Everybody wants a clean house but nobody has the time to do the cleaning. There are a couple of solutions. Pay someone to do it for you, or arrange a robot to sort out your tendency to drop Doritos crumbs everywhere. Solenco‘s new Legee-D7 robot vacuum cleaner, made by Taiwan-based Hobot, is the second sort of solution. It may even be the better one because it can clean your home while you’re sleeping (without requiring overtime payments).
Solenco might sound a little familiar. That’s because the company is also behind Meaco, a UK brand of air circulators (which are totally not fans — and that’s not sarcasm). The company also provides several types of air purifiers to the South African market. The new Legee-D7 robo-vac is just the latest home solution from the company.
Getting a Legee up
Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t new. Roomba was the first major brand but everyone from Dyson to Xiaomi has one on their roster. Even Samsung makes one (that looks like Darth Vader). The Legee-D7 gets the ‘L’ in its name from Lidar, the tech that it uses to navigate your home. It gets the ‘D’ from the D shape of the vacuum itself. It’s this profile that permits better cleaning in corners, something that Solenco demonstrated during the device’s Johannesburg launch today.
It also demonstrated exactly how this robot vacuum cleaner avoids leaping off edges, by running the demo on a very narrow table. Impeccable self-preservation instincts aside, there are several reasons to check this one out.
Solenco is marketing this product as a four-in-one robot vacuum. It handles both hard floors and carpets, vacuums and mops thanks to its padded rear end, and also avoided tangling itself up in hair. We’re not going to ask where the hair came from, though the Legee-D7 should avoid slurping it into its brushes anyway.
Just following orders
The Legee-D7 is able to transition from cleaning hard floors like tiles to carpets, provided the height difference is no more than 20mm. Sensors inside the unit automatically lift the mop at the rear of the vacuum so it’s not dragging a damp surface over carpets. These same sensors can also exert additional downforce on tiles, in the event a stain is proving to be stubborn. This is helped by water jets controlled internally that avoid squirting too much water on floors.
There is a range of smart features as well. Siri and Google Assistant voice control are options, via Legee’s app. The app also lets users gate certain areas for use with one of the vacuum’s functions. If one area of a floor needs deep cleaning and the other a dry vacuum, those can be pre-defined. Sections can be defined as curtains (so it doesn’t avoid those areas thinking they’re solid) or as containing too many lumpy bits (so it can avoid it altogether). Finally, it’s able to use a smartphone’s hotspot instead of 5GHz or 2.4GHz WiFi. This lets its 4,900mAh battery facilitate cleaning during load shedding. Contained inside the Legee-D7 are a 320ml water reservoir and a 500ml washable trash/filter area.
The only real question remains — are we willing to pay R9,000 for one? Based on very early impressions, it’s looking positive. But we don’t work on early impressions, so stick around for the full review. Stuff will have one of these shortly. We’ll put it through its paces and find out just how smart the Hobot Legee-D7 really is.