gadjosevilla
on - last edited on by
JS
The idea that we can employ robotic devices to take care of necessary but time consuming household chores is quite attractive. Our lives are busy enough as they are, who really wants to take a few hours to scrub floors.
Much like the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, the Mint Plus is a two-trick device. It cleans dry and cleans wet. We test how well it does these tasks.
Extremely easy to use and fast to deploy, you can select e a dry wipe (for picking up dust and dirt) or a wet Swiffer-type wipe for scrubbing and shining. Put these wipes on the magnetic receptacle, position the device where you want it to start and select the mode and you're good to go.
We first used the Mint Plus without the GPS Cube. Our apartment has a small area that is not carpeted. Basically it covers our entire kitchen, a bathroom and our foyer. Aside from the tiled bathroom, the entire area is made out or rubber flooring.
The Mint Plus does a good job picking up dust, dirt and pet fur with the dry wipe. It seems to be studying the cleaning area and makes it a point to clean the area end to end. When it senses a chance in surface (or a precipitous edge), it simply backs up and avoids that area.
A full battery charge is good for 4 hours of cleaning which is way more time than most scenarios would require. Leave the Mint plus to do its work and it goes about its business quietly and successfully covers around 60 percent of the area that it needs to clean. This improves to around 80 percent when using the cube for naviagation.
We did find that while it did a fairly decent job of gathering dust and dirt, it had some difficulty navigating in certain areas where it would constantly be re-orienting itself and bump into a wall back and forth.
The Mint Plus is supposed to learn as it goes so we figure it should memorize its path after a few uses.
Even on floors that were previously vacuumed and which we thought were pretty clean, the Mint Plus managed to pick up a lot of dust and dirt.
I was more impressed by the wet cleaning function. I popped in a Swiffer wipe pressed the setting and let the device do its thing. The Mint Plus has a different motion for wet cleaning and is pretty thorough in cleaning. The light weight of the device and the fact that it can't really sense areas that need more of a scrub or a back and forth to clean means that it will miss cleaning some spots thoroughly but these are areas that humans would need to apply a lot of elbow grease to remove.
The Mint Plus comes with its own reservoir which means users can use their own cleaning agents rather than the disposable wipes which is convenient.
The amount of hard floor space is really the prime consideration for someone thinking about getting the Mint Plus. If your home is mostly carpet, it won't make much sense but if you have hardwood floors, marble, linoleum or concrete then this device will save you a lot of time and keep things clean provided you have a steady supply of dry and wet wipes, which should be considered when calculating the long term expense and cost of ownership.
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