For the past two months, a robot has been cleaning the windows of my home. If you weren’t aware of the existence of robotic window cleaners, you’re not alone. I’d never heard of them before I caught sight of one shimmying its way up a pane of glass at a gadgets and appliances show, and everyone I speak to about my new automated home helper has responded with surprise, or – occasionally – disbelief.
If you’re curious about how I got on with my particular windowbot, you can head to my Hobot S7 Pro review (or check out my teammate’s Ecovacs Winbot W2 Pro Omni review for a best-in-class, 5-star example). Alternatively, read on to discover the three things that surprised me about window cleaning robots in general – beyond their mere existence in the first place, of course.
1. They use barely any water
I’ve seen professional window cleaners at work – and I’ve even, on occasion, cleaned my own windows – and I’ve noticed they use plenty of water. It’s splashing and foaming everywhere. Unless you’re in need of a midday shower, you won’t want to be walking in the vicinity of a window cleaner at work.
A windowbot is an altogether drier affair – perhaps because it needs to maintain suction to stay on the window, and that’s tricky-to-impossible on a wet, soapy surface. My window cleaning robot sprayed the finest mist of diluted cleaning fluid onto the glass, before buffing it off with its cleaning pads – which were barely damp at the end of the job.
This doesn’t seem to impede how well the windowbot cleans, although I think you’d want to go in with a more saturated cloth for dislodging bird poop or dried-on mud splatters, for example.
2. You can’t leave them unattended
I’m used to testing robot vacuums, or sometimes robot lawn mowers. The USP with the bots I’ve used thus far is that they can take care of their job while you’re out, or asleep, or on holiday. Or all three.
This is not the case with a windowbot; it can’t be left to clean unattended. This is primarily because these bots aren’t capable of making their own way from one pane of glass to the next without you physically moving them.
Even if you had one enormous pane of glass that you wanted to set the windowbot to work on, you’d probably want to stick about for safety reasons, because one big difference between vacuums / mowers and window cleaners is that the latter are moving vertically.
There’s a tether cord provided, so that if the robot falls off the window mid-clean, it won’t go smashing its way down the side of the house and damaging things / itself / any unsuspecting passers-by. I was pretty lax about attaching this at first, until it actually did fall off a window, to be saved only by some seriously fast cord-grabbing action.
I will say that in all the time I have been testing the windowbot, this has happened only once, and the other bot my colleague tested stayed firmly fixed to the window at all times, so I wouldn’t think it’s a common issue.
3. They can reach places humans cannot
One big benefit of this gadget is that it’s much smaller than a human, and thus can venture into places that are out of reach to human hands. For example, cleaning the glass behind the metal railings of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my living room is usually an absolute nightmare, but the windowbot managed it with ease.
Perhaps a more common scenario is that they can be used to clean the outside of windows without having the set up a whole ladder system. If you can reach out and place the bot on a pane of glass, it can clean it. And if it does take a tumble – which, hopefully, it won’t – it will not end in a trip to emergency care.
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