Buy one premium robot or multiple cheaper robot for multi floor home

Hi,thanks for your input Natalie & Michael. You really helped me to decide which robot i should buy.

I may assume that one floor is approximately 150/2 = 75 sq. meters with a few rooms on each floor. I think that «dumb» robot vacuums with a random cleaning pattern will not be efficient on 75 sq. meters area. Sometimes they can leave a part of a room (or even a whole room) uncleaned and spend most of the time repeating cleaning the same places

Actually my house is 300 sq meters and each floors is around 150 sq meters. So based from your information, I think it is better for me to buy one premium robot with lidar than two random navigation robot. I'll just alternate to put it upstairs/downstairs, maybe it is a little hassle but i want to make sure the robot doesn't miss cleaning any room.

And thanks for the heads up about the Ecovac's app.

Hi Bob,
Considering the size of your house, I may assume that one floor is approximately 150/2 = 75 sq. meters with a few rooms on each floor. I think that "dumb" robot vacuums with a random cleaning pattern will not be efficient on 75 sq. meters area. Sometimes they can leave a part of a room (or even a whole room) uncleaned and spend most of the time repeating cleaning the same places. However, they fit well for a small apartment (less than 50 sq. meters) since there are more chances to cover the whole area on one charge randomly moving around.

Robot vacuums with lidar-based navigation will never miss any spots, they spend less time on cleaning, and are more gentle with furniture. You can check the cleaning report in the app and make sure that it cleaned the whole area when with a "dumb" robot vacuum, you never know where it cleaned and where it missed.

It looks like the latest Ozmo 920/950 are great devices in terms of navigation and cleaning performance. As Natalie mentioned, there are some bugs in the software (for example, here is a recent review on Amazon which describes the issue), but I hope the app will be fixed.

Hello Bob, thank you for the kind words :) Our goal is to create a community that will help other people to buy the right robot vacuum for them and fix some issues if there's a need.

Regarding your question: lidar is a really-really great feature, it's not the most important one but it definitely changes a lot. I have had robot vacuums with random navigation for years and they were amazing, they performed well, my floors were clean. But with lidar, you don't need to worry about the robot bumping too harsh into furniture since it already knows where obstacles are placed. With lidar, you can check where the robot has already cleaned while random robots just bounce around so you don't know for sure how much of area it covered. The benefit of the LDS laser-based robots is the ability to interact with a map ie setting virtual walls, zoned cleaning, send the robot clean to a particular room, etc.
Once I tried a lidar robot, I couldn't go back to a "random" vacuum.
If your first robot vacuum will be randomly moving around, you will be satisfied with it, you have nothing to compare to it so it might not be a huge difference in your case.

Re: which DEEBOT to get? Keep in mind that ECOVACS has some issues with the app, it loses data sometimes or can't connect to a router. Since the Ozmo 920 is new, there is not much info about user experience though some of our readers claimed the app works just fine. The Ozmo 920 saves multiple maps which will be great in your case, you don't need the robot to rebuild it every time when placing the vacuum upstairs/downstairs. It has more suction power over the Ozmo 601 which does make a difference if you have carpets. You get what you pay for, the Ozmo 601 is cheaper but it lacks some bells the Ozmo 920 has. It's up to you what to go with, one Ozmo 920 or two Ozmo 601.

P.S. Keep in mind that the Ozmo 920 comes with a suction inlet that handles pet hair and long human hair (mind changing in my case as well).
Also, the Ozmo 920 has carpet detection and increases suction when it recognizes one. A helpful feature for those who have carpets (I love it in my Roborock and 360).

Hope, that answered some of your questions.

Best,
Natalie