There are a few things as mundane as household chores, but thankfully technology can occasionally swoop in to help us out. Vacuuming may seem like one of those mundane tasks, but we can now just plop a little robot onto the floor, press a button, and walk away while it goes on its merry way.
While we’ve had an iRobot Roomba 880 faithfully cleaning the TechRadar offices for a long time, we recently let it take a little vacation as we checked out the iLife A7 instead. With a much more affordable price point than similar models on the market, is it worth picking up as your first robot vacuum?
Pricing and availability
The iLife A7 is available now via Amazon in the US, though the company has said it will be rolling out to more countries in the future as well. It’s priced at $249.99 (about £188, AU$337, AED 915), which makes it extremely affordable, considering the most basic model from iRobot sits at around $299.
The A7 is dubbed as the successor to the iLife A4s, so you’re looking at a robot vacuum that’s designed to tackle light carpets and tiles mostly. Plus we’re only talking about vacuuming here – for any mopping action you’ll have to look at the company’s other offerings.
Design
The design of the iLife A7 follows what we’ve seen from most robot vacuums – round in shape with a few buttons at the top. In the box you’ll find replacement brushes and filters, the docking station, and a remote control. The docking station is quite compact, and just features a single green light so that the A7 can park itself when needed.
The iLife A7 features two spinning brushes on either side, which helps to get into most corners for optimal cleaning. Each one is color-coded so you can correctly replace either the left or right brush, and they snap on and off fairly easily. They work in tandem to sweep debris into the mouth of the underside suction passage and into the dustbin.
There’s only one roller underneath, and you can slot in either the rubber brush for hard floorings, or use the bristle brush for carpets. If you’ve got a combination of both surfaces, then you’re going to want to run the A7 twice and swap the brushes around for the most efficient cleaning cycle.
That’s a tad inconvenient, considering certain robot vacuums have both brush types fitted in as a default. There’s also no carry handle, so if you need to pick up the A7, you have to do so by the sides, and you’ll often touch the dusty wheels while doing so.
On top of the A7 is a small display that shows you the current cleaning mode, battery level, and time. It also displays any error messages if the A7 runs into problems while cleaning, though you’ll have to grab your user manual to decipher them properly.
As with most robot cleaners, the front features a wide curved bumper, which gently taps against objects to help the A7 navigate around a room. At the back is the removable bin, which easily pops out for you to empty. There’s unfortunately no indicator to tell you when exactly the bin is full, but iLife recommends that you empty the bin after every cleaning cycle, to ensure optimal performance.
Lastly you have the remote control, which lets you start or pause a cleaning cycle, adjust the suction power, or manually control the A7 if you want it to pay special attention to a particular area.
Initial setup
Setting up the A7 is quite straightforward, but requires a little bit of prep. The docking station needs to have at least 1m of space on either side, and 2m of space in front of it. So tucking the A7 into a corner of your apartment isn’t going to work in its favor.
The user manual also advises you to cover any mirrors or reflective surfaces up to 15cm from the floor, presumably to avoid the A7’s navigation systems from being disrupted. You’ll also need to make sure that the dock is firmly placed against a wall, so that the A7 can properly dock when it needs to recharge.
You’ll need to leave the A7 to charge properly before its first use – we left it on the dock for a lengthy eight hours before the light turned green and it was ready for operation. Subsequent charges should take less time, as the A7 learns to clean your space more efficiently.
It’s important to point out that the A7 does have its own little power switch on the right hand side, which needs to be on in order for scheduled cleans to take place.
What’s supremely annoying about this is that if you switch the A7 off and turn it back on, it clears all cleaning schedules and the current time from its memory, so you have to reprogram these all over again.
Setting a cleaning schedule is thankfully not that complicated – just use the onboard buttons to cycle through the days of the week, and then adjust for which time you want the A7 to start cleaning. By default it will always clean in Auto mode – any other mode needs to be manually started via the remote control instead.
Cleaning performance
Our cleaning test involved running the A7 in a 600 sq ft studio, with furniture and most large obstacles moved out of the way. iLife recommends moving furniture such as dining room chairs or stools back to their original locations, so as not to confuse the A7’s navigation.
