Review: iLife V8s

Designing a budget robot vacuum is an unenviable task. Most robot vacuums already operate within a very limited set of engineering constraints. They all have to be about the same size and make below a certain level of noise. The batteries have to operate for a certain length of time.

Within this set of constraints, the two dominant companies, Neato and iRobot, already offer affordable smart robot vacuums for under $300. You can buy iRobot’s entry-level vacuum for $299, and you can find Neato’s for a mere $200.

Can a budget robot vacuum offer something else that iRobot and Neato can’t? With the iLife V8s, the most obvious addition is a mopping function. Unlike with the Roomba 690 or the Botvac D3 Connected, you can switch out the V8s’s dustbin with a water tank and cloth mop to clean hard surfaces in your home.

But other than that, the V8s skimps on features. It isn’t Wi-Fi-enabled, so you can’t use it with Google Assistant or Alexa. You can't check maps or a dirt detect function on your phone. It has a large dustbin, but it was hard for it to collect enough dirt and dog hair to fill it up. In sum, in the several weeks that I used it, this robot vacuum failed to convince me that it was worth it.

Setup was fairly simple: Just plug in the docking station and set the botvac on it to charge. I discovered that three hours on the docking station was usually long enough for it to charge fully. I measured the V8s at 12.5 inches in diameter and a little over three inches high, which makes it slightly shorter than the Roomba 690 and perfect for getting under low cabinets and furniture.

You control the vacuum with the included remote, which takes two AAA batteries. On the remote, you can select different cleaning styles—spot mode, path, or borders—stop, start, manually direct the vacuum, tell it to go home, or bump it up to max mode. You can also control it via several clear and easy-to-read push buttons on the top of the botvac, which are set underneath an illuminated LCD.

While it was running, I measured it at a relatively quiet 60 decibels in normal mode, which went up to 67 dB in max mode. Even on max mode, the V8s was able to operate for almost 1.5 hours without recharging.

Using the botvac's buttons to set a cleaning schedule was a little like using predictive texting on a flip phone. It’s not hard, but it is time-consuming, and you find yourself irritated that you have to do it at all. First, you manually set the time, and then manually set the cleaning days. It's a lot of tedious, repetitive button pushing.

I did like the vacuum’s mopping function. The water tank fits about 10 ounces of water, which was enough to mop my 12 x 12-foot kitchen. The water tank regulates how much water can soak through the mop so that it doesn't soak a small patch of floor where you start it.

If you have an open floor plan, as I do, you can place the V8s at the edge of the imaginary barrier between your kitchen and living room, with the botvac's sensors facing in the direction you’d like it to go. The botvac will then mop behind a virtual line starting from where it was placed. Unfortunately, the V8s was not great at detecting the edges of a low-pile rug, so I couldn’t use it to mop our living room automatically.

But other than that, the V8s’s navigational capacities were excellent. Although the botvac didn’t come with any barriers, I found that it didn’t get stuck, either. The robot’s 11 obstacle-avoidance sensors and three sets of floor sensors helped it navigate smoothly around my house. Its cliff sensors weren't fooled by steps, and it stayed within the door jambs when I left the French doors open in the kitchen. In two weeks of testing, I never had to rescue it.

Of course, these great attributes are negated by the fact that the V8s was not that great at cleaning. Instead of a roller brush, the V8s uses tiny rubber flippers as carpet agitators, set around a small suction nozzle.

At a mere 5.9 pounds, the V8s doesn’t weigh nearly enough for these tiny flippers to agitate the carpet. It was ineffective at pulling dog hair out of our low-pile carpet, so much so that my spouse started using the push vacuum on our carpets and rugs after every cleaning cycle.

Each time I ran the V8s, it continued vacuuming for the full 1.5 hours until the battery drained. 1.5 hours should be fully sufficient to clean a 300-square foot house--some premium botvacs finish the job in around a half-hour--but I found high-traffic areas to still have dirt and dog hair when each run was finished.

One time, I ran the V8s only to find that it had pushed all the accumulated dog hair tumbleweeds out from under the couch, and laid them all precisely in a row where your feet go.

The V8s has a large dustbin capacity of 0.75 liters. At first, I was happy to not have to empty the dustbin once or twice during a run, until I realized that the V8s wasn't filling the dustbin at all—even in my filthy, dog hair coated garage. I suspect that one reason for this was that the V8s's suction nozzle kept clogging. Once or twice during a cleaning run, I had to flip the bot over and dislodge the wads of fur with a chopstick.

The large bin was also difficult to empty. The HEPA filter sticks down into the middle of the bin, and dirt and dog hair gets trapped behind it. I can empty most botvac dustbins by shaking them into the garbage can. But with the V8s, I used a cocktail shaker spoon to swipe out the dirt from behind the filter (don’t worry, I washed them both afterwards).

Excellent navigation is one of the most important attributes a robot vacuum can have, and it’s one at which the iLife V8s excels. It’s quiet, simple to operate, and well-priced. It also has certain thoughtful touches, like an automatic mopping navigation system that won’t cross into carpeted areas of your home.

However, if you're looking for a robot vacuum to make a significant dent in the amount of futzy detritus lying around your house, you'll be better served with another option. For just $30 more, you can control my mid-range pick, the Roomba 690, with your phone and get a much better clean.

So, I'm calling it: skip the iLife V8s. If you're going to have to be a bot babysitter full-time, you might as well just pick up a Swiffer, and clean the floor yourself. Spend the time you might have devoted to digging around this robovac's congested innards with your family instead.