Dyson 360 Vis Nav 304640-01

I have been sitting here having breakfast and a coffee (which is now cold) and for the last hour & a half and the robot has been trying to return to the dock. More often than not, either my wife or myself have to replace the robot on the dock ourselves. We had the same issue with our first vacuum which we took back to The Good Guys and which Dyson… Read more

replaced with a new robot vacuum cleaner. No return information. Just a new vacuum. This one, the second, is no better than the first one. I have remapped the areas we want vacuumed. I have named zones. I have created areas to avoid due to multiple chair legs etc., like around our breakfast bar area. The dock has the correct clear distance around it. The vaccum cleaner is still driving into the dock at the wrong angles or beside it, then reversing and looking like it is lined up only to stop just before it drives onto the dock, turns to the left or right and drives off again. It has now driven itself to a couple metres away from the dock. I paid a lot of money for this through The Good Guys, but any claim like repair etc., has to be taken up with Dyson directly. To be honest, I would just like to get my money back. I bought this robot thinking that it might be a better deal than a lot of the other robots that have a mopping function, which I am dubious about, and having a full width cleaning roller as the Dyson rep was keen to point out. All the selling points make sense. I just wish the rep had said that the vacuum was quite dodgy at returning to its dock. THA would have been helpful. I notice that The Good Guys are advertising the 360 for $944 now. That is a lot less than I pad for it and with what I know now about this robot, it is still too expensive. And for the whole time I have been writing this review, the robot is STILL trying to find the dock. I thin it has spent more time trying to return to the dock than it has actually vacuuming this morning. And now after 2 1/2 hours of trying to return to its dock, I have to pick it up and place it on the dock. Sorry, but Dyson have a lot of work that needs to be done to make this a worthwhile purchase.

Great robo vac -works excellently – i have just purchased the dyson 360 nav vis and found it works great. have a 2 bedroom flat but only use it in the main rooms not bed rooms. took 40mins to map the unit. i have 1 small dog and one large long haired dog (samoyed) who leave hair around and the vac picks it up great, also the dust. i divide the cleaning into two areas and do at… Read more ·  1

different times. one take 32 mins , the lounge room takes 15 mins. i like that i can empty the bin easily (like my dyson stick vac) so it keeps the smells down as the dust and dander gets emptied every day. it does not get lost and finds the dock before it runs out of power. i used it on auto and that seems to work great. i think i will use it every day. yeah no vac for me :-) well worth the money for my early xmas present. very happy with the unit and dyson. also works on hard floors and carpets and mats easily.

A huge waste of money – This machine was purchased by my husband to make my life easier. Have had nothing but issues with it since Dec 23. From the machine unable to dock on its docking station, not being able to find the dock, software issues, to app compatility issues with my phone and internet service. I still have to manually vacuum my floor (tiled surface) nearly… Read more

every day to finish cleaning as the machine always stops half way through a clean. After being promised that I would receive a new machine if I send it in to the repair centre, dyson have informed me that there is nothing wrong with my machine and they'll have to send it back to me. Do not even bother buying one of these machines. Apparently warranty means absolutely nothing to this world wide company. Spend your $2000 on a different machine. Dyson has obviously become too big and quality means nothing to them any more, especially if their name will still make them sales. SHAME ON YOU DYSON!!!

Absolute rubbish, not worth the cost or effort – "Right, that's it!" we thought. After struggling for almost six months while our ecovacs deebot 920 POS randomly decides it can only go backwards in circles, and ecovacs refuse to repair it under warranty (despite it being just 18 months old and Australian consumer laws requiring it), we decided to replace it with a real robot vacuum. We like… Read more

Dyson - we have a number of their products - so decided to give their new robot vacuum a try, particularly since they have a 90 day returns policy on the unit. We know that it doesn't have a mopping feature but actually I prefer to use a bucket and mop to be honest.

The first thing that struck me on unboxing the unit was how heavy it was. At about 5kg it is almost one and a half times the weight of our ecovac dumbot. The design is different to most modern robot vacuums, being a D shape, having one long rotating brush along the front edge and no side spinning pickup brushes, and an automatic retractable suction side duct.

Another significant difference from many other vacuums is that Dyson appear to have chosen to use an upward facing camera and other sensors/cameras (26 in all) for mapping and navigating instead of the more common laser.

