NEWS – I am a huge fan of Neato’s Botvac robot vacuums. I have two of them in my home. One for the main floor and one for the basement. They are both scheduled to automatically run 3 times a week, but now that we’re replacing the carpet on our main floor with luxury vinyl planks that look like barn wood, we’ve found that we need to keep those areas vacuumed more often due to Max tracking his cat litter. Luck for me and you if you own a Neato Botvac D7 Connected, there’s a software update which adds a new zone cleaning feature.
With zone cleaning, users can add extra cleaning for specific rooms or custom areas of a home that require additional cleaning and schedule the work to happen in addition to Neato’s regular household routine. The feature allows you to:
- Create zones on your floor that make the most sense for your life, be it an entire room or just a trouble area.
- Name zones using a list of pre-determined labels or create custom zone names.
- Make multiple, overlapping zones in a single floor plan. Zones can be placed in any way that works for your lifestyle and your home.
- Add No-Go Lines to any zone, creating off-limits areas in any area or room of your home
- Deploy Zone Cleaning across multiple floorplans, pinpointing zones for a more efficient clean, controlled on-demand or scheduled via the Neato app.
When my D7 gets the update, I’ll be able to have it vacuum the areas of my main floor that no longer has carpet each day so that I don’t have to see little cat litter granules or cat fur tumbleweeds flying around.
This new feature will begin rolling out to users of the Botvac D7 Connected via a software update today on Tuesday, December 4th, and the rollout is expected to be complete by the weekend. For more info about Neato Botvacs, you can visit Neatorobotics.com and their Amazon page. I love love love mine!
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Hi,
We have a single-level home that’s 2700sqft of floor area. In the past (several years ago, when I last checked), botvacs could not do such a large area in a single go and one had to manually setup areas for them to do. Can today’s crop recharge themselves when they run low and then continue where they left off when they’re recharged? Or, perhaps battery power has gotten good enough so 2700sqft can be done in a single go? Also, can they now map out the entire floor plan on their own?
Yes, they will run for as long as they can and then go back to the dock and finish cleaning where they left off once they have recharged. 🙂
Sorry for the follow-up question: how long does it take them to recharge? If you’re scheduling the vac to run while you’re out of the house, could the recharging get in the way and the ‘bot then tries to finish when you’re home again – or, worse yet, when you’ve gone to sleep? Or is this “finishing” also scheduleable?
Good question! I am not quite sure. It might be different for each model depending on the battery capacity. No, I don’t believe you can customize when it will finish cleaning after recharging. But with their new zone cleaning update, you could create zones and schedule cleaning in a 1/3rd of your house at say 10am, then zone 2 at noon, and finally zone 3 at 2pm. Depending on your work day, cleaning would hopefully be done by the time you arrived home in the evening.
Talking about Neato D7 Aug 2019.
The battery seems capable of about 1200 sq ft. in the ECO mode. We have 80% of our flooring is tight weave carpet. Non-carpet areas take less power so you may get more sq ft.
For the D7, if it runs an hour, it will need about an hour to charge back to 100%. D7 has quick boost which is suppose to charge a tad more than needed to finish up.
The D7 will run down to 7-12% remaining charge before heading to charging dock. It will charge up and then start up where it left off.
We broke our floor plan into individual rooms and schedule each room during the week. We have yet to run a complete schedule but figure most room will be an hour to an hour & half max. Fully charged the D7 should complete 90 to 120 minutes new.
Thanks for the additional info. Very helpful.