Neato Robotics - D7 Connected

I use neato xv-21 15 years. all 5 neatos work fine. My "new" neato d7 work 6 years and fine too. The d7 vacuum cleaner is easy to disassemble, and unlike the Roborock, the Xiaomi is easy to maintain and repair. Maintenance involves removing hair every five years and replacing the side brush drive belt.

The differences between versions is typically pretty small if you're shopping between versions that are 1-2 yrs apart. Unless you \*really\* need a feature or just want the newest thing, I would never recommend folks upgrade in that window of time. My personal success metric on a robot vacuum is simply whether I need to babysit it. My old Neato Botvac D7 required a lot of attention, brush maintenance, and would still get lost periodically. It was best of breed back in the day, but enough time elapsed that switching to the Curv was game changing. I ended up buying a second Curv for the 2nd floor, despite having the option of buying a Saros 10R at the time. I'm probably good for another 5-7 yrs. For me to buy sooner, it would have to be a life changing feature set that actually works.

D7 here On its 3rd life Last replacement was the spindle to turn the brush Do like it

Yeah, I have a Neato D7 that is on its last legs. I've rebuilt it bout 6 times using parts from junkers. It's served me well since 2018 or so, but it's toast. I have to clean the dirt container on the d7 after every run so a couple weeks is fantastic. I'm a little surprised at the report on carpet. Reviews I have read said due to the high suction, this was a strong point. But if it can at least get it done without the battery draining that'd be great.

As a long time Neato user, thanks to the early shutdown of their servers, I had to find an alternative to my 3 botvacs that have been very reliable with nightly cleaning for several years. The products have certainly changed since I bought my last D7, and sorting through all of the offerings has been a challenge, since pretty much anything is going to be an upgrade. So, after spending days reading reviews, this reddit, and several other sites/videos, I settled on two Dreame L40 Ultra's. At 399 BF price, they seem like they have a lot of bang for the buck. Hopefully I won't be sorry. Our house is all tile floors with some area rugs, and has two adults and two indoor cats, so we have some light messes and hair to keep cleaned up. I hope the mopping feature is a nice little bonus. Good luck on whatever you choose.

Interesting to see what all of us Neato refugees ended up with. We loved our "fleet" of D7's and D4's, in spite of their flaws. Since our floors are mainly tile, the wife really wanted one that would hopefully reduce her need to mop to just "deep cleaning" like the vacuums did for that. So far we're enjoying our Dreame L40's, as they give us that functionality that we would not have bought yet if the neatos hadn't had the plug pulled on us. I hope your new unit provides the same upgrade as ours did.

My j7+ served me fine, never had any mechanical issues. But, hairs tangled around every rotating part, so it needed cleaning weekly, and it was stupid, even though it was smart, it did get tangled, navigation errors, telling me can't get into room when it could easily. L50 has clever design, I haven't yet discovered where hair starts to tangle, but I'm really sceptical how long it will last. I did read somewhere new roombas aren't so easy to repair like old ones, tbh that easy modular design made me go j7 and no roborock. And that was wrong decision, irobot has fallen way way way behind when it comes to innovation and features, and I saw with my own eyes how stupid j7 was, even app sucks. Nah would not say my irobot was best vacuum I have had, but it worked as in no mechanical issues. Neato D7 before that has stupid design with side brush that uses small belt, had to change that belt after not much use. And it had all kinds of bugs in software, but cleaned way better that j7 ever did, that big front brush was good, and it had three times the suction of j7.