Once the unit was charging in the dock (which has two black and white square orientation markers), I paired it with the MyDyson app on my phone. Using Bluetooth, this process took mere seconds, unlike the much more painful process with the ecovac.

Once paired, I could immediately examine the features of the app and robot. Most of the usual features are there - scheduling and viewing cleaning history, settings, help and the like. Now fully charged, the first thing to be done was to map the house. Our house is a fairly typical Australian single storey 4x2 with activity and theatre, with mainly hard floors (laminate or tile), about 220m2.

Usually I have found that mapping is done during the first clean but the Dyson has a special vacuum-less mapping mode. Selecting this mode I expected the robot to finish in half the time but no. Bizarrely it took the most random, illogical route for mapping the house, going all over the place, and it took almost two hours, the same time it would take the ecovacs in vacuum mode! It also left an annoying trail of dust bunnies around with it, gathered from under the beds.

Eventually it finished, although it missed one room because the door had been shut the first time it entered the hallway. Annoyingly it refused to recognise the room existed from that point on, even though it went past the open door many times. I have yet to work out how to add that room now, I don't want to have to create a new map! I can't even tell it to go to that area manually and map the room, because everything is based on the mapped areas - catch 22.

Once the map was created, it was time to "zone" the rooms and label each of them. At least the ecovac app would make an attempt at identifying the various rooms, doorways and etc., but not Dyson. Each and every area or room had to be individually defined and set up and since the map has no zoom feature, this is a frustrating operation. The room labelling was equally annoying, the short list of options only allowed for a few standard names, unique names are required and stupidly all the custom rooms have the same icon. More annoyingly, if you need to adjust a zone, and re-label, it wipes all your labels and you have to redo the lot!

We only have a couple of no-go areas in the house, mainly areas where there are cables which would traditionally get caught up. The bot seemed to navigate all these without difficulty so fortunately it was not necessary to set up no-go zones or no-climb or no-brush zones.

However, it is clear that the Dyson app developers forgot to actually look at any other robot vacuums apps before they created their own. Not that I'm suggesting they should directly copy other apps but they could have at least got a few ideas of what to do and not to do. The map screens really do need significant work - as a software developer myself, I would not have let this feature go out to the public, it is alpha quality at best, little more than a proof of concept.

The bot has four cleaning modes, any of which can be selected via the LCD panel on the top of the bot or from within the app. Using the app enables the user to select both the mode and the zone(s) to be cleaned. The four modes are:

Auto: The vacuum will automatically adjust its suction power based on the amount of dust it detects.

Quick: For quick, everyday cleans.

Boost: Maximum suction power for a deeper clean.

Quiet: Quiet cleaning.

For my first test I decided to send it to the laundry (using auto mode), where there was a good scattering of cat litter and pieces of dry cat food around where the cat bowl would normally be, by the door to the back garden.

Interestingly it cleaned the centre of the room first, making short work of the pieces of debris it found, it then took a strange route closer to the edges, then finally it deployed its side suction nozzle to clean right to the edge. This worked quite well to even remove some of the debris from under the front of both the washer and dryer.

However, much to my surprise, it failed to go all the way to the far end of the room by the sliding door, where all the bits of cat food were, so it completely failed to clean that area. Upon the bot returning to to dock at the end of the task, I immediately sent it back to laundry but this time in boost mode. Again, it took the same route - centre, then close to the edges, then actual edge and again it ignored the far end of the room.

I assumed that this was as a result of poor mapping, however I looked on the map and it clearly showed the end of the room correctly and showed the bot stopping short both times, for no apparent reason. Perhaps the answer is that it simply doesn't like going near full height windows and doors. If this is the case it is even worse, given that most of the windows and doors in the house are full height - not cleaning up to them is a downright failure.

The next issue we discovered was that because the bot is 93mm high at the edges (99mm at the camera maximum), it couldn't clean to the kickboards in the kitchen because it couldn't get under the cupboard doors (80mm). Even using its side suction nozzle it was unable to get to all the debris.

The third test was to send it into the gym (activity) to clean the carpet which was, at this time, still covered in dust bunnies from the mapping task. The problem we found this time was one of battery life. The gym is carpeted to reduce the sound of the equipment in use but is also the route to the cat flap so gets quite dirty with hair from our cats.

