OUR VERDICT
A triangular body allows the Electrolux PUREi9 to get at room edges and corners with ease, but for a product with this high a price point, the software behind the machine leaves a lot to be desired.
FOR
- Compact triangular design
- Climbs up to 22mm
- Excellent app connectivity
- Washable filter
- Reasonably quiet on Eco mode
AGAINST
- Mapping software needs improvement
- 40-minute battery life
- Undeniably pricey
Most robot vacuum cleaners on the market today are round, making it rather difficult for them to get into corners or thoroughly clean along the edges of a room. And combined with the fact that they generally work best on hard floors (like wood or tiles), it restricts the type of home a robot vacuum would fit into.
The Electrolux PUREi9, however, not only gets into corners and sweeps up everything along the edge of a wall, it runs quite well on low- and medium-pile carpets as well.
And while it can’t match the suction of a standard corded vacuum, in testing we found it still did a very good job of sucking up dust, crumbs, fluff, and even bits of gravel, off the floor in just a single pass.
However, while it’s neat to be able to put your feet up and let an AI take care of the cleaning, there’s plenty wanting in the PUREi9’s mapping software that could interfere with the peace of mind a robot vacuum’s supposed to provide – and that’s a huge disappointment when you consider the device’s undeniably hefty price tag and the fact that it performs best on a hard floor. So if you have wall-to-wall carpet, the PUREi9 isn’t for you.
Price and release date
The Electrolux PUREi9 will be available in Australia from March 15 and priced at AU$1,699 (about $1,325 / £954). We don’t have any news yet on availability and exact pricing for the UK and US, but we’ll update this review as soon as we do.
Compared to the competition, that’s a rather high price to pay for a robot vacuum that doesn’t include a mopping function as well. If you’re after one of the best robot vacuums available today, you’ll be shelling out close to $900 / £800 for the iRobot Roomba 980 in the US and UK. It will set Australians back by AU$1,499.
Design and build
It’s hard comparing the design of a round robot vacuum like the iRobot Roomba 980 to Electrolux PUREi9 – they’re apples and oranges, really.
The PUREi9 sports a triangular Trinity (as Electrolux calls it) design, while most other robot vacuums are round. Despite that difference, the PUREi9 is compact and won’t take up too much room in your home, but Electrolux insists it needs 0.5m of clear space on either side of the charging dock and 1.5m in front to be empty for it to function optimally each time the vacuum rolls off the charging dock.
The PUREi9’s built-in front bumper folds around the front corners of the unit and covers half the two sides and gives a little every time the robot vacuum encounters an obstacle, reducing the impact with which it hits the object. That said, the vacuum doesn’t ram into obstacles: Electrolux has installed a proprietary 3D Vision system that lets it perceive what’s ahead and slow down to almost nudge against something it can’t get around.
A slim protrusion on the right corner houses a small socket where you can plug in the unit’s optional PowerBrush attachment, a set of eight long plastic bristles that are perfect for those hard-to-get-at corners and for cleaning along the edges of walls. Electrolux recommends the brush be used on hard floors, so it’s removable for when you need the unit to clean a carpet or rug. Add to that the bar brush under the chassis which sweeps the floor as the unit drives around and you’re home is well taken care of.
The top sports a touch panel with controls for starting and stopping the machine, the Eco mode (more on that later), the Home button and the spot-clean option. While the unit is operational or while charging, all controls are brightly lit, along with the indication for the unit’s Wi-Fi connection. The display also shows the time of day while charging.
Just beyond the touch display is the button to release the bin, which pops out easily, while the front of the bumper houses the robot’s 3D Vision system that maps your home and detects obstacles.
One great thing about the PUREi9 is its ability to climb up to 22mm, thanks to Electrolux’s ClimbForceDrive technology. It’s a bit of a mouthful to say, but that basically means the large front wheels of the unit stay folded in when the the robot is on a flat surface, but are released when trying to climb over thresholds or ledges, increasing the height between the body and the floor. So, if you aren’t too careful, you could find the PUREi9 trying to explore the outdoors beyond your home.
Like most other robot vacuums, the PUREi9 also has enough low clearance to find its way under furniture where any standard vacuum can’t get at.
The PUREi9 comes with a charging station that you will need to place against a wall. It’s a very simplistic design, consisting of two charging plates on the floor panel and a front wall for the robot’s bumper to tuck itself into.
Initial setup
The PUREi9 is technically ready to go straight out of the box, but don’t expect it to begin doing anything logically if you try and use it this way.
For proper operation, you need to plug the charging dock into a wall socket first and then placing the PUREi9 onto the dock’s charging plate. Sadly, the battery indicator light doesn’t show the precise level of juice in the unit, but as long as it’s a bright white, you can run the vacuum.
Press the Start/Pause button and the robot will begin to hum and reverse its way off the charging dock. The unit will spend a second or two swivelling on its central axis and will then begin to drive itself.
Cleaning performance
For something so small, the PUREi9 does a rather thorough job (well, where it actually does manage to clean – more on that later), be that a hard floor or carpet. It does, however, have trouble on high-pile rugs or carpets as it can’t travel smoothly over these surfaces.
The unit has been programmed to detect obstacles and, when it does, it’ll actually swivel and use that PowerBrush to sweep around the base of the obstacle. This ensures that the edges of a room along a wall or furniture gets a good cleaning as well.
If the robot senses round obstacles, like the legs of furniture, it makes tiny adjustments to move along the circumference, not missing much.
The PUREi9 has a battery life of just 40 minutes in its standard mode, but switch to Eco mode and that gets bumped to an hour. We were able to run our review unit for an hour and five minutes on Eco mode before it needed to be refuelled.
Eco mode increases the battery life of the unit by reducing the suction power, but that doesn’t take anything away from the PUREi9’s cleaning capacity. Even with reduced suction, there’s enough power there to clear away dirt in a single pass.
If it runs out of juice half way through a clean, the PUREi9 is able to find its way back to the charging station, at least on paper. It takes the PUREi9 two hours to recharge and, once done, it’ll automatically start up again and try to finish the job… well, in theory. We say “in theory” because it won’t necessarily pick up where it left off. It will generally find its way to another room if you are cleaning a “complicated” multi-room space, like the apartment we were testing in.
Mapping the home
As the unit makes its way around the house, you can see the PUREi9’s 3D Vision at work. The robot will keep swivelling one way or another, sometimes even doing a 360-degree rotation on its central axis, as it attempts to map your home. Electrolux says the robot should move in a logical square spiral pattern in small rooms, starting at the outer edges, moving along the four walls, and then maneuvering slowing towards the centre.
That, however, was not what we experienced with our original testing. We ran that first unit on wall-to-wall carpets and, even after two weeks of running it every day, we saw no logical pattern to its movements. The longest distance we found the unit could travel in a straight line was about two feet, after which it changed direction – and not necessarily at a 90-degree angle. It seemed to head off in fairly random directions, even if there were no obstacles in its path.
It took our unit more than a week to learn the layout of the test space, which consisted of three bedrooms, a living and dining area and an open-plan kitchen. However, not once did the unit stay on a consistent path, instead pioneering a new route every time it started its cleaning routine.
More often than not, the same strip of floor will get cleaned multiple times before the vacuum moved on to another spot. For anyone watching, this can feel like it’s wasting its time, especially given the limited 60-minute battery life of the unit.
Although Electrolux promises that the device breaks up large spaces into smaller “cells”, we saw no clear indication of that happening. In our time testing the unit, large rooms often didn’t get cleaned completely. We would come home to find dust or fluff in certain sections of a room, while other parts would be spick and span.
Electrolux believed that the navigation issues we initially encountered were most likely due to a faulty review unit and send us a replacement, suggesting we place the charging station on a hard floor and allow the PUREi9 to start its cleaning cycle on either wood flooring or tiles. While starting the unit on tiles (in a very narrow kitchen area) did improve the droid’s performance, the fact that you need to do so does essentially limit the PUREi9 to being used in homes with either hardwood floors or tiles. That’s a less-than-ideal situation in an age when many homes come with wall-to-wall carpets.
