If you’re looking for an affordable robot to clean your floors, the aptly named Wyze Robot Vacuum offers a lot to like for $249.99, including 2,100Pa of suction power and a laser sensor for mapping your home, a feature typically only found in more expensive models. You can use an app to select certain rooms and send the vacuum straight there, or create virtual walls to cordon off areas you want avoided. It works quickly and methodically, effectively collecting debris and pet hair from hard floors and carpeting. While the Wyze vacuum offers superior mapping abilities and cleaning customization options to other robots in its price range, the $299.99 iRobot Roomba 675 remains our Editors’ Choice award winner by a hair for its longer battery life, better obstacle avoidance capabilities, and voice command support.
What Makes the Wyze Vacuum Different?
The Wyze Robot Vacuum is packed with an impressive amount of technology for the price. It features seven groups of sensors to map your home, navigate around obstacles, avoid falling down stairs, and automatically find its way to its base station.
The most notable of the sensors is a raised Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanner that casts thousands of invisible laser points to measure surroundings and generate an editable map of your home’s floor plan. Pricier vacuums like the $799 Ecovacs Deebot T8 AIVI and the $499 Proscenic M7 Pro feature laser mapping technology, but it’s rare to see in a budget-friendly model.
Once the Wyze vacuum creates a map of your home, you can label each room, select the ones you want cleaned, and send the robot directly there. You can also create virtual walls so the robot avoids certain areas, like a mess of cords under your desk or TV stand.
While some affordable floor-cleaning robots haphazardly ping-pong from wall to wall, the Wyze Robot Vacuum cleans more methodically, making straight lines. Using its four-core Cortex-A7 processor and the LiDAR map of your home, the robot divides each room into sections, calculating an efficient cleaning route.
As it cleans, the robot uses speed sensors to determine its location and path, a gyroscope to stay on course, cliff sensors to avoid stairs and ledges, and collision sensors to recalibrate when it encounters obstacles below the LiDAR scan. When it’s running low on battery or completes a cleaning cycle, the robot’s induction and recharging sensors help it locate its base station and successfully dock.
On the top, the Wyze Robot Vacuum has home and power buttons, as well as a cover that lifts up so you can remove and empty the dustbin. Inside the dustbin, it has a small HEPA filter, which cleans the air as the robot runs. On the bottom, it has a main brush and one edge brush. Most other robot vacuums, with the exception of iRobot models, have two edge brushes.
Because of its raised LiDAR sensor on top, the vacuum is on the tall side. It measures 3.7 inches high and 13.8 inches in diameter. If you’re looking for a shorter robot vacuum to fit under low-profile furniture, options in this price range include the $220 Eufy RoboVac 11s (2.8 inches), the $220 Dser RoboGeek 23T (2.83 inches), and the $300 Eufy RoboVac 30C (2.9 inches).
The Wyze Robot Vacuum offers three suction levels: quiet, standard, and strong, topping out at 2,100Pa. That puts it nearly on par with the most powerful affordable robot vacuum we’ve tested, the RoboGeek 23T, which offers up to 2,200Pa. The stronger the suction power, the more the vacuum will pick up, but the louder it will be. In quiet mode, the Wyze model runs at 58dB, which, according to OSHA, is quieter than a normal conversation. In standard and strong modes, it runs at 61db and 64db, respectively.
Setting up the Wyze vacuum and connecting it to its companion app is simple. Just install the edge brush, connect the charging station to a power supply, then set up the charging station at least 1.5 feet away from objects on either side and 4.5 feet across from anything directly in front of it. Once you have the charging dock in place and plugged in, put the robot on the floor, press the power button for three seconds until the light indicator comes on, then connect it to the charging station, making sure to align the metal induction strips on the robot with the ones on the charger.
From there, download the Wyze app (available for Android and iOS) and create an account if you don’t already have one. Then open the app, press the plus sign in the upper left corner, select Add Device > Home > Wyze Robot Vacuum. Next, press and hold the robot’s power and home buttons until it says “Wi-Fi connection has been reset” and the buttons start flashing. Finally, press Next in the app, enter your Wi-Fi password, go to your phone’s Wi-Fi settings menu and connect to the specified network, then go back to the Wyze app, and it should start connecting.
The app asks you to name your robot. I went with one of the suggested options: Home Robot. You then have the option to share the device with a family member; just enter their email address to send an invite. Be sure to download any firmware updates (your robot will automatically reboot when it’s done), wait for it to fully charge, and you’re ready to start cleaning.
Unlike many competing models in this price range, the Wyze Robot Vacuum doesn’t support Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, so you can’t control it with your voice.
Powerful and Smart
Thanks to its LiDAR sensor, the Wyze Robot Vacuum makes quick work of mapping your home in its companion app on its first run. The sensor spins around six times every second, measuring the distance to 2,016 different points in the room up to 26 feet away. Some competing vacuums take two or three runs to generate a map of your home, but the Wyze Robot Vacuum does it on its first pass. Within 30 minutes, it created almost a full map of my roughly 900-square-foot main level.
In terms of battery life, Wyze says the robot can clean for up to 110 minutes in standard mode. In testing, however, the robot cleaned for up to 83 minutes (in quiet mode, its default setting) before successfully finding its way back to the base station.
If you have a small home or an apartment of around 1,000 square feet or less, the robot should have no problem vacuuming your entire space on one battery charge. If it runs low on juice before finishing the job, the robot will return to its base station, charge up, then pick up where it left off. If you have a large home, however, you might be better served by a vacuum with longer battery life, such as the iRobot Roomba 675 or the iLife A9, both of which lasted longer than 100 minutes in testing.
On the plus side, the Wyze robot works quickly and efficiently, first cleaning along the edges of walls, then zipping around in straight lines to cover the rest of the floor. Even in quiet mode (the weakest suction level), it picked up an impressive amount of debris. After its first test run, the vacuum’s waste bin was almost completely filled with dust, dog hair, and a few feathers that escaped my pillows.
Wyze says the robot can handle carpet up to an inch thick, and cross heights of up to 0.8 inches. In testing, it had no problem traversing different floor types, including tile, laminate wood, and carpet, and moving from one to another. Wyze says to avoid using the vacuum on shag carpets or rugs with tassels, as they may get caught in the main brush.
On the downside, the robot got stuck a few times in testing. On its first cleaning job, I had to manually set it free after it got caught under a shelving unit. On another run, it became wedged under the base of my couch twice, an area that has foiled other robot vacuums, including the iLife A4s Pro. When it gets stuck, it will send you a notification in the app. The Roomba 675 doesn’t offer as many smart features as the Wyze model, but in our testing, it almost never got stuck.
Like many competing vacuums including the Roomba 675, the Wyze model may not operate on dark or black flooring, as the machine’s sensors can misinterpret it as a ledge or stair. Wyze says the robot “can see and clean in any light,” but in testing, it overlooked dark rooms. On one early morning test run, the robot said it was finished after less than an hour, and navigated back to its base station with battery life to spare. Upon reviewing the cleaning record in the app, I noticed that it missed two whole rooms. