This thread came along at an opportune time. Mrs WD has been complaining about the amount of time she has to spend vacuuming. With 2000 sq ft of carpet and hardwood it takes her a couple of hours twice a week. I was hoping someone would come out with a small riding vacuum cleaner, maybe something that looked like a small zamboni, but we don't have a place to park it anyway so...
We have a Golden Retriever who thinks it's her job to coat the house with fur, so I was skeptical of these robot thingies. But after reading this thread I ordered a Neato D5 Connected model to try.
Holy Cow!
Here is a pic of the little rascal backed up to its charging dock. It is only about 12 or 13 inches square.
Mrs WD had vacuumed with her Shark on Tuesday. We set the Neato loose on the floor on Thursday and it picked up enough dog hair to knit another Golden Retriever puppy. We ran it again Friday and it still picked up a significant amount of dog hair. Ran it Saturday, more hair. We are amazed at the amount of dust, dirt, and hair that was in our carpet that the Shark wasn't getting out.
It can't cover the whole house in one charge. It runs about an hour before sending itself back to the dock for a recharge. It's kind of comical when it backs up the the dock and rubs its butt against it to get a good connection.
It covers 95% of the floor, but has some problems. The "connected" feature is supposed to let you operate it from your cell phone. Bad thing is, if it ever has a problem - gets stuck or runs out of battery too far from the dock, or if you pick it up and move it, it loses it's connection and it's a real pain to reconnect. Ours has gone offline every time we've tried to use it. It has optical sensors that need cleaning or it goes completely off its rocker. A can of compressed air is on the shopping list so we can blow the sensors off every time we empty the dust bin. If I had it to do over, I would not get one of the Connected models. The feature isn't worth the extra expense.
It does such a good job Mrs WD is afraid it will replace her, but I assured her that unless it has a BJ function that I haven't found yet, she has nothing to worry about.