Another problem we faced was the inconsistency of the unit in finding its way back to the charging station. Like most robot vacuums, the PUREi9 attempts to return to its dock when its battery is low, or when its bin needs emptying. Unfortunately, it was the rare occasion when we found our review unit actually made its way back easily. For the most part, rather than going straight back to base, it got lost within rooms and we had to either guide it back by using our feet as obstacles (in the hope that it would remember the path of least resistance) or just switch it off and place it back ourselves.
Left to its own devices, it would sometimes just give up trying and shut itself down in the middle of the room, even though the battery indicator showed it still had some power, and we’d have to pick it up and place it back on the dock ourselves. Pressing the Home button would start the machine, but it still wouldn’t be able to find its way back.
Even if the PUREi9 did find its way to the dock, it took a heck of a long time to align itself to the charging plates. The protrusion for the corner brush seemed to give it grief every time, making it come off the station and keep maneuvering to find the right angle repeatedly.
Although we didn’t get to spend as much time with the new review unit as we did with the first, the second PUREi9 (which also had a new firmware) we received was able to return to the charger quicker, charting a path that it might have mapped out as optimal.
App control
While it isn’t necessary to use it to control the PUREi9, the vacuum does come with an accompanying app that’s available for both Android and iOS. Via the app, you can set up a cleaning schedule and even start, stop or send the unit back to its dock (or Home).
Connecting the unit to the app is child’s play – just follow the instructions on screen and it doesn’t take more than a minute or two to get set up.
Any commands issued by the app are carried out instantaneously, and you can even use the app remotely over the internet – which is very handy if you’re bringing home unexpected guests and want it to do a quick clean before you get there.
The first version of the app that we used was quite simplistic: other than the basic controls and the scheduling, no other information was available. You couldn’t view the map of the cleaned area or determine battery levels, and nor could you get notifications or alerts from the unit (if it got stuck somewhere, for example). While most of those features are still not included in the updated version of the app, Electrolux has at least added a map of the area being cleaned.
However, there is a significant lag between the position of the PUREi9 in the physical room and its position on the virtual map. We found that the robot would often have returned home but the map still showed the droid as cleaning.
The map shown doesn’t really resemble an architectural floor plan, like Roomba or Ecovacs companion apps, but it will give you the general shape of the home to give you an idea of where the PUREi9 has been, useful if you’re keeping tabs on it remotely.
Maintenance
Cleaning out the bin is a cakewalk: press the rectangular release just beyond the touch panel and the bin pops out. The top cover lifts off the clear plastic bin easily for you to empty the contents. Plus, the bin is large enough for a few runs (perhaps two or three if you have a carpet floor) before it needs to be cleaned out. Of course, the triangular android will let you know when its bin needs a clean.
Between the red-framed mesh and the top panel is the dust filter, which slips off for a wash or a quick brush with soft bristles. Once cleaned, the bin easily snaps back into place.
Like most newer robot vacuums, the PUREi9 will speak to you when needed – if it gets entangled in wires and cables, it will verbally ask for help (albeit in a slightly robotic voice), or in case there’s an error it will mention what has come to pass so you can fix it. If the bin hasn’t been fitted in properly before the next clean, you will hear it ask you to insert it correctly, and it will ask you to empty the bin quite politely when it’s full.
Verdict
While we can’t fault the hardware, Electrolux has seemingly struggled with the software side of things. Excellent physical cleaning performance and perfect app control is all for naught if a robot vacuum doesn’t clean in any logical pattern, which in the PUREi9’s case means it can miss large sections of a space or clean some spots repeatedly.
We get the feeling the PUREi9 would operate more effectively in small, simple spaces – like a sparsely furnished studio or small home (specifically, one with hard floors). But for a unit that comes with a price tag this high, we’d argue it should do well in multi-room dwellings with wall-to-wall carpets, too. Plus it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the competing robot vacuums, like the iRobot Roomba range, to otherwise help justify the cost – it doesn’t mop and the app has very limited functionality.
If Electrolux fixes the troubled mapping algorithm, however, we reckon the PUREi9 could make for an excellent robot vacuum. Being a slow learner isn’t always a bad thing, especially given how impressive the hardware is. So it’s a pity the smarts don’t (yet) live up to the same standard.
Source: techradar.com
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