About a year ago I wrote this post reviewing the Saros 10R after 24 Hours and I wanted to provide an update. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Roborock/comments/1iny71k/saros\_10r\_24\_hour\_review/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roborock/comments/1iny71k/saros_10r_24_hour_review/) **I want to start with the good:** **Cleaning Performance:** Brief History: I've had several Robotvacuums over the years starting with a Neato D7, then Roborock S5 MaxV, Roborock S7 MaxV, briefly owned a Ecovacs something cheap (for my second floor) and a Dreame that I returned in less than 3-4 days because it broke within that time and support was terrible and now the Saros 10R. There's a few things I think people miss when talking about cleaning performance. First - everyone's house and level of 'dirt' is different. Some people have all hardwood floors. Some people have all thick carpets. Some people don't live in a muddy backyard slopfest with a long haired german shepherd - some people (me) do. My house has a mix of hardwood floors, area rugs (on the first floor) and relatively thick carpet on the second floor. So I've been able to kind of experience various situations where these vacuums succeed and fail. **Hair/Carpets:** For example: The Neato D7, despite being a dumb, lumbering, loud, obnoxious, tangling mess - was EXCEPTIONAL at cleaning hair out of carpet. Both my upstairs rug and area rugs on the first floor would be GSD hair free after a pass of the D7. Now granted it would get stuck in various places, run over every dog toy, and the hair would half be tangled in it - it was still extremely powerful. On the opposite side we have the S7 MaxV with the rubber brush (yes I know and have replaced it with the hybrid bristle one). That thing was terrible for hair. Great for hardwood pickup, literally completely useless for pulling dog hair out of my carpets. Saros 10R: I would say the Saros 10R does about 85% of the Neato's job on hair pickup with 0% of the tangles. It's now been a year and I've yet to have to detangle the robot. While it's not as great as the Neato at getting the hair out, it's significantly better than my previous 7MaxV. **Hardwood Floors:** In terms of vacuuming all these robots basically perform identically on my hardwood floors. The 10R has an advantage of having an extending arm (when it works - more on that in the negative section) but generally speaking they all kind of work. In terms of mopping the S7 MaxV was a massive step up over the S5 MaxV. When my dog tracks in mud prints and stuff it would do a good job of cleaning and rinsing them out - where the S5 would just kind of push it around. I found it less useful for actual stains though. For example I have a cappuccino machine and occasionally when removing the puck i'll spill a drop of coffee on the floor that I won't notice till later, after it's dried - The S7 MaxV would need 3 or so passes to get this. The S10R does it usually the first pass. So mopping performance is significantly improved. I find it streaks less than my S7 MaxV (idk if its due to less water or just better mop cleaning at the basestation). I also find it does better with corners (due to the mop being able to rotate out). **Cleaning Performance Overall:** We buy these things to clean and I'd say that cleaning performance of the S10R is very good. I personally would like to see slightly better hair pickup - whether that be via better brush design or suction idk - but I do think my old Neato did a better job. But the fact that it does 85% of the job with 0 tangles and mops exceptionally well makes it way easier to say it's got great cleaning performance. **Now I'll go into the Mixed Bag for One Thing:** **The Dock:** The S7 MaxV dock was loud and it was hard as crap to clean but in-between services it kept the vacuum in tip top shape for relatively longer periods of time compared to the S10R. The 10R dock is much quieter when emptying - which is nice.. but then it doesn't clean the filter as well. On my S7 MaxV I'd wash the filter maybe once every 2 months or so - even when I did I never saw dust caked in it, the filter was good at removing it. The S10R i need to wash the filter almost weekly - there's dust constantly caked on it that dock can't remove. (Yes I change the bag frequently and even vacuum the dock filter). Also the 10R dock holds less water on top of the bot seeming to use more water - so way more frequent refills of the dock. That being said the 10R dock is much, much easier to clean and quieter. It also obviously does a better job of cleaning the mop pads. On top of that the vacuum bag is bigger so less changes + it has a soap dispenser thingy. **And now we come to the negatives section:** **Reliability:** In the past year I've had to replace the side brush motor twice and now it essentially failed again (previously it stopped completely - this time it doesn't extend anymore) but it's out of warranty so I guess I'm cooked. My S7 MaxV is now almost 3 years old and I never had a single failure. My S5 MaxV is at my parents house now and is 4 years old without a single failure. 10R? 3 failures of the same part in 1 year. I have to say Roborock did replace the motor twice with little to no fanfare so that was nice.. but it would also be nice if they replaced it with a part that doesn't essentially break the same way every time. **The Bin:** Not only has bin size been decreasing over the years on these bots but the designs are also just getting straight up worse. I've seen posts on other roborocks, Q Revos it seems - having this issue but with my GSD hair - my bin barely fills past 60% before clogging. So the bin is not only way smaller than my S7MaxV but it doesn't even fill all the way. If I don't run the vacuum for multiple days (for any given reason) with my GSD hair - I'll literally have to manually empty the vacuum bin 2-3 times for a single floor. I break up the rooms to try to get it to go back more but even that isn't really effective. I complained about this in my first review and obviously hasn't changed, if anything it's gotten worse due to the dock's ability to clean the filter reliably. **Obstacle Avoidance:** \*The following is based on my floors\* - If you have a white floor/carpet with a black cable then your experience will probably differ than mine. My dog loves to leave toys out everywhere and obviously I try putting them away when I can but occasionally im lazy and don't. The vacuum does probably about the same job here as my S7 MaxV in terms of avoiding the objects maybe slightly better - not sure because it's not the end of the world if it hits them. For cables it seems worse - my wife has a Korg keyboard and we have a tower fan that tends to hang out off the wall on the hardwood floor - it runs into these cables maybe a similar or great amount the S7 MaxV - even after updates. But here's the thing - when it does hit a cable it's basically fatal to the run compared to the S7 MaxV. When my S7 MaxV would occasionally run over a dog toy, or would occasionally run over the wires on the keyboard or fan, it would just keep going. I think maybe twice or three times in the 2 years I had the S7 MaxV running everyday, did it actually stop due to a wire being trapped in it - specifically in the wheel. It would hit the wires more frequently but it would get stopped less. The Saros 10R on the other hand almost always gets trapped when the avoidance fails. The wire gets wrapped around the mop pad, pulling it off and ending the run. Basically having the spinning mops increases the need for superior obstacle avoidance. Now I don't know if you'd file this under a obstacle avoidance issue or a mopping issue but it's still been an issue. I've essentially carved out no go zones for relatively large areas where my S7 used to go, but this cannot due to the unreliability of running it there. **Firmware Updates:** Look I think for the most part most of the 'cool' stuff they can add via software has already been added. S7 MaxV got a lot of great updates over the time I had it - just lots of new features that constantly made it feel like it was getting better over time. The S10R hasn't gotten the same love. That's not to say it hasn't gotten updates - it has, mostly bug fixes and like I said I don't expect a bunch of new features.. but I guess I did expect certain things to improve over time. I mentioned the obstacle earlier - I figured because the starsight system was new this would get some updates that would obviously increase reliability.. but it just hasn't come. It performs about the same has it has when it launched. Similarly - when my extended side-arm did work, it's extremely unreliable. The Flexiarm Extended Cleaning for Crevices has been in beta for almost the whole time I've owned the robot and still doesn't function reliably. Matter support has been extremely unreliable and none of the updates have really fixed/addressed it. And now with Roborock releasing new models seemingly every few months, it feels like these will be left to the wayside on updates. **Conclusion:** I'm not as excited about it as I was when I first got it - especially due to the reliability problems with the side brush motor. I still think it cleans vacuums/mops much better than the S7 MaXV - which is the primary goal of the robot vacuum.. but it also is worse in ways that I guess I just didn't expect. You'd think a few years + new lidar system would yield better obstacle avoidance.. but it doesn't feel that way (at least on my wood floors and carpets). You'd think bin design wouldn't go backwards.. but it did. You'd think the dock would be better at cleaning the filter out, but it's not. I think it's harder now to justify the $1300 or so I spent on it. But this is my experience - I think perhaps I didn't have the failures I'd be much more positive about the product, despite the other issues. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask

