Better Decisions Through Data.
Given our own work in this area, we were very skeptical this would work correctly, and told the Moneual representative that. If you just open the window in urban California (or in urban Europe, where Moneual is from) you will get a huge day-to-day fluctuation in dust (both PM2.5 and PM10.). You can’t use a sensor to turn on your robotic vacuum, or it will trigger falsely as a result of opening the door or window! (Even funnier, as described, a forest fire, like the Colby Fire outside of Los Angeles, could trigger the vacuum!)
(It’s a different story if the sensor keeps tract of cumulative dust in the air, since that could indicate the amount of dust that has built up on the carpet. But the Moneual rep denied that the sensor was recording cumulative dust, only current dust levels. We wanted to know if it was monitoring PM2.5 or PM10 dust levels, so asked the rep about the size of dust particles that were detected. He didn’t know, but did offer to demonstrate with some grains of sugar. We have not seen grains of sugar floating in the air much where we live, so we do not think this a good demonstration! But, obviously, it is intented to be sensitive to at least the larger (but reportedly less dangerous) dust particles. This may work in places with very clean air, so that any dust is indicative of a need to run the vacuum. However, with weekly vacuuming, most of the dust in the air in the more typical urban environment is the result of incoming pollution, not dust coming off the carpet, so we do not think this will work, at least as the rep explained it to us.
If Moneual wants to get in touch and tell us more about the sensor, and how to convert those numbers to PM2.5 or PM10 readings (assuming that’s what it reads), we’d be happy to support their sensor in our app.
Moneual versus iRobot Roomba
If you look at reviews on Amazon, it seems consumers still prefer the iRobot Roomba robot vacuums over the Moneual MR6550 Rydis Hyrbrid. We’ve used robotic vacuums for what seems like a decade now, and have experience both with the nearly decade-old Roomba Discovery SE and the more recent Roomba 770 robotic vacuum.
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So, if I understand correctly, your vacuum will monitor how much dirt it picks up from the floor? Do you end up with a spreadsheet to optimize the frequency of vacuuming? How incredibly modern!
All of the robotic vacs we mention have these dirt sensors (and the Moneual takes it a step further by trying to monitor dirt in the air and automatically determining when to start the vac, although we were dubious about how well this worked).
We see you run an on-line vacuum review site, so are surprised you weren’t aware that dirt sensors in robotic vacs have been around for a very long time. (And, as we talk about in this article, have started to get added to traditionally, non-robotic vacs.)
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The Roomba has had various dirt sensors for decades. The original was an ultrasonic sensor that detected the sound of dirt as it entered the dustbin. This adjusted the behavior of the robot. If it saw a lot of dirt entering the dustbin over a certain area, it would give that area more attention. This was a very important feature of the higher-end Roombas (the cheapest base Roombas did offer the ultrasonic sensor, but it has been part of the “early” Roomba Discovery SE etc which have been available before 2005). The more modern Roombas have even added additional sensors to help the on-board algorithms recognize areas that are dirty and also help it determine when it is done cleaning.
So having the on-board vacuum algorithmics monitor the dirt coming in (and even the dust in the air) is serious business, and vacuum doesn’t work correctly without it. We were also amused by the newer ability of these vacs to offer the ability for the user to monitor the amount of dirt vacuumed (e.g., via the Moneual’s app, which the Roomba has now duplicated). With the ability to tap into the on-line cameras on these vacs, and the addition of a direct or indirect Internet connection (which the older Roomba did not have), there are some Internet of Things security concerns, unfortunately. There is the possibility Skynet could hack into an Internet-connected vac (or your Internet-connected toilet) someday.