The gym being carpeted and with a significant amount of dirt and hair on it, the bot had to use the increased suction which it turned on and off as it went around the room. It had significant problems navigating around the various equipment and, frankly, made a rubbish job of clearing away the dust bunnies and cat hair. Due to the D shape, this unit ought to be able to get into a lot of awkward spots and clean right into the various nooks and crannies. Unfortunately it failed miserably.

The other problem with the gym was the battery usage. By repeatedly using the boost power, yes it made a very good job of cleaning the areas it actually went across, the problem is that it it didn't make a very good job of actually covering the entire carpet. Unfortunately, this meant that it had to stop part way through the cleaning and return to the dock to recharge, despite appearing to have half a charge before it started.

Perhaps if Dyson had used a laser to more accurately map the objects in the room it could have made a much better job of cleaning close to legs of the equipment but I found it left a significant number of corners and similar locations that it failed to clean well at all. The same applied to chair and table legs - I expected to see the unit do the circuit around the table legs, instead it simply made a very poor attempt at coming at it from a number of different angles with the side nozzle deployed and making a very poor job of it.

Based on my observations of the amount of battery used to clean the five rugs or carpeted areas in our house, it will be unable to perform a full Auto clean of the house without two recharges, which is ridiculous. These are just the observations from the first day!

The next morning I got a notification on my phone telling me it would start a scheduled clear in about two minutes, this would be five minutes early. I checked the schedule, it was correct, so the unit was saying it would start early. I reset the schedule by another half hour - same result. However, it actually started right on time - so the notification is incorrect which suggests poor testing of the app.

Navigation is another area where this robot has serious failings. When told to do a general (quiet) clean, instead of cleaning room by room, it appeared to divide the area into quadrants which it then overlay onto the map - this leads to, in my opinion, a very inefficient route for cleaning the rooms. To be honest it made a pig's ear of the first clean, leaving bits behind and failing to clean very well at all. Full length curtains were also a sore point for it. I had lifted all of these off the ground during the mapping but during the clean it made no effort at all to try to go under them, unlike our previous bots which would approach slowly and try (successfully) to push through.

After one hour of "quiet" cleaning it had made a very below average job of poorly cleaning the two main rooms, not even including the main bedroom ensuite. I then sent it clean the dining room and it made an average job of that, successfully navigating around the table and chair legs, but still not making a particularly great job of it, no better than our previous units.

Finally, I sent it back to the laundry to see if it could do that right on a third attempt. Amazingly it did finally manage to to get all the way to the far end of the laundry. Unfortunately it still failed to clean all the pieces of cat food. Although the D shape allowed it to drive straight into the corner and it deployed the side nozzle it still failed entirely to clean the corner at all. If the side nozzle came out at both front corners it might have a chance or getting these pieces but the side brush less design actually works against it in these scenarios.

At the end of all this the battery was almost empty, despite it having only (poorly) cleaned about half the area that the ecovac would have completely (and better) cleaned in the same amount of time.

There are a number of features in this robot that are really great.

The ability for it to detect the amount of dust it collects and create a "heat" map which it can then use to bias how it clears is brilliant. This means that it biases its cleaning to the areas that need it. Not having a bunch of consumables like side brushes and filters to replace all the time is another benefit, the filter and brush bar are both user washable. The shape and side duct are great for cleaning long straight walls. The powerful suction and Dyson vacuum technology means that it does make a great job of cleaning carpets. The app has one great feature - by having a specific mapping feature, the thing does not keep updating the map as it cleans, my biggest bug-bear with the ecovacs app.

However, the excessive height means that the unit cannot get under as low furniture as the advertising suggests. Most other units have a lower profile, even including the laser pod, which enables them to get to much lower spaces. In addition the wonderfully powerful cleaning power makes the battery life honestly pathetic, unless it is only ever used on hard floor. The D shape could have been a real bonus but the navigation software makes a mockery of it and the position of the single side nozzle fails to take full advantage of it.

In conclusion, therefore, we have already decided after just two days of frustration and disappointment that we will make use of the 90 day refund policy that buying this unit direct from Dyson gives us. At $2399, I feel we can do much better with another brand.

Nice try Dyson but I can't give you more than "3/10, must try harder (much, much harder)".

p.s. To be fair to Dyson, we bought the unit direct from them (at a service centre) and they honoured their 90 day satisfaction guarantee and refunded us the full price without question.