Currently on the hunt for a new robot vacuum after Neato D7 died after 6 years of faithful service. The D7 was champion on carpets with out of the world suction. For the next vacuum wife said to pick one that has mopping and a base station that automates most tasks. With that on mind, we narrowed our search to Roborock and Mova. We had considered Ecovacs top of the line model but was put off by the reliability ratings from users. What we prioritize most is, hardfloor vacuuming and mopping skills and the best automation possible with dock. Secondly, the app performance for responsiveness and granular controls. Don't really care about the robot vacuum needing to scale Mount Everest like obstacles (seriously why though...?) or voice assistants. With this in mind which of the two robot vacuums would you recommend? Roborock QRevo CurvX or Mova V50 Ultra - both are similarly, but Roborock is the slightly more expensive accounting for discounts as we. Would've like the Mova Z50 Ultra if it releases in North America but alas the choices are these

The D7 was our first vacuum and I loved that little bot. We went with Qrevo as the replacement. RIP Rosie. Long live Rosie II.

I recently got a shark nevertouch combo robot from Costco and it’s amazing! I first tried a roborock and iRobot j9. The shark is better and I researched and watched videos on more expensive ones and it gets my floors so clean I think it’s the best but right now. The roborock was horrible on carpet. My first was a neato d7. It vacuums really well. New one had to at least come close!