REVIEW – Trying to keep a house clean with three cats, a dog, two rabbits and chickens out back is pretty hard. While I try to vacuum at least once a week, my dust bunnies keep breeding faster than I can exterminate them. This is where the Tesvor S6 robot vacuum comes in super handy with the automatic running schedule and real time laser mapping, I’m able to be at work and have the Tesvor S6 vacuum with the peace of mind that the house will be clean when I come home.
What is it?
The Tesvor S6 robot vacuum is a laser guided, artificially intelligent vacuum which can clean your house on its own.
What’s in the box?
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- Tesvor S6 robot vacuum
- Charging dock & power cord
- Remote
- Cleaning tool
- Replacement left & right brushes
- Replacement high efficiency filter
- User guide
Hardware Specs
- Navigation system: Gyroscope Navigation
- Voltage/Power: 14.4V/25W
- Size: 13.4” x 3.9” / 34cm x 9.8cm
- Weight: 7.7lbs / 3.5kg
- Dust Bin Capacity: 20oz / 600mL
- Battery Capacity: 2600mAh
- Operating Noise: <70db
- Operating Environment: 32-104°F / 0-40℃, <85% humidity
- Operating Speed: 20 yards / 18 meters per minute
- Grade: <15°
- Fan Speed: 20000 per minute
- Suction Max: 2700 Pa
- App: WEBACK
- Motor: Brush Motor
- Mapping: Laser SLAM
- Runtime: 95~120 minutes
Design and Features
The Tesvor S6 is full of sensors. It has a front bumper sensor as well as front scanning sensors which allows it to gently bump into things as it navigates around the house. The disk on top of the vacuum houses the rotating scanning laser which maps the whole house as it runs. It is able to detect small protrusions and even where a door is open or closed. The map it creates is updated every time the vacuum is run which makes the map more and more detailed and accurate the longer the robot is in use.
On the underside of the vacuum, there are two side sensors (circled in purple in image above), which monitor the surface the vacuum is operating on. These sensors also detect if the robot is near a staircase or drop off. I have a sunken living room with a step down into it. I’ve never had any issues with the robot falling into the living room or down the stairs. The charging points, (circled in red in the image above), match up to the charging dock while charging. If the robot doesn’t sense that both points are in contact with the dock, it will readjust its position until correctly docked.
Along with the large center rotating brush, there are two rotating brushes on each side of the vacuum. They are removable for cleaning and are clearly color-coded and labeled to designate which side each of the brushes attach too. I haven’t had too much debris that is too large for the vacuum but if anyone has long hair in the household, you will need to frequently cut anything tangled around the brushes off. The cleaning tool included with the vacuum has a built in blade for that task specifically which makes it easier to free the brushes from anything entangled around it.
One of the features I love about the vacuum is it has two filters both of which can be cleaned and reused. The main filter is a micro-mesh that snaps inside the bin that can be washed reused. The high efficiency filter is a smaller fabric/paper filter that is located on the top of the bin. While you can’t wash it out, the included tool has a brush on one end designed specifically to clean out the filter. The main filter, which is washable, catches most of the dust so the high efficiency filter doesn’t get as dirty so a quick brush down will get it pretty clean. It is also possible to replace the high efficiently filter with the one included or purchase more from Tesvor website. The dust bin itself is pretty small so if you have a large house you’ll have to pause it midway through running and empty it otherwise it doesn’t clean as well as it should.
The Tesvor S6 is self-homing which means the charger base sends out a signal to tell the robot where it is at all times so it is able to locate it and recharge on its own. While cleaning it will automatically recharge itself and resume where it left off on its own. This means that you will never have to come home and try to locate a dead robot somewhere in the house.
My cats think it’s a really interesting toy and love chasing the robot around while it’s running. I’ve had no issues with the Tesvor S6 thinking that my cats are an inanimate object or running into them as they bat at the vacuum. It merely continues on its designated cleaning pattern without deviating from the route.
This vacuum is capable of mopping as well. This accessory is purchased separately from the vacuum. This review focuses on the vacuum itself not on the mopping attachment.
App
Overall this robot was kind of hard to get to work. It often loses its connectivity to the Wi-Fi. In order to get it to reconnect, you have to turn it off while it’s on the charging dock, then pull it off of it so the vacuum no longer charging. After about five minutes, push it back onto the dock while still off then turn it on once the robot is charging again. This is super inconvenient especially since nearly every time I found it wasn’t connected, I was at work.
The robot uses LIDAR to create a map of your house. This is really awesome because it constantly updates the map as it’s running so if anything changes such as a chair wasn’t pushed in, it is able to adjust appropriately live. It is key to note that the map is automatically created so in order to get the map oriented the way you wish, you have to keep clearing the map in the app until it scans the correct orientation.
It has three running levels, quiet, standard and strong. The battery life on quiet mode is about two hours while strong drops it down to about 90 minutes. I found that running it on quiet mode worked fine for me and didn’t leave anything behind. In order to assist the robot in cleaning the app provides options to send the robot to a specified location, set a zone to clean, create a virtual line, indicate restricted zones and locate where the robot position is. In the screenshots above, I used the virtual line to prevent the robot from getting to close to the drop down living room.
Sometimes only a certain room needs to be vacuumed instead of the whole house. That’s where the zone function is useful. Above shows that I specified the robot to only vacuum the dining room.
I also had quite a bit of trouble getting the robot to automatically clean the house in a logical pattern. While testing it, the machine had multiple updates, every time it updated it seemed to work really well for one or two runs and then it would go back to being kind of weird and not very efficient. The last time I ran this right before I wrote this review, was the first time it actually cleaned the whole house un-assisted. Before that, I had to keep designating zones for it to clean to make sure it covered the whole house.
The screenshot above shows the way the vacuum navigates the house on its own. I’ve put colored rectangles around each of the areas the robot mapped out and then cleaned before moving onto the next area.
What I like
- The live updating laser mapping
- Washable filter
- Self-charging and resume cleaning
What I’d change
- Better WiFi connection
- Consistent operation, accurate cleaning every time
- Ability to rotate map
- Self-emptying base or larger dust bin
Final thoughts
While I’m very impressed with the LIDAR live updating map, the actual logic of the way it vacuums the house needs to be more consistent. It also isn’t as convenient as one might think due to the constant loss of WiFi connection. However, with a bit of tweaking, the Tesvor S6 vacuum robot has the potential to be one of the best automatic vacuums on the market.
Price: $299.99 (Amazon)
Where to buy: Tesvor and Amazon
Source: The sample for this review was provided by Tesvor
