit gets through the filters into the motor, so expecting a failure. For the HEPA filter, I have not replace it yet, but it sure shakes out a lot of dust. Then I air blast, wipe both down both, and polish the sensors. If I am out of town it consistently crashes within 6+ days (my wife does not clean it). I bet it would work a lot better and with fewer cleanings if you dont have dogs brining in sticks and leaves.
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Wanda
> 3 dayAt 2 months… still works. Love the systematic cleaning pattern and self emptying feature. It continues vacuuming where it stopped to empty and returns to the charging station. Our previous robot vacuum seemed to follow us from room to room instead of completely cleaning an area.
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Rob Sims
> 3 dayMy Lady-Friend saw this Model on Sale for 200 Dollars off for a limited time. I had talked about getting a robot vacuum and this was the opening I was waiting for. Amazon shipped it to us and we received it without any incidents. Setup was a breeze. It is easy to assemble, and getting it onto my WIFI Network was a breeze. I had some issues until I discovered I forgot to switch my phone with the app from the 5g signal to the 2g signal (very important). Once I did that, setting up the Robot on the App was easy. I really have any complaints about the Shark Robot. It does what is advertised. It is actually cleaning our apartment as we speak. It does a good job of finding its way around without getting stuck. The only time it got stuck was when it was cleaning under our bed. I put down some of the magnetic border strips to keep it away from my surge protector and the wires around it, and it got stuck between the strips and one of the bedframe support posts. It was an easy fix, just moved the strips in more to give the robot more room to maneuver. Problem solved. So far, Im happy with my purchase. Now, the Kraken in the Room: The Suction. I think it is decent for what the Robot is. I did a good job of picking up the dirt and lint that was under our bed that we could have never gotten with our normal vacuum without moving the bed. Understand that this Robot, especially at this price point, will NEVER fully replace your standard upright vacuum. The purpose of this robot is spot cleaning and keeping a base level of cleanliness. You should still have and be using your upright for when you need true deep cleaning. In closing, this is a powerful little robot that does the job that it is advertised it will do. It is easy to set up and easy to use. If you absolutely HAVE to have a more powerful robot that does more of the deep-cleaning that youre looking for, the Roomba has a model that is around 800 bucks. Thank you, and GOOD NIGHT NOW!!!
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ARO
> 3 dayThe good: I really wanted to give this little guy 5 stars. Because we have a couple of very vulnerable people in our family I dismissed our former cleaning service when COVID came to town and never started them up again. I purchased this bot from Amazon on sale during the pre-Christmas sales. It replaced a cheaper robot, which failed miserably. This robot may not get every single bit of crumb and hair on its first go-around, but it works very well. The routes it creates are logical, making parallel sweeps that align to the walls. It neatly goes around the legs of furniture, returning accurately to the path it was on before it met the obstacle. It does a reasonably good job each time it is run. I found that by running it daily for a few weeks and then 2 or 3 times per week it kept my floors looking quite nice. (I have no pets or small children. If I did have either one I would probably maintain the daily use.) The good: The bot has no problem getting up close to the irregular line of our natural stone basalt fireplace. It wiggles along the edge going in and out and cleans this area of dust and such very well. In fact, the bot does better than I did with the vacuum and better than the housekeepers did. It doesnt care how long it takes. Obviously, people-based cleaning involves beings that do care how long this process takes. Same for other irregular surfaces. The bot goes in and out as long as it takes. For our finely crafted mid-century house, this is a really big deal. The Good: The built in cliff-avoidance works very well. In 4 months the bot has not gone over an edge even once. In our mid-century house there are not only stairs, but also other drop-offs that look really nice but would probably not be allowed with current codes. The good: This little bot is much quieter than expected. Naturally there is the noise created by the air going through it, but there is very little actual motor noise. Usually when it is working I am working at something else in a nearby room. It makes just enough noise that I can tell where it is, but not enough that it distracts me from what I am doing, and not enough noise to wake those sleeping in the next room. The good: I did not bother with the app because I have oriental rugs with fringes that must be picked up prior to running the robot. I also choose to put the chairs up out of the way so the dining room floor gets really clean. In bedrooms I do a quick check to be sure there are no socks on the floor, etc. Scheduling therefore makes little sense. However, the bot works very nicely without the app. For those who want no app, this will work beautifully. I find that it was best to use the bot to clean half of our main floor, let it recharge, then clean the other half. This is something that the app would not support. If you have a