Robot Mop --> iRobot Braava Jet M6

[nelsonic]

As noted in #122 (comment) I think the iRobot Roomba 960 vacuum cleaner was good investment that has already paid off. 🙌
Also noted in #122 (comment) I think that having a Robot Mop would be a similarly good idea. 💡

Our kitchen floor is "cement effect" which is nice if you like the "industrial" look.
The issue is that if you drip any liquid on it and there was already some dust on it, it becomes a dirt spot:

These particular dirt spots have accumulated in front of the trash bin. People with wet hands have dripped water on the floor and any dust immediately sticks to it, and when it dries this is the effect. 👎

Similarly the Laminate Flooring does not handle spills well ... this was a spill that went unnoticed next to the dining table:

I moved the table yesterday to re-org the room and noticed the spill. It's a bit disgusting ... 😕
I was just about to grab the manual mop this morning and clean the house, when I decided to open this issue. 💡

iRobot Braava Jet M6

Through a bunch of research I've narrowed our option down to the M6 as it's the only one that is "smart", uses a camera to map your room for faster cleaning, has a big tank/deposit for water+detergent and has a base station for recharging (the others require the person to manually plug in to recharge... 🤦 ).

The webpage https://www.irobot.com/en/braava/m-series is not very informative.
Just a basic brochure and promo links (US only). k

The best way to understand this product is to watch a couple of YT reviews:

The mop (microfibre cloth) extends slightly beyond the robot to reach into corners better:

kk

Note: to be clear I don't think this will completely replace having periodic human mopping, rather they will compliment each other. The Robot might end up doing 80% of the work, the easy to reach wide open spaces like corridors, kitchen floors, co-working room and even bathrooms. But corners and stairs will still require (weekly?) human-powered cleaning.

https://www.kuantokusta.pt/electrodomesticos/Electrodomesticos-de-Limpeza/Aspiradores-Robot/iRobot-Braava-Jet-M6-p-4-458244

The Fnac promo only lasts till 2020-08-19 so we have 2 days to decide.
https://www.fnac.pt/Aspirador-Robot-iRobot-Braava-Jet-M6-Wifi-Aspiracao-e-limpeza-Aspirador-wet-and-dry/a7328679

Fnac has superb after sales support. When my mum's Fitbit died, they gave her a voucher to buy a brand new one.

For reference it costs £584 on Amazon UK: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/iRobot-UK43371494-Braava-m6134/dp/B07V32F8XC

It's €599 (unexpectedly slightly cheaper!) on Amazon ES:
https://www.amazon.es/iRobot-Braava-m6134-fregasuelos-pulverizador/dp/B07TQVQ3FN

I still think it's worth getting it from Fnac as their support is much better than Amazon.
The last think you want is to be calling up Spain to ask for help ... 🙄

I searched ebay and the cheapest I could find was £460 which is €509 at the time of writing:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/iRobot-Braava-Jet-m6-m613840-WiFi-Enabled-Robotic-Cleaning-Mop-BNIB/363077150479

While I'm always tempted to pay less, I think it could be worth considering a local retailer with good after sale service. 💭

Washable Microfibre Pads

The washable pads cost £15 - £23 https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=irobot+braava+m6+washable+pads

According to reviews online, the sweeping pads are less effective than the mopping ones.
So I would probably not bother with the sweeping pads and just stick to mopping.

Todo

• Decide if we want to get the M6 and if we want to use the Fnac promotion.

@iteles thoughts?

[nelsonic]

Promo video has a good (quick) overview of features:

[nelsonic]

Review/recommendation from Kay the professional home organiser: https://youtu.be/4cRo6ZMLz_Q

People universally love this product. The only "obstacle" is the price. 💰 🙄

[iteles]

We definitely need regular mopping ontop of vaccuming or the floors still have thin later of dirt on them (as evidenced when we walk around barefoot).

The biggest advantages for me are that:

• It's much kinder to whoever has to clean the house (see section below on the Braava Jet M6 vs a human)
• It actually gets into corners
• There are reusable/washable pads as you've screenshot above
• It seems to be a bit 'smarter' than the Roomba 960 where you can isolate the rooms it focuses its energies on and has better plotting of rooms; from the review videos it also appears to be more organised than the Roomba 960 about where it goes, moving in straight lines rather than leaving out random patches in the middle of your room)
• You can control how much water it sprays out
• It works in tandem with the Roomba 960 which we already have (although literally everything else I found only mentions it working with the s9+ and the 'i series' so I wouldn't take this for granted)
  https://store.irobot.com/default/roomba-robot-vacuums/irobot-roomba-960-robot-vacuum-and-braava-jet-m6-robot-mop-bundle/4699387.html
  

The 'sweeping functionality' is a bit redundant if we have the roomba 960 #122 working in the same area).

