The vacuum failed to clean up two of the three test Cheerios that I strategically placed around my main floor to see which nooks and crannies it could reach. Both had small overhangs (one was an Ikea Billy bookshelf and the other a freestanding cabinet) that the Spot+Scrub couldn’t get under. It doesn’t have an extendable arm to help fix the issue.
I ran into a similar issue upstairs. My bathroom cabinets are the same basic builder-grade set as my downstairs kitchen, but the Spot+Scrub managed to wedge itself underneath my primary bathroom cabinets and then struggled to remove itself. It did the same thing with my low bed frame, forcing itself underneath after many attempts, and then it couldn’t get out. I marked the bed as a no-cleaning zone in the app, but, like the kitchen island, since the Dyson map doesn’t know where my bed is, I had to guesstimate, leaving a good portion of the bedroom without any vacuuming.
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Still, it did a good job of cleaning my upstairs carpet. While this robot vacuum can map multiple floors, the operation wasn’t as completely smooth as I had hoped. When the Spot+Scrub finishes cleaning on a floor without a base station, it’ll return to the starting position. Once you move it to the dock, it’ll just start charging without emptying. That means when it goes to work on my main floor, the mop pad isn’t cleaned, dry debris is still left in the vacuum, and the dirty water chamber isn’t dried. It’s almost like it resets itself, forgetting its last function.
So if you’re using it on multiple floors, save the one with the docking station for last. I ended up having the Spot+Scrub clean my main floor after the upstairs, just to make sure the vacuum would be fully emptied and dried. You also have to activate the cleaning function while the robot is still in its docking station, so it can prep for mopping, then pause the cleaning (you can do this in the Dyson app or on the vacuum itself) once it rolls out of the docking station to then lift and move it to another floor.
AI Wars
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Of course, there’s the feature this vacuum is named for: its built-in AI that spots stains and scrubs them away. The Spot+Scrub uses an HD camera to inspect the floors, then uses AI to analyze what it sees and know when to scrub trouble spots. It’ll go back and forth over those spots, and the AI will calculate how often it needs to do so to remove the stain.