larger house, or multiple levels, this is a really good thing. I actually have 3 very separate areas that are cleaned by the bot and the app would only be useful for one of them, as it only stores 1 map. The app-less cleaning is done quite logically and the entire floor in each room of each area is cleaned reasonably well. As noted below, small bits may be missed, but with regular use my floors are clean to look at. A fairly significant amount of dust and debris are picked up every time the bot is run. The bad and the ugly: Corners are a real problem for the bot. Once in a while you need to get your finger into a wet paper towel to clean out the accumulating guck in the corners. However, the same is true when I vacuum with a conventional vacuum. It was also true when I had maid service clean the floors monthly (only then it was their fingers in the paper towel, rather than mine.) Also there is sometimes a bit of stuff left. For instance, after cookie making with small children, if the bot is put in the kitchen and the doors closed so it can clean up the flour on the floor, there may be a place or two where a bit of flour remains. Run the bot again and it will get that last bit, or just wipe it up. I see this as a minor issue, but a real one. The really bad and ugly: Unfortunately, Shark has dozens of models that are very similar with different model numbers. Even more unfortunately, your model number reflects the place where you purchased the bot, not the bot itself. Your model number is virtually useless in trying to find the right replacement parts. Third party parts are often ill-fitting or poorly made and the shark site is of no help in locating your actual model from the model on the bottom of the machine. However, the online chat person or the call-back support are quite helpful and very fast. More bad and ugly: The model number on the box of the one we purchased was different from the model number on the bot and also different from the model number on the enclosed documentation. The instructions in the manual did not match actual parts on the bot. Even the instructions on the bot did not match the configuration of the bot. For instance, there is a figure on the bot suggesting that a circular filter be cleaned regularly. Problem? Filter does not exist, and no place it could fit. If one were to attempt putting a filter into the area adjacent to the figure it would cover the window where you are supposed to be able to see the level of the dirt in the collector. (Not that big a deal, though, because the plastic window is so darkly tinted that nothing can be seen through it anyway.) Using the mis-matched manual requires a bit of flexibility. If, for instance, you know that you need to pinch something and pull, the fact that the tabs mentioned do not exist, you can find something else to grab and pull. This has worked fairly well, though not without a bit of annoyance on my part. It would be nice if there was a bit of labeling to indicate just where something should be grabbed to dis-assemble for cleaning or replacing filters. Putting the actual part number on the replaceable parts would also be a really great idea. More bad and ugly: This is probably a petty gripe. However, for those of us who must use the bot without the app, a key part of this process is to turn the machine off while moving it, then on again to begin cleaning or to send the bot to its port. It would be a really nice convenience if the on/off switch were put on the top where it would be visible and easily reached rather than recessed on the side. Turning off the moving bot is a bit of a chore. If it were recessed on the top it would be quite easy to use a cane or broomstick to knock the rocker switch one way or the other. The instruction manual clearly states that one should not pick up the bot until after it is turned off, but turning it off first requires a bit of a circus act, following the bot, locating the switch and pushing it without triggering the thing to take off in another direction (the camera sees you and that alters the path). Overall, I would recommend this product for a person who is willing to live with its flaws. I am happy with the cleanliness of my floors, it takes less than 4 minutes for me to ready the dining room for cleaning (12 chairs, 2 oriental carpets to move) and less than a minute to check other rooms for cords, dropped items, etc. Then it takes the bot about 30 to 45 minutes for each of the separate areas. During its cleaning time I almost never need to do anything related to the cleaning process. I do clean the dust bin every time I clean, a process that takes only seconds. About once a month I clean the dust trap on the bot itself. That process can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 5 minutes depending on what is there. If the bot picks up a straw or paper clip, more stuff gets stuck to that obstruction and the lint can pile up. At any rate, I spend considerably less time on this process than I would spend cleaning with a vacuum (which has its own quirks) and the bot is actually more thorough than I would be, spending about 2 to 3 times as long in actual cleaning than I would. Time spent cleaning is important. The bot moves slowly enough to give the suction time to be effective, also slowly enough that when it bumps into furniture legs it does no damage. Also, in 4 months it has paid for itself, compared to the amount the housekeeping service would have charged. Of course, it does not dust. Too bad. My house always looks presentable, I spend less than an hour in actual floor maintenance time but the floors always have that just cleaned look.
