Recently I unpacked the newest Dyson vacuum to try it out. As someone who tests lots of gizmos, I wasn’t expecting to be blown away.

But when I pressed the trigger to activate the vacuum, my mouth gaped open. Dyson’s $700 V15 Detect has a laser that illuminates dust invisible to the human eye. To my horror, every inch of the floor was blanketed in a light layer of dog fur.

My corgi, Max, was no doubt the culprit. I vacuum the house often and occasionally get help from a professional cleaner. So the sight of so much fur even after all those efforts was horrifying.

Dyson’s laser-equipped vacuum is one of the latest examples of cleaning tech, an increasingly important category now that the pandemic has forced many of us to spend lots of time at home.

Along with the Dyson, I tested the latest automated cleaners — a robot vacuum and a robot mop — from iRobot, the maker of the Roomba. After a week, I concluded there are convenient ways to fit these gadgets into our lives.

Dyson laser vacuum

The V15 Detect is the latest stick vacuum from Dyson. Getting started is simple: you charge the battery, attach a cleaning head to the stick and press a button.

The device comes with seven cleaning heads for sucking up dust and dirt on hardwood floors, carpets and smaller areas like crevices. The roller attachment for hardwood is the one with the laser. It makes night vacuuming a thing — the darker it is, the more visible the laser.

Stick vacuums have generally served as a secondary cleaner to a full-size vacuum because of their short battery life and relatively weak suction.

I can confirm that the stick vacuum has come a long way. The Dyson’s suction was not as strong as my extremely powerful Miele bagged vacuum. But after two weeks of vacuuming with the stick, I didn’t feel a need to plug in the full-size vacuum.

The robots

It takes a while to get accustomed to the Roomba J7+, the $850 robot vacuum, and the Braava Jet M6, the $450 robot mop, both from iRobot. The devices rely on cameras, sensors and AI to create a map of your home. Once a map is created, you can label each room and tell the robots to clean specific areas or to clean everywhere.

It took the Roomba J7+ several runs to create a map of my home. For reasons still unknown, it kept skipping my master bedroom; only after I picked up the robot and started it up in there did it add the bedroom to its map.

The Braava Jet mop was even more finicky. It got stuck trying to go over a wood gap for a floor transition between rooms.

Spokespersons at iRobot said the robot mop was designed to be more sensitive so it didn’t inadvertently squirt water on areas like rugs, which is why it was unable to coast over the wood gap. They advised me to tinker with the threshold settings to teach the robot to go over floor transitions.

Even so, the robot mop rode onto my thin floor rug in the living room without hesitation. The company suggested I set boundaries in the map to tell the robot not to mop in certain areas.

What a hassle. In the end, I found the simplest solution was to share the Roomba’s map with the Braava Jet and instruct the mop to clean rug-free areas, like the bathroom and kitchen.

Assigning specific rooms to the robots was the sweet spot for people like me who work from home. So the next time I stepped out, I instructed the Roomba to vacuum the bedroom and the Braava Jet to mop the kitchen.

When I returned, both rooms looked clean. I was impressed with the Roomba’s ability to squeeze into areas where I normally wouldn’t vacuum, inside the coat closet and underneath my bed.

Bottom line

Robot vacuums and cleaners cannot entirely replace manual cleaning. Because of their size and shape, they will miss some corners and crevices, and they lack legs to climb up staircases. And these cleaning gadgets are as expensive as high-end smartphones. Still, if you buy one, it should be a stick vacuum. It makes cleaning easier and is likely to encourage you to vacuum more often.

Robots like the Roomba vacuum and the Braava Jet mop can be convenient, but they are best for people who have the enthusiasm and patience to deal with technology. Once put on the right path, they can lessen the load of endless house chores, which is a boon in a pandemic or out of one.

NYTNS