February 5, 2025

266 - Year of the RoboVac 💨🤖

Welcome to an upgraded newsletter - we out here reviewing a robovac!

Hey there, !

Before we get into this week's post, I wanted to thank and welcome all those who have come to this little corner of the internet through last week's Zodiac. I hope you enjoyed it! It's one of my favourite posts to write, and when y'all share it with others and tell me about it, it pours into me like rivers of dopamine - the happy chemicals just flood in 🥹🥹🥹

If you're new, I can tell you for a fact that that post is a once-off during the year. You can probably safely ignore the next 51 issues of this newsletter, but...y'know, it's called Potentially Interesting for a reason :D Maybe you'll find something fun to read in the main post, or in a link down the bottom, or a new recommendation. Maybe you'll start recommending me stuff too!

Regardless, I hope you have some fun for however long you stay. It's been 5 years writing this newsletter now and I don't see it stopping any time soon :D

For those who have been around a while, the reason that last week's post came a bit later is because I had to upgrade my plan (I've gone over the 100 subscriber limit of the Free Plan from my provider!) - this means I'm going to have access to a few new features (like paid subscriptions, surveys and comments on the archive) as well as more control over the formatting of these emails (like today's one!). Please brace for some changes as I experiment - and let me know your thoughts! (you can reply to this email with any feedback :))

Anyway - let's dive in!

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Thanks to my loving family, I got a robovac over the Christmas break. Perhaps it's because they saw my house and thought it was too dirty (lol thx) or because of my mum's core belief that cats are full of germs and are also dirty so having a robovac around would be useful (maybe true?).

Gandalf seems to have gotten used to it though:

It's the eufy x10 Pro Omni - yes, it's exxy (as most robovacs are!), but it was on a steep discount (from what I have gathered) so doubly a good purchase for the Asian parents.

Anyway, here's a few thoughts on the product - not whether you should buy it, but my observations in testing it for a few weeks:

• NB: I should say, to begin, that the main mess I had around my house was from Gandalf's fur and also the little cardboard bits he leaves around after using his scratchers. Other than that, I usually did a fortnightly vacuum and maybe 4 - 6 week mop? My tolerance for mess is high mainly because I want my deep cleans to be as efficient as possible while also making it not too disgusting to walk around. Granted, it was a bit dusty, but I thought it was fine? Evidently, my family thought otherwise.

• NBB: I named it LunaVac because devices in my house all have Moon-themed names.

  So anyway...

1. It does what it says on the box - it's a robot vacuum that can clean and mop. Everywhere I go I have clean floors when I walk around - even for 'maintenance' which most people say they get robovacs for, it's pretty tidy! I like that it shows me the path on the map that it took; the mapping of my floorplan was pretty quick and very accurate, and it gets around obstacles pretty well. I noticed that it was really good at cleaning around chair legs, and it got better at navigating my space over time. You can also set no-go zones which is useful if you have some particularly sensitive areas to deal with.

   

2. The physical design is pretty swish - it's black, which we love the sleek lines of, and it's a little bit squarer at the front (like, rounded corners) which means it can get into corners better. It's nice to look at, and it doesn't seem like it gets too messy or unclean (at least, in the month or so that I've used it). There's obviously suction for the vacuum, but also mop pads and a little swishy thing that guides dust and bits into the vacuum. On one occasion, LunaVac got caught up in a cord which pulled off one of the mop pads - luckily, because it uses magnets, it was super easy to pop back on. Very nice touch. Another time, it told me it had something stuck in the vacuum, which was super easy to pop open and check the compartment for - it wasn't confusing or too dirty to handle, which I appreciated. Again, really nice touch. It's also relatively quiet (Gandalf isn't scared of Luna at all) and has a light for low-light situations so the camera can still see stuff.

3. There's lots of AI functions that you can use to essentially set and forget. It uses AI to see obstacles, it uses AI to sense what kind of surfaces it's on, it maps your house with cameras / sensors of some sort, and it's pretty accurate about it! There's a 'Smart Clean' function that will work out the optimal way of cleaning your house - both from a mapping point of view, but also a surfaces point of view as well. It has an 'AI.See' function which purports to be able to use camera vision to identify exactly what obstacles are in it's way (i.e. is it a shoe? is it an electrical cable?) and act accordingly.

4. The app is not as user-friendly as I think it should be - it looks swish, but it's functionally shit. Setting schedules, setting customisations and understanding why things are different colours is difficult to work out - it would definitely not pass the mum test because it requires you to poke around and find the settings in different places and isn't intuitive. There are scheduling functions which are hidden 3 layers down, there are 'scenarios' which you can set up that are a bit hard to understand why I should choose something over the other (which is why they have a 'Smart Clean' function using AI I guess), the button to go into Robovac settings is 'Enter' for some crazy reason, the icons are weird and non-descriptive...it's not a FULL mess, but it's a medium mess.

   

5. Returning to base seems inefficient - Luna has to go back to base every so often to clean mop pads, and perhaps it's just me, but there's only settings to either

   a. return to the base station to clean mop pads every 15-25 minutes, or

   b. return to the base station to clean mop pads after every room.

   My problem was that I got a lot of small rooms, and big rooms; how do I know how long they'll take to decide if I should do room by room or on a schedule? Why can't I code it so that it cleans after X rooms or at a logical break in rooms? Maybe it could be after a certain square meterage rounded up to the number of rooms you have? It just seems illogical to, in the middle of cleaning a room, go back and clean the mop pads which takes like 5 - 10 minutes, and then go back out again. Then again, it's pretty clean and they're the designers so okay sure.

6. The battery life is...okay- I think when I first opened it up, it had 75% battery, and it had to take two breaks to recharge (though I was doing a deep clean for the first clean so maybe that takes more time and energy?). Then again, it's supposed to be a maintenance type robovac so I guess it doesn't really matter about the breaks. It DID once wake up at 2am when I specifically said don't disturb me between the hours of 10pm to 8am - so...not sure why that happened but okay. It hasn't happened since that one time though.

7. The scheduling works well - I've had it do a Tuesday/Thursday afternoon vacuum, and a Saturday morning 'deep clean' which keeps the place really clean and tidy. There have been a few issues with it starting on time (I lost connection with it once on my WiFi which I had to reset for some reason), but they've now cleared up. Cat toys get eaten up so I usually try to clear up the rooms before Luna goes for a clean, but the maintenance cleans do what they need to. Great job LunaVac.

Genuinely, I have stopped vacuuming myself now on a regular basis. I did it before Chinese New Year, and there are a few nooks and crannies that Luna can't get to that I might do a handheld sweep for, but other than that, on the whole, it's brilliant. I feel like I save a lot of time and my floors are clean - and isn't that what it's all about?

On the flipside, I've gotten into a bad habit of literally just sweeping shit off my table on to the floor because 'Luna will get it'. Not a great habit, but that's what robovacs are for, right? :D

Chat soon :)

Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!

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✔️Real Life Recommendations

1. Of the Oscar film nominations, I knocked off two of them which would be nice to recommend - Conclave: if you're religious and / or want to see some old men fight over power in a kind of investigative Holmes-ian way, but also snarkily in a Mean Girls kind of way; and Anora: which sells itself as a sex romp but becomes way more nuanced - and features one of the best henchman teams seen on film. I still want to watch The Brutalist and I'm Still Here but they're hard to find and watch!

2. The Penguin - I'm so impressed that 1. I couldn't see Colin Farrell at ALL in his insanely great depiction of the Penguin, and 2. that Cristin Milioti (the Mother from How I Met Your Mother) absolutely KILLED this role. It kept the vibe of The Batman and fell deeper into the sordid underworld of its villains; it's one of the best series that I can remember in recent memory that successfully dived into 'what happens next' after a movie, and explained the motivations behind the villain without trying to make them 'right'. Absolutely fantastic series that I'm a bit late for, but it was v worth it.

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🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway

1. Macrodata Refinement - if you're watching Severance, you might want to try your hand in MDR?

2. ShadeMap - this tool simulates what the sun and shadows will look like at any place in the world (based on the topography of the area). It's a fascinating tool to look at - not sure what to use it for yet, but that's most of the links I have here so :D

3. An asteroid got deleted because it was actually Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster - my main reaction was 'they didn't think of tracking this before??'. Fun astronomy finds.