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Lynn Emerson
Greater than one weekI wanted to wait until I had owned it for a while so that I could submit a quality review. I had a very expensive Deebot before and I replaced it with the shark. This thing is unbelievable. It cleans better than the Deebot ever did. It cleans dirt I didnt even know I had. It gets in tons of places that the Deebot couldnt or wouldnt. My floors have never been cleaner. I highly recommend. There were some bad reviews about the software. I think its great too. I bought two, and they are fan.efin.tastic!
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C. Adams
> 3 daySo this is really two reviews. One of the vacuum itself, the second of the management software. Vacuum/Robot: The vacuum seems to run great. It picks up well, doesnt get lost, its navigation seems to work well and the ability to clean a given room is nice when it has the map (more on this in software). It fairly consistently returns to empty at the base (I set it to empty every half hour when vacuuming, it mostly does that). They mechanics of the empty works pretty well, sometimes it gets stuck on larger debris (IE dried pasta the kids dropped, bottle caps, etc.) and errors out but thats only happened twice I think. I dont have any stairs in the area of the floor that it runs on, so I assume the stair sensor would work. Overall the vacuum/robot work as well as the software lets it from my experience. Software: Heres the Achilles heel of the system. So far the software from Shark sucks, and not like you want a vacuum to suck. I have a fairly heavily integrated automated home, lots of smart lights, a Roomba on a different floor, lots of google nest mini speakers. Im a cloud engineer by trade so I know my software and network integrations well, so this isnt really a user issue with the software. So far the software seems to log you out of the app about every 3-5 days. When it does this you have about a 25-30% chance that your map, settings, schedule and the rest is there, you just have to log in and youre good to go again. Theres also about a 25% chance that your map, or schedule or both has been lost. This means your room assignments could be gone, your vacuum may not know its schedule to run, and youd have to reset up these items. Then theres about a 45-50% chance that your robot had been completely lost, and you have to re-add it and set it up from scratch again. Shark consistently says an update will be pushed, and to wait 48 hours to see if the issues are resolved, but since it happens every few days its almost like the updates are causing this, or they arent really performing any updates and are just trying to get you off the phone. So long and short, top marks on the robot itself, and the self empty base. Theyre great. Good marks for functionality and setup in the software, you can name rooms, keep out zones, set schedules, alerting, maps, etc. ZERO MARKS for stability. I hate that about once to twice a week I am resetting my robot in some way, either completely re-adding it to the application and wireless, reconfiguring the schedule, redrawing the map, or noticing its missed its schedule and having to find out why THIS time. Ive owned it for just under a month (Dec 3 purchase Dec 30th review 2021) so far and Im not really happy, I hope Shark fixes the stability issues, because then it would be a great system, as it is its meh at best. So much potential taken down by buggy inconsistent software.
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Maddie Chow
> 3 daywe had a roomba for 2 years until we gave it to our in laws. we wanted another one, but the roomba didnt do very well, and we had 3 indoor dogs. the dogs are now outdoor now that we live on land, but doesn’t mean the husband doesn’t drag in debris. we got this one for the emptying dock. it works great. it has errors sometimes for no reason and can’t always find the dock, but it does well enough for me not to have to vacuum but once a week instead of daily.
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Diane
> 3 dayI looked at pros and cons of many robo vacuums before deciding on this one. It cleans quite well—I’m surprised at how much it picks up! I could not go 30 days without emptying, but we do have the two shedding dogs and a fair amount of sand. My dogs have short hair. I can see how longer hair might be a problem. Even short hair can clog a bit if you don’t regularly open things up to clean out. I run mine once a day, empty every day, and have learned that I need to clean the filter and clean the inside about once a week. If you don’t have pets and live in a sandy area, you can get by with a lot less. The filter works really well—do clean it more often than recommended. My only real complaint is that the battery seems to need more charging than I’d hoped. I have had trouble getting connected to wi-fi, but I haven’t called in for help yet—that seems to be a common issue. I will look forward to setting times and doing spot cleaning once I can use the app. All told, I’m very happy with the purchase so far.
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Dee Dee
> 3 dayEasy set up. Seems to work well. Fun to watch.
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Multiple discrepancies
> 3 dayIt can memorize its own routes and you can micromanage which rooms you want it to do. I see mine make it’s way through a door instead of bumping around everywhere, trying to find the way inside.