My quest to give my home some smarts continues with the addition of a robot vacuum.
I debated for quite a while about the virtues, or lack thereof, of having a robot vacuum running around my house. After all, I don’t live in a mansion; my house is a shade over 1400 square feet. One would think that keeping it clean does not require a lot of effort.
And it doesn’t really, except for one thing…
Everyone has a pet peeve, something that undeniably irks the heck out of them, maybe unreasonably so. My irksome peeve is dust bunnies, those little balls of dust, hair, and who knows what else that seemingly appear out of some mystical alternate reality. They hide under beds, in corners, behind sofas, and multiply like rabbits in heat. They look like weird alien tumbleweeds that gather and grow until they get big enough to match your body mass so they can replace you. They dodge dust mops and somehow manage to avoid regular vacuuming. For mindless bits of flotsam, they sure seem hellbent on surviving my cleaning days, most likely to fulfill some nefarious alien mission that involves copying my DNA by analyzing my fallen hair and dead skin flakes, perhaps looking for means to subvert my immune system and send me into a dust bunny induced hell.
It’s no wonder I have trouble sleeping.
They must be stopped!
Enter Dirty Dirk.
Some friends of mine have a robot vacuum cleaner that they set loose twice a week. I had dropped off a borrowed item and was surprised by the squat, outsized hockey puck that came crawling from under a couch. It ignored me, seemingly content to devour whatever bits of dust in its path. And realistically, I was just too big to bother with. I asked my friends about it, and they were delighted with their mechanized pet that they named Sharky. When I asked what they liked about it, they said, “It just works!”
That set my mind in motion. Maybe this was the answer to the question I didn’t know needed asking. To wit: how do I eradicate those evil dust bunnies? Well before the ink had dried from me signing for the deed to my new home, I had procured a robot vac of my own. And I dubbed it ‘Dirty Dirk’.
Setting DD up was simple: take it out of its box, find a place in my house to put its ‘nest’ (charging station and debris repository), and let it map my home. That latter bit was kinda fun to watch. Dirk ambled about searching out every nook and cranny. It trundled under beds, sniffed out spaces between tables and chairs, and peeked its LIDAR eyes in places I wouldn’t normally think to look for dust.
Once the mapping was done, I told it to go hunting. It beeped and flashed a light to let me know it was executing my command. Then, at a leisurely pace and stealthily quiet, it set out to find and consume dust bunnies.
Watching how dedicated it was to complete its mission served as entertainment the first few times I launched it, especially when it encountered the metal-legged bench I have in one room. The bench has horizontal parts that are on the floor. Undeterred, Dirty Dirk tumbled, bumped, and pushed its way over and around that bench, sometimes making noises that made me think it had crashed and was lying upturned on the floor like some robot turtle, its wheels rolling uselessly in the air. But it ran the gauntlet of the bench legs unfazed.
My dust bunny population has been dramatically reduced thanks to Dirty Dirk. Reduced, but not eliminated completely. DD can’t open or close doors, so it can’t get behind them or into closed closets. I’m sure those little alien tumbleweeds are hiding in the dark recesses of my closets and behind doors, plotting a course for world domination. So, once a month or so, I go scorched earth and take my regular vac into those places where Dirty Dirk can’t go.
There is no escape for dust bunnies in my house.
None.
The only problem I have with Dirty Dirk is that I can’t tell it, by voice command, to start a cleaning mission; I have to use an app. This is another issue that irks me: every ‘smart’ device has to have an associated app. I suppose it’s necessary so that you can perform firmware updates when needed; beyond that, the apps serve as a direct interface for the device in question and a platform for ads. In a perfect world, devices connect directly to Apple’s HomeKit (or the smart home system of your choice) via MATTER, and everything, including firmware updates, is handled through that. In this way, you won’t have to worry if some device maker decides that it’s not worth their time to maintain a device or its associated app and stops supporting it.
This does happen; just ask owners of Google’s first and second-generation thermostats. Google decided it will no longer support them and bricked them, making them unusable and leaving users in somewhat of a lurch. Google offers their latest generation Nest thermostats to owners of the newly unsupported models at a 50% discount, but it makes some folks hesitant to jump to smart thermostats and smart devices in general. After all, a dumb thermostat will continue working for decades, even if the maker goes out of business, and they’re a lot cheaper and less complicated to deal with.
Seems like the smarter thing to do is to stick with dumb devices. But doing so may mean I’d lose my battle with dust bunnies. And, really, do I want to abandon Dirty Dirk?
I have friends who insist that I need a pet, a cat maybe. They don’t realize that I have a great pet, one that eats those dastardly devilish dust bunnies.
Ditch Dirty Dirk for a cat that coughs up hairballs?
Nope!
Stay tuned.
Vern
GoGeezer 