Customer Ratings & Reviews

After reading many reviews I bought the Neato D5 robotic vacuum. I have never had one of these robots before and since it is my job to do our floors I thought this would help me. I have used it twice and am returning it to the store because it just does not help at all. It may somewhat clean the center of the floor but not the edges and corners where the dirt accumulates. Even in the center it has nowhere near the suction of even a stick vacuum so misses dirt along edges of throw rugs and in tile cracks. The reality is I still have to vacuum the floors after it because my wife wants it clean even in small spots and corners. So what is the point? The lack of suction is certainly a big fault and likely shared by all these floor robots simply due to their size. They just can’t create much vacuum. But even if they could, they still don’t get in the corners and edges or, and this is important, any spot smaller than the robot like beside your toilet. Look even a robot as smart as this one, can't go in the bathroom and shut the door behind itself to get behind the open door - something I automatically just do when manually doing the floors. And it can't get beside the toilet on either side because it is too wide. I found right off that I could not use it in most rooms. The living room has lamp cords running under the couch that is high enough for the Neato to go under but it gets stuck in the cord. In the dining room there are so many plant stands with legs and chairs with legs that it gets hopelessly lost bumping into legs and again it can't clean in between legs or areas between plants and the wall that are narrower than the Neato, so you have to vacuum it yourself. Bedrooms are also too much to handle, as it can't open the closet doors and clean the floor in the closet, nor will it go under the bedspread that touches the floor but I do manually. So I thought that if I just confined to the hall, kitchen and hall bathroom it might help but no. The large entrance throw rug is not thick, but even when it goes from tile up over the edge of that rug it leaves all the dirt along the edge of that rug due to poor suction. And it is not going to pick up that rug, shake it outside, and vacuum the bare floor under it that I always do, or pick up the shoes by the door and move the shoe mats to clean under them. (no shoes in our house - just slippers). We have no pets so when I vacuum the tile floors I need everything moved, closet doors opened, throw rugs picked up etc and then I wet mop, let it all dry and move things back. When I vacuum carpeted rooms I move all the dining room chairs to vacuum under the table - but a robot can't move the chairs and so never gets near cleaning table crumbs around the chair legs (and the Neato gets stuck sometimes inside the four legs of a chair). The fact is it cannot do what I wanted and I should have known that. But even still, for those of you who are less demanding, the D5 first tries to do the edges of a room and it sort of does, and then it does the center of the room or 15 x 15 area in a smart linear fashion. In the kitchen the center works pretty well but in the bathroom it get hung up in the one throw rug. But the edges are key because that is where dirt accumulates and it just misses a lot. It hugs a straight baseboard and if that is all you have it might be OK, but anytime it hits the trim of a door (that protrudes half an inch) along that baseboard, it stops, backs up an inch, turns out 30 degrees and goes around the door trim and heads back toward the door until it hits the door (at an angle), straightens out then continues until very shortly it hits the other trim of the door and goes around that. But it misses a few inches around (on all sides of) those two door trims and that is just where dirt seems to collect. Same with door stops that it will go around but not clean around (or under). Well enough. If all you want is the middle of your floors in the least cluttered rooms lightly vacuumed - go for it. I took it back. I realize now that to do what I do routinely each week without much thought, I think I would need a robot costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in some perhaps not too distant future. But that future is not yet here.

Just like everyone else this thing does so insane things like ger stuck in the middle of the room or gets under stuff only to get stuck under trying to go back. Even with the qwerks it worked great on the dog fur around my house and we really can look past some issues since we no longer have to manually vacuum our downstairs. For the bad just after we hit the one year mark of owning it and the dust bin no longer closes. This would not be the end of the world if there was a way to replace the dust bin. If I can replace brushes and filters I should be able to find a replacement dust bin on the neato website but they do not carry it there and other online outlets do not carry it either. Now I have a really expensive paperweight or doorstop.

had it for couple months and so far great, using go lines are neat after u get a map of a floor plan

Had an older non-LAN Neato for years, loved it, and wanted to love this one. Start the old one to clean let it go and if it can't finish on one charge it will go recharge and pick up again to finish. Out of dozens of tries, never had that happen with this App-controlled model. This last time on a single room it has stopped twice to reboot, and at least 8 times, it just quit - "ready to clean". I am on HOUSE mode, not SPOT CLEAN. Apparently when it loses the Wi-fi it tries to reconnect but loses its place and will not continue. But it is in the same room as a powerful wi-fi extender. There is no problem with the wi-fi signal by any other device. Wish I could at least disable app control and let it clean, but cannot. Pretty much useless except for minor spot cleaning.

I've had 2 Neatos, one previous generation, one from the current generation. Both failed within a year. This second model I had replaced via the manufacturers warranty. That SECOND model then also failed. I sent it out for repair, it came back and worked fine for a few weeks. Then it suffered the SAME PROBLEM! So their warranty repair service clearly did nothing to actually fix the issue at hand. I would NEVER recommend buying a Neato. They are unreliable and will not last you very long. Customer service and repairs are awful. I'm going to be looking at a different manufacturer for my next model.

PRODUCT WARNING: I purchased a Neato vac and it started MELTING! Since they claim to have a 12 month warranty I exchanged it (which was a HUGE hassle and they made ME pay shipping) they sent me a REFURBISHED unit which started having issues. When I contacted them I was told there is only a 3 MONTH WARRANTY on refurbished units!!!!!! Essentially because there was manufacture defaults to begin with they now took a year warranty to 3 months by sending me another broken product and refusing to replace it. Do yourself a favor and do not purchase from Neato!

A recent suspicious firmware update seems to have killed off my botvac. Worked flawlessly one day, endless reboots the next.

I had a neato for 5 years and loved it. I purchased the D5 to replace my older vacuum. When it will vacuum it does a great job. The vacuum is constantly refusing to vacuum and is requiring hard reboots often multiples. I sent in the robot for repair and nothing has changed. Still stops working every 3 or 4 attempts. Skip this model it is flawed for sure.