Neato XV-21 Pet & Allergy (Scratch and Dent)

Its great if you have a perfect square room with nothing in it then it will vacuum the heck out of it.
Oh, but if you can get the battery to charge and stay charge and when I called the company I had to go through all types of remove the battery from the bottom, unplug, plug in, wait for it to fully charge and reset it again and if it doesn’t work, update the firmware then pull the battery again and reset again and recharge it full before using it to …
Mine gets lost all the time.
When picked up off its location of getting lost and placed in a position for it to recover, it does not recover and runs around until the battery dies then you have to pick it up and return to base.
But if you call, there’s a pleasant young lady on the other end asking if you have named your BOT as many of their customers have.
I told her mine was named FRED
F#$king
Retarded
Electronic
Device

Ugh. Don’t buy this. Mine is dead after less than a year.

Dim Green Light problem: vacuum won’t start, screen is blank. I did a very very hard reset a few times. This consists of holding down the big red button with Neato + plugged in charger + AND while it is plugged into my computer via micro USB cable. Husband comes home one day and asks if I’m drunk, since it looked like I was trying to vacuum my computer desk.

It works for a while, then Dim Green Light problem comes back.

And now the very very hard reset no longer works.

The internet (not Neato, they just say they can repair it out of warranty for a stupid amount of money) says that I could maybe try replacing a capacitor on the motherboard to fix the problem. If I had known that I needed proficiency in electrical engineering in order to run this vacuum, I would not have bought it.

Been there, done that, and even bought new batteries… works once or twice, then goes right back to the old 5 minutes and die (not even enough energy to return to base)… I think there’s a fundamental programming or hardware problem with these things, and there’s TOO MANY cases of “me too” for it to not be true, at least on some production runs… I even updated the firmware.

Tried to send back to MFG for repair/replace but couldn’t get them on the phone, nor any reply from emails on their site… It’s a shame… when it works, this thing is absolutely amazing.

Mine started having battery errors after the first 2 months. They wanted $49 to replace it on warranty.

I bought this about 6 months ago. Doesn’t come with instructions, I paid for the insurance stuff, but could never “activate” it. I never even tried to use it. It sits in the storage unit unused and will continue to.

Overall, bleh. Don’t bother.

This thing is a game changer. You won’t regret it

Yep. Where you once had money, now you only have a funky looking doorstop.

Our is not so cleverly named: Irene, after the lady who used to do our floors for us.

We have a U-shaped house, and it seems to do fine. I did have to make sure all cords were hooked up (we have tons). It gets stuck in placed that I’d expect it to–close quarters. We have lots of items on the floor–underbed storage, laptop tables, baskets, dog toys. It has no problem getting around most of it.

With 2 dogs and 3 cats, this is a godsend. I hope I’m one of the lucky ones and our battery lasts (had it only a few weeks). If not, it was an experiment, bought refurbished.

I don’t expect it to get everything; there is no way it could. But my house is much cleaner now on a 3x/week schedule.

I’m liking it.

Warning
I bought mine to add it to another Neato that I have had for a month and love it. This one was DOA- it had a battery issue that I spent 60 minutes with tech support to try to fix and they said the whole unit needs to be replaced. I have to pay return shipping costs to get it replaced. Not happy :frowning: