The incantaion of kitty-litter removal

As I, for the third time in seven days was sweeping the floor of the living-room for kitty-litter and wads of fur I happened to look at my wristwatch.  To my astonishment my wristwatch was a digital watch! As any one in my generation will tell you digital watches are from the future!

If this is the future surely magic must be invented by now? and surely there must be an incantation to get rid of kitty-litter and cat dandruff?! Firm in my belief that this must be the case I went to consult great sage of Si-ba.The great sage of Si-ba told me that such an incantation did indeed exist but that it would cost me 14 days of my mortal life. Since the alternative was spending a life-time sweeping thisfelt like a small sacrifice to make and I uttered the strange incantation "I would like to buy a Neato XV Signature Pro robotic vacuum-cleaner". The sage gave me a big black box and told me to bring it home, put it on the floor and feed it the universal sustenance of all magic beings called el-ec-tri-city.

At first nothing happened but with a howl it suddenly sprung to life and started meticulously licking the floor. As it is more thorough than I would ever bother to be it takes it quite some time to go over the entire apartment. It is about as noisy as a vacuum-cleaner set to something like half-power so the cats don't like it and it is something of a pain to be around, but since the little beast will happily make its rounds while I am out of the house it is not that much of an issue.

It will negotiate most carpets and thresholds without problems, it even managed to clean most of the area under my kitchen table, despite the fact that it is a jumbled mess of chair-legs.

But you will probably want to be home the first time you set it free as you  will probably have missed something that will be a hindrance. I found that if it manges to eat a loose cord or a washing label from a carpet it will get stuck and complain that "My brush is stuck, please free me :(". It will also detect a bowl of cat-food as a threshold and carefully navigate over it to get it clean, this makes an interesting rattling noise, but is a waste of cat-food.

All in all, not that much change was needed to get the apartment robot-friendly. The hallway carpet will probably have to be replaced since the robot sometimes manages to crumple it to lunar-landscape of impassable folds


I also need to get better at picking up cords from the floor, because even after I picked up "all" cellphone-chargers, laptop-chargers headphones, outdoor-thermometers and so on it still managed to find one cellphone charger and one probe of an outdoor-thermometer to get stuck on.

It came with some magnetic tape that works as a "wall", I will have to add some of that around the cat's food bowls.

It is not quite as smart about the path-finding as the advertisements might lead you to believe, it misses spots and sometimes traverse the same spot many times, but all in all it does a pretty good job.  Cleaning-wise it is comparable to manual vacuuming. While the suction is lower than my monster of an Electrolux it makes up for that by having a higher coverage than what I can bother to have manually. I suspect that I will still need to vacuum about once per month but no more bi-daily sweeping.

Vacuuming my 3room+kitchen apartment takes about three hours or so, which is divided in to 3 iterations of 25 minutes of vacuuming, and 40 minutes of charging.