The A7’s sole purpose in life is to clean, and in that regard it does a fairly decent job. The bristle brush is good at digging into carpets to pull out flecks of dust or hair, while the rubber brush does a good job of sucking up things from hard floors. The A7 has a slightly lower profile than our Roomba, which allowed it to go underneath a couch without any problems at all – an area that the Roomba refuses to go under without getting stuck.
We definitely recommend turning on increased suction for thicker carpets, as the A7 wasn’t able to clean our rug properly on the normal suction setting. In fact, it hardly did any proper cleaning at all, so opt to keep the suction level on high for the best results.
You might notice that on occasion the A7 is very good at sweeping up dust, but forgets to actually collect it. We found a number of dust bunnies in various spots, which we then had to manually sweep up or send the A7 back for a second run.
While the A7 did go about its business as usual, there were some rather alarming surprises during the week. On the first unattended scheduled run, the A7 decided to suck up one of the slightly longer curtains in the living room, so we had to carefully untangle it and send it back to the dock for charging.
On another occasion it inhaled a loose MacBook charging cable which curled around the main brush and brought the A7 to a halt. Yet another time it somehow managed to wedge itself on an indoor laundry stand and couldn’t figure out how to back off it, so it just sat there with a sad beeping noise.
With a full week of scheduled cleaning, the A7 only managed to successfully complete three of those – the rest of the time we would discover it had sucked up something it shouldn’t have, or couldn’t find its way back to the docking station and had just given up.
Mapping your space
The A7 doesn’t have any in-depth mapping function, though iLife says that after a week’s worth of runs, the A7 will have a rough idea of where to go in your apartment. That didn’t seem to be the case in the two weeks that we tested it, since it seemed that every time it started cleaning, it would start up a new random cleaning pattern.
For quick cleaning there’s always the Point mode, which circles the A7 in a growing spiral before it retraces its path and comes to a halt. The Path and Border modes are best suited for spaces that don’t have a lot of furniture around, as the A7 bumped into far too many objects during our test runs.
What’s unfortunate with the A7 is that there’s no way to confine it to a particular area or room (unless you physically block it in). Roomba ships with their virtual wall, and newer models allow you to block off an area via an app, but there’s no such comfort here. Wherever you put the A7 down, it’s going to trundle off and explore of its own free will.
App control
The A7 has a companion app that allows you to control it and set schedules, but unfortunately for us we just couldn’t get it to work on either Android or iOS, despite assistance from iLife. The company have said that the app is still undergoing a few tweaks, so here’s hoping that a future update will correct this issue.
Maintenance
As mentioned before, iLife recommends emptying out the bin after ever clean cycle, and we’d suggest the same. The bin fills up fairly quickly, and pops out with a push of the button.
While the main bin compartment can be easily opened and tipped over to empty it, the struggle lies in the attached filter. It’s held in place a bit too firmly, and you have to hold on to two blue handles on either side in order to pry it out safely.
Unfortunately when we finally managed to get it out, a beautiful cloud of dust showered our hands and floor, which no one would find appealing. There needs to be an easier way to remove this filter for cleaning, as you certainly don’t want it exploding dust in your face when you’re trying to clean it.
There’s the usual task of also cleaning out the brushes underneath, and the included tool is good for untangling hair and bits of animal fur as well.
Final verdict
For its price, the iLife A7 is certainly an affordable option for someone who’s never owned one of these before. It’s fairly compact, does a decent job of cleaning, and that’s really all you need.
Where things do go a bit downhill is the prep work that you’ll have to do beforehand, just to ensure the A7 doesn’t get stuck anywhere or gobbles up something it’s not supposed to. There’s also no easy way to block it off from exploring certain areas, and the fiddly dustbin can also be a bit of a headache.
The end result is a robot vacuum that just about gets the job done, so if that’s what you’re willing to pay for, then prepare to welcome the A7 into your home. For anyone else, there are a number of other cleaning companions you can look at, including maybe just vacuuming yourself.
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