iLIFE A6 Smart Robotic Vacuum Cleaner

We’ve been exploring getting a robot cleaner for our Minton home since moving in 4.5 years now, but kept putting it off on account that these devices were pretty expensive back then. The branded ones from LG, Samsung and Roomba were priced just shy of a thousand dollars here. Way too much for the convenience it was going to bring us!

There’s quite a bit more range these days, with these Chinese manufacturers also producing their own lines of cleaners. Just about as good a time as any to try one out then. One of the best things going for the iLIFE A6 Smart Robotic Vacuum Cleaner for us was its price: it cost just SGD271, including shipping. As with the other techno-gadgets we talk about on this site, this equipment was purchased out of of our own pocket. The reseller we bought from – Gearbest – is an online reseller based in China and one of the more popular stores for consumers to buy technological gadgets that are not normally available locally. The unit from the point of purchase to delivery took just a week, and the unit was successfully setup and running in just 5 minutes.

And a week after having the A6 cleaning up the house:

Ling was pretty impressed right after the first time the robot finished a round on the house – and the wife has very high standards when it comes to household cleanliness. The two guinea pigs shed a crazy amount of hair that show up visibly against the bright-colored tiles we’ve got in the corridor – and sweeping them up every day was a dreadful chore. The robot cleaner now makes short work of it – and the effort and time saved here alone would been worth the price of the product.

The A6’s battery enables the robot to run for about 2.5 hours. Though given that the cleaner also needs some time to find its way back to the docking station when its battery is almost depleted, the actual operating time is probably just over 2 hours. Still sufficient for the robot to crawl the 1,495 square foot apartment several times over though.

We initially placed the docking station underneath the living room’s feature wall – out of sight and mind – but the A6 had some difficulties finding the station on its return home, given that there’s a large +1 seater right in front of the dock LOL. So, the dock was moved to a more visible but somewhat more unglam location for the A6 to pick-up its homing signal.

Oddly, I’ve been unable to get the robot to start on its daily schedule. I’m probably not setting parameters on the remote controller properly, so the unit has been started daily manually.

The A6 is rather basic in its features: apart from the remote controller to set timing and schedule, spot cleaning and cleaning modes, there’s no wireless or Bluetooth connectivity, and (apparently) no memory or sense-making of the apartment. The cleaning patterns look pretty random and like by brute-force.

There seems to be a set of directly front-sensors to detect oncoming furniture, but the collision detection doesn’t seem to work when the object isn’t squarely in the front of the unit. So, the A6 does bump into furniture quite a bit, though thankfully not violently so since it’s a fairly slow-moving to begin with.

Floor rags and cables will get the A6 jammed up. Though the robot will also quickly timeout and power-down when it senses it can’t move.

Watching YouTube videos of robot cleaners gives one an impression that many of these machines can make a din when it’s doing its work. Interestingly, the A6 runs relatively quiet. It’s not nearly approaching silence of course, but the A6 emits an audible purr as it makes its way around the house. It’s inoffensive but yet just about loud enough for you to hear it across the apartment. Setting it on turbo mode though will result in a noise level that approaches traditional vacuum cleaners though.

The relatively diminutive overall size and low profile were key selling points. Apartments are fairly small on the island, and with two kids and two pets at home, we’ve got a lot of furniture! The unit measures 12.2 inches across and has a better chance of squeezing through furniture gaps without us having to re-arrange the house everyday before the robot can do a round of cleaning. A good case in point is our dining table with its set of six chairs. Many of the robot cleaners can also be fairly tall, and we have a living room sofa that allows for just 3 inches of clearance from the floor. The A6 has a height of 2.8 inches and is able to sneak in comfortably to suck up all the goodness knows what gunk accumulated underneath the sofa after all these years.

Aside from the main cleaner and docking station, the box also included a bunch of accessories: additional brushes, a battery-operated virtual wall, remote controller, and a multi-language manual printed on heavy glossy paper, but was on the other hand also poorly bound at its spine – pages can easily get detached if you lay the book flat.

In all, the A6 isn’t the best device in its class. That it’s an exported device from China also puts doubt on any kind of support or warranty follow-up if I ever need it. The higher performance robots have loads more features, including connectivity, better room sensing and – importantly – memory too. But for the price we paid for it, we can’t complain too much – and the time we’ve saved having to sweep hair balls everyday is significant. So, the A6 gets a recommendation from us as an entry-level basic robot cleaner – and we’ll probably spring for a better model once this one expires!