Shark AV911S EZ Robot Vacuum with Self-Empty Base, Bagless, Row-by-Row Cleaning, Perfect for Pet Hair, Compatible with Alexa, Wi-Fi, Gray

First experience with a robot vacuum and not overly impressed. First unit lasted around 6 months before a component failed. Shark did replace it under warranty after I paid a nice shipping and handling cost of the replacement. Cleaning: It does well maintaining but does not deep clean. I purchased this unit due to the multi-floor and because we have a semi-indoor blue healer. The unit definitely keeps the hair from building up but we still need to do an actual deep clean from time to time to get everything. Mapping: I had to delete the first few maps on both the original and the replacement until they looked correct. I was hoping to be able to schedule the kitchen and living room nightly with the bedrooms weekly (dog doesnt get to come into the bedrooms). But when I would use the app to just clean one room_ it would go through the entire house anyway. I gave up on the map/room aspect and just hit the clean button on the unit when I wanted it to run. The barrier function is useless. Unless it already maps the space, you cant set it up. It it also very course in its mapping, there is no fine tuning. I wanted to set up a barrier on out laundry room so that it never attempted to go in that space but would have to let it map the area a few times before I could block it - I ended up just shutting the door. I tried to block the area of the Christmas tree the first year but it ignored it and plowed through the presents and the tree skirt anyway. AI: The programming lacks finesse and the ability to learn. Both units likes to bump into things and turn to discover its boundaries (and never stops). I put weights in front of the doors so that it doesnt shut the door on itself, pick up chairs so that it doesnt wedge between the legs, put a trashcan next to the toilet so that it doesnt hop up on the bottom of the toilet and get stuck, and move the entrance mat so that it doesnt get stuck between it and the wall. It doesnt learn where obstructions are to avoid them. I made tubes to act as barriers around the Christmas tree this year, Ill need to add some weights on them as it keeps trying to push through them. It works ok as long as you are there to fix it when it gets stuck. I do not schedule as I dont let the unit run when Im not home to monitor. Once the warranty is out and this one dies, I will most likely try a different manufacturer.

Love that I finally broke down and bought this. So good for pet hair and easy to clean out. Easy to program a schedule.

A great robot vac. Runs on schedule and cleans dog hair everywhere it goes. The only problem I faced was Wi-Fi connecting it while pairing with my phone. It took three attempts to succeed. Now I am just happy it cleans on its own.

Owned for 8 months. It runs twice a day, cleans till battery is drained doing 1400 square feet. 2 dogs 3 cats and two young boys. It is frustrating when you get a debris stuck error and when it gets confused. When it breaks I would buy another one.

I’m not sure if this was a great buy for me or not. It took me months to get this little vacuum and myself too coexist together. Every day when I come home, I have to check to make sure it’s on the port and if not, I have to search my house for it. I bought this because somebody had wrote that it did really well with picking up birdseed it does not and then also it clogs all the time. If you don’t have pets it would work great.

UPDATED 7.13.2022: About 4 months ago, my Shark deleted the map it made of my house. Thats what it uses to efficiently clean the house and it lets you design No Vaccuum Zones such as under your table where it gets lost for hours trying to navigate chair legs, or where that rug is that is really plush and prevents the robot from getting up onto it. Anyway, Ive remapped and re-set up my rooms and no-go zones multiple times only for the app to delete them again. Ive read online that its a very common problem, but good luck getting anyone in Support to look at it. Without this functionality, its just another dumb robot. Dont waste your time buying it for the Mapping functionality. _________________________________________________________________________ Ive been rocking at Roombak 699 for many years. Three batteries, countless brushes, and a new dustbin lever later, and I knew it was time for an upgrade. I purchased this Shark unit, not really knowing what to expect. I should have done this a long time ago. Lets start with the obvious: - The Shark unit has a predictable cleaning pattern. Once it has run several times, itll create a decent map of your house. Youll want to go in and create rooms or zones so you can tell it where you want it to clean (or dont). You can also create no go zones without having to stick those infrared, battery powered units all over the place. Once this is all set up, this unit will clean your house--taking as long as it takes. For my house, that usually means going back to the home unit to dump its collector a couple of times. Every now and then, it needs to recharge. Roomba didnt do that. It would zig and zag back and forth until it ultimately just lost charge and maybe it cleaned everything, but probably not. - My Roomba was really loud. So loud, you couldnt work or watch TV or carry on a conversation with it running. My kids even asked me not to run it at night because it woke them up (and it was downstairs and they were upstairs). The Shark unit is at least half as quiet so we dont mind running it when were all here working or just putzing around. - How well does it clean? Maybe not as well, but that is made up for by the fact that it can climb over rugs and clean the entire house in one day versus maybe it takes 2-3 days with the Roomba and it gets stuck on half a dozen things, including cliffs that arent cliffs. We have a mix of hard floors and fairly thick-pile carpet. If youre wondering if its worth saving a few hundred dollars on a Shark and trying it out, you should go for it. Im glad I did.

Its a good vacuum but for what its being sold for dont buy it. There are far better robots out there. If you want to stay with Shark go with one of their LiDAR robots. They track a lot better. Pros: Self empty dock works great. No-go zones. Great suction and good pickup. Easy to maintain. Good edge tracking. Cons: Doesnt work in the dark due to being a camera system. Doesnt clean corners well. Tracking is okay at best, doesnt know where it is sometimes. App is okay, used to be worse.

Started to make a loud noise after using it about 5 times. Looked online and followed possible resolutions to clean out dust bin, check wheels etc., but, did not correct problem. I was satisfied with performance until this occurred.

The 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.

A solo purpose of this purchase was because it is a bagless vacuum. After using the bagless upright vacuum a decade or two, I had no intention to keep buying and wasting those bags. So for that matter, this is the perfect auto vacuum. The downside of this is that - which I was aware of prior to the purchase - this model does not equip a sensor to detect objects. In order words, it would push a shoe around, try very hard (perhaps wasting battery power) to go over anything on its way. I forgot to turn off the scheduled cleaning while I was out of town, it ran and the cats apparently pushed a small glass bowl off the kitchen counter and spread small broken glasses, some large pieces got stuck when it did self emptying so most certainly Id certainly schedule to run while I am at home, clear the floor before the scheduled time. So if you prefer to run an auto vacuum of any kind, Id suggest that you choose the sensor to avoid the objects.