I’m a fan of robot vacuum cleaners. They take the one job I hate doing on a daily basis and make a passable effort at it, keeping the dust, pet hair and crumbs down to a minimum through sheer determination and dogged repetition.
I have yet to find one that can tackle stairs, but I’ll happily take on that job if it means the rest of the house is largely managed by the robot.
It vacuums, it mops, it finds its own way back to the dock 99 per cent of the time (the other 1 per cent it got marooned under the sofa), and it links in with the Aeno smart home system that also includes heaters, air purifiers and other home appliances.
The Aeno RC2S robot comes in two finishes – glossy black and glossy white – with a neat dock to charge up the robot in between cleaning sessions. Inside the box you’ll find two bins – one for dust and dirt, one for water – some mop pads and spare side brushes.
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The first thing I would recommend is turning down the volume on the robot. It likes to talk to you, and even at its lower volumes, the automated voice is loud
Set-up is quite easy: install the app on your phone, plug in the robot and connect everything up to your home wifi. Once you have the app up and running, you can start setting up schedules for cleaning, mapping your home and setting the virtual barriers for the device.
The first thing I would recommend is turning down the volume on the robot. It likes to talk to you – confirming commands, changing modes, telling you when it is charging and so on. I’m all for communication, but even at its lower volumes, the automated voice is loud. That’s fine at lunchtime, but not so great at 6am, when it could wake the entire house as it starts its daily routine.
Having said that, it makes it easy to find when the robot has got lost somewhere under the furniture. You could look at the cleaning map to see where it stopped, or you could use the “find vacuum cleaner” feature in the settings. Hit that and the vacuum will start saying “I’m here”, allowing you to track it down.
There are three vacuum modes: low, medium and turbo. For the most part I left the Aeno device on medium, and it was enough to pick up pet hair and everyday dirt and dust. Turbo was only for rugs and serious spills, and it seriously hammered battery life.
The cleaner has a suction power of 2500pa, which is enough to give you a daily clean of your home and deal with regular dirt and dust. To navigate, it has a lidar sensor on its body, along with sensors in the bumpers to deal with anything the lidar can’t spot. The lidar is the most useful, creating an accurate, editable map of your home in minutes. It also means that the robot should recognise new obstacles in its path, such as if you have moved furniture. Creating new maps is much simpler than sending the robot around to bump into things in its path.
The Aeno device comes with a large water tank that takes the place of the dust bin in the vacuum, so you can get all the hard floors mopped in one go
Within the app itself, there are options to set up rooms, so you can clean by room or zones, and you can set your preference for a particular order for cleaning. This is particularly handy if your home will push the limits of the device’s battery. On medium mode, you’ll get a couple of hours of cleaning out of it before it has to return to the dock, but it’s always best to get the most important rooms out of the way first.
A lot of the features you will find on other robot vacuums. So why opt for the Aeno device? For me it was the mopping function. Most of the hybrid mop and vacuuming robots do the bare minimum on the former, the equivalent of wiping a damp rag over the floor. And the water tanks are tiny, so you might only get one room in before your need to refill the tank.
The Aeno device comes with a large water tank that takes the place of the dust bin in the vacuum, so you can get all the hard floors mopped in one go. You can also control the water flow to make sure your floors don’t get soggy.
It does mean you will have to be a little more organised, however. If you want to mop, send the vacuum around first, or your cleaner will just drag the dust around with the mop pad, occasionally leaving small damp dust balls or depositing pet hair. You’ll also need to remember to empty the water tank when you are done, or risk it leaking out on to the floor over time.
Good
Overall, the Aeno cleaner does a good job. It manages the pet hair generated by the feline member of the household, and with regularly scheduled cleaning, manages the everyday dirt and dust brought into the home. Our home is largely hard floors, but it also does a decent enough job on carpet. Battery life is also quite good, with the vacuum managing to do the lower floor of my home without nipping back to the dock to power up. The turbo mode most suited for carpets is a drain on the battery, and so will require more time on the dock to get your home fully cleaned. However, there is an option to pick up interrupted cleaning sessions where they left off, so it won’t leave the same bit of carpet undone every time.
The app is simple but covers almost everything you need. You can set the vacuum to auto mode, where it will clean until it is finished, tell it vacuum a specific room or zone, or direct it to a spot in a room and let it work away.
Bad
I would have liked notifications when there was an error with the robot, such as when it gets stuck or has snarled up a cable in its brush bar. While the cleaner will announce what it’s doing, that is no good when I am out of ear shot or have the volume turned down.
Voice control is spotty, though that may have been more to do with Google Home’s quirks than Aeno.
Everything else
The app also functions as the manual controls for the cleaner. If you want to clean a specific section of your home, you can manually guide it there and let it do its thing. The app tells you when it is time to replace things like the roller bar or the side brushes.
Verdict
A good hybrid cleaner, as long as you have mostly hard floors.