On Price

Price is an obstacle because if you think about it, in Portugal, a typical cleaning lady is paid between €7-€10 an hour depending on the area of the country (there are definitely people who are paid more in the €12-14 range and there are still those who only charge €5-6 if they are older and have reduced geographical mobility for example).

So in their minds, people think they could get 100 hours of cleaning (€700/7 for a rough number, people always err on the side of whatever suits their argument best) for the price of a mop.

Say there are 1-2 hours of mopping to do a week in a typical household per week - note a typical Portuguese household has very little in the way of carpeting so a lot fo the vacuuming of carpets is converted to sweeping and washing floors.
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/this-is-how-much-time-i-actually-spend-on-housework-in-a-week-232212

As a worst case scenario, for an average house, you could pay a cleaner for just under 1.5 years for the cost of the Braava Jet M6.

Of course, we're talking about getting this at a discount but calculations at €600 cost is still a year of cleaning by a human.

Note: These are all very rough numbers but this is intentional because it is intended to simulate the calculation that the average Portuguese person will do in their heads.

Why a Braava Jet M6 vs a human?

But the key here is to keep in mind that this is not an average home. We have a large surface area and I estimate it takes me at least 1.5-2 hours on average to mop each floor depending on the floor. If I was changing out the water as often as I really should (which is the most time consuming part), it might even take longer.

So for a good cleaner I would say that mopping the whole house would take around 4 hours (including constantly changing the water in the bucket).
This would need to be done twice a week (with sweeping an sporadic cleaning in between). So 7-8 hours a week.

At a conservative €7.50 per hour for 8 hours a week (I don't think we'd get anyone this cheaply), this means that the Braava Jet M6 cost will be the equivalent of 10 weeks of a human mopping in our case (€599/€64 per week on mopping).

From purely a price perspective, it makes perfect sense.

But there's something much more important here: Mopping is tedious and it's a thankless task that involves carrying heavy buckets of water around the house (because no one is pushing a bucket along our laminated floors and scratching them).

Wouldn't you thank someone for taking mopping off your plate?

Freeing someone from this task seems like the right thing to do if we can.
All of that extra time can be poured into tasks that are much more enjoyable (or just spending time with family and friends outside work if that is the person's preference and they can afford less hours). dwyl.

Note on extra mopping

Of course there will still need to be some mopping done by humans.
We will all need to tidy up spills as they happen and a deep mopping will need to happen with some regularity (timeframe to be determined depending on how good the M6 is).

Although the Braava Jet M6 seems to be much better at getting into corners that the Roomba 360 is, I am yet to be convinced that all corners will not need a regular extra mopping schedule too, so this will also be factored in #113.

But overall, this seems like a no brainer to me that fits perfectly with our philosophy (https://github.com/dwyl/start-here/blob/master/mission.md#what-is-dwyls-mission).

Where to buy

It looks like the cheapest place to get the iRobot Braava Jet M6 in Portugal is Worten:
https://www.kuantokusta.pt/electrodomesticos/Electrodomesticos-de-Limpeza/Aspiradores-Robot/iRobot-Braava-Jet-M6-p-4-458244#

However, the after sales service at Worten is notoriously terrible.

I haven't experienced the after sale service at Fnac but if you say it's good @nelsonic, then I say it's probably worth the extra €40. Let's go for it and buy it today 👍

[nelsonic]

@iteles it's interesting that KuantoKusta (price comparison site) has removed the Fnac price from their list. I screenshotted it above and Fnac still has it at €559 until midnight tonight.
Worten have obviously price-matched their -20% promotion to avoid losing market share.
I think the Worten (Portugese company) vs. Fnac (French) is much of a muchness.
I've had a couple of bad experiences with Worten in terms of returning items that were simply unsuitable but "open box". Whereas Fnac has an excellent after sales as noted above.

[iteles]

I'll make the purchase this afternoon 👍

[nelsonic]

As for your "Note on extra mopping", this is consistent with what I had written above: the robot does not replace the human, rather they compliment each other. I think that by running the Braava over one area per day we can reduce the mopping frequency requirement to weekly. 💭
But this needs to be tested and documented.

As for the cost of a person to do our housekeeping/cleaning, yes, on the surface it can look cheaper to hire a person to do the cleaning, but that's 1^st order thinking/comparison.
House cleaning is a whole system #113 that needs to be put in place it's not just a one-time thing. We need to create training docs (videos) and checklists for all cleaning tasks and then have a system to review the work that gets done. I think setting all this up will take at least a couple of weeks from both of us. Whereas the Robot Mop is a single decision with minimal on-going costs. Yes, we will need to create a system to refill (water+detergent) and replace (wash) the mop pads. That will be a couple of daily checklist items for the wider cleaning system. Buying the Robot Mop can be done independently of creating the wider system.

[nelsonic]

@iteles I now have a Fnac account from buying an item a couple of weeks ago.

So it could be worth adding this purchase unless you can figure out how to buy it through the PT Co. 💭

[iteles]

All you have to do is:

• Make sure the company NIF is on the purchase receipt as the NIF that the purchase is made against
• Pay it from the company bank account (if your card doesn't work straight away you can either choose MBWay and set that up - it will involve a trip to the multibanco - or see if they offer other options like pagamento multibanco which you could pay tomorrow morning at the ATM for example)

If you change the details of the FNAC account to be the company's (most importantly the NIF) then you can still add it to the Fnac account and get the 5% back as value on your card which should make a big difference!!

OR set up a new account for the company if this is tricky. Either way it's totally worth having it attached to a cartão Fnac.

[nelsonic]

Inês, please join me at my desk in the coworking room so we can investigate if its possible to change the NIF on the FNAC account. 🤔

[nelsonic]

Entidade: 23239
Referência: 877380155
Montante: 562.89€

[nelsonic]

@iteles the attempt to pay online yesterday didn't work. 🤦
But I tried again this morning and it went through:

It's still disconcerting how they use a comma instead of a full stop as the decimal separator in PT. 🙄
But apparently this is the norm in most non-English speaking countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, order placed & paid. We should receive it @home in a couple of days. ⏳

[ElectricFeet]

Re braava m6 versus a human cleaner: during lockdown, our human cleaner couldn't come and clean, so I got a Braava M6.

The floors have never been cleaner. Additionally, we've significantly reduced the frequency of mopping, as the floors are being cleaned better and the "cleanness" lasts longer.

I'm not sure whether it's their liquid, or the pads, or a combination of both, but the (parquet) floors now shine in a way that they never have before. They look like gloss paint in the sunlight, while they were previously a sort of silky eggshell finish. With a human cleaner, our feet would get dirty if we went without slippers just before they were due to be mopped again.

Things to note:

1. It takes longer than a human does. But a human isn't breaking their back and no-one needs to be involved once the training is done. And you can mop as frequently as needed, rather than when the cleaner comes -- and clean, say, the kitchen floor more often.
2. The first time you use it, you need to set aside a day when it can learn your home layout and you will clear its way from chairs / other obstacles (the problem is, you don't know where it will go next, so you really do need to follow it around at first). I suggest doing the mapping of your home with a dry mop, as it is much faster. Once you have done all this initial setup, you can tell it which room is which and then get it to clean one room (or a few rooms) at a time, which means you don't need to follow it around any more. Don't close any doors while training (I did and ended up having to throw away the map and start again).
3. The mops are highly engineered: the washable mop pads have a cottony-type fabric interspersed with little threads of nylon, while the dry pads have a nylony/silky material at the front edge. I think that these may be critical for removing electrostatic dirt that builds up on the sealant of our parquet (I think it's PM2.5 from the road -- we're in a city). I think that this is why the floors are so much cleaner.
4. I normally hate floor detergent smells, but the irobot stuff is pretty innocuous -- not strong smelling at all and reasonably peasant. Its cost is too high, though.
5. The throwaway pads are good. The washable ones seem to get bent a bit in the washing machine, but so far are totally functional, as they are pressed back into shape while cleaining.
6. I think that the dry sweeping functionality is important to the removal of the electrostatic dirt. The floors seem cleaner when I do vacuum --> dry sweep --> wet mop, rather than just vacuum --> wet mop.
7. As a tecchie -- and an unusual one who always reads the manual -- I find the documentation lamentably sparse. I had a lot of questions to which I couldn't find answers. Once all the training is done, it really is very easy to use, but I got very frustrated and impatient the first time I tried to train it. (See point 2: set aside time.)
8. It requires a network connection, has a camera, and the company is a spin-off of a company that mainly does military work. Yeah: I have no idea either. <head in sand mode>

Points 1-6 sound a bit over-positive, but I really love this thing.

As a counter balance: I also bought a Roomba s9+, which I think is a stupidly high-priced vacuum. While it cleans fine, I am not crazy about it. It's great to be able to tell it to go clean the kitchen and then it comes back to base and empties itself, but it doesn't justify the high price. (The integration with the m6 seems nice, but I haven't used it yet.)

I also bought the very first Scooba many many years ago and after a few uses, it sat in a cupboard as we went back to mopping by hand (and eventually threw it out). It was waaay too messy to clean / fill / empty.

The Braava m6, on the other hand, I think is superb. They've really nailed the design aspects and the cleaning is fantastic.

[nelsonic]

@ElectricFeet great feedback! Thanks! 🙌
Great to know that other tech-focussed people have found it to be a worthwhile investment. 👍
Our M6 arrived today so we're going to set it up after work. ⏳

[iteles]

It arrived and we tried it and it's GREAT! @ElectricFeet Totally agree (and thanks for taking the time to write this out, we love a contribution like this 🙌 )

I genuinely think it's much better than the Roomba 960 #122 we bought as well.

It follows a pretty sequential pattern around the room whereas the Roomba just goes in the craziest patterns. I was sitting in a room that was not it's home location yesterday and the Roomba literally came into the room 5 separate times, doing the same parts over and over, only about a third of the room was vacuumed whilst I was there though it seemed to manage the whole room by the end of the cleaning cycle 🤷‍♀️

The Braava Jet M6 is much more methodical and I noticed a difference IMMEDIATELY.
Love it so far! (Also loving the fact that it came with a reusable wet and dry mop pad already)

Still need to try out the full on mapping functionality and spend the time to keep an eye on it as @ElectricFeet suggested but will do that this week.

[nelsonic]

Desk chairs; the mortal enemy of the iRobot: 🙄

[iteles]

We need more of the reusable mop pads just to save me from having to think about this quite as often.

I have done some extensive research into buying them on Amazon or ebay but essentially, all of the compatible ones have two very common complaints:

1. They are basically impossible to get clean - especially with dog or human hairs or just a lot of dirt in general, there are lots of complaints around how they take ages to get clean and most can't be put in the washing machine like the iRobot ones can
2. The plastic bit that holds it onto the Braava Mop is flimsy and breaks relatively easily after only a few uses, making them not-so-reusable.

The other thing I researched was other places to buy the authentic iRobot ones at a cheaper price than from iRobot themselves (especially during Black Friday) but it was on special absolutely nowhere and everywhere except iRobot themselves are out of stock (and could take up to a month or more to deliver because they have to order it first).

For the record, the cheapest place to get them is Radio Popular who still charge €29.99 for the 2-pack but only €2.90 postage.

iRobot charge €6.50 postage no matter how much you get from them (obviously free postage is you buy an actual robot):
https://loja.irobot.pt/pt/irobot-braava-jet-m-series--embalagem-de-2-panos-de-molhada-reutilizveis/4643570.html?lang=pt_PT&cgid=pt

Also, a lot of places sell the mop heads for the previous models but not for the JetM series.

So after all this, I've decided we're just going to drop a bomb (well, daylight robbery for the margin on this product) and get 2 more reusable mop pads from iRobot themselves.
I think we only need 1 pack of 2 for now (giving us 3 reusable mop pads in total) because we do enough laundry that three on rotation works well.

[iteles]

Went to order these yesterday and they were no longer available from irobot in Portugal or the UK 🤦‍♀️
I am so peeved 😭

[nelsonic]

@iteles unavailable directly from iRobot 😞 but still available from a couple of retailers ... 🤞
https://www.kuantokusta.pt/electrodomesticos/Electrodomesticos-de-Limpeza/Acessorios-de-Limpeza/iRobot-Mopas-Reutilizaveis-para-Braava-Jet-M-Series-p-4-499162

Do we already have an account with Radio Popular? https://www.radiopopular.pt/produto/pano-esfre-irobot-braava-jetm

Delivery time estimate 8 - 11 days. 💭

[iteles]

Yea, I tried RP but when I put it in the cart I got this 'could be anywhere up to 30 days' warning as I mentioned above:

That's why I was hoping to get it directly from iRobot but I'll get them from somewhere else now they're out at iRobot too 🙄 👍

[iteles]

@nelsonic Could you please sort the payment for this?

Entidade: 11686
Referência: 930 401 044
Valor: 60,05

[nelsonic]

@iteles payment made:

Proof PDF sent to you. ✅

[iteles]

They emailed me to say that they only had 1 unit in stock and asked for the IBAN to refund the other 🤦‍♀️

[nelsonic]

@iteles did you tell them we don't mind waiting for re-stock? 💭

[iteles]

Got the new mop pads, just waiting for them to return the difference in value

EDIT: Value difference has been returned, this bit of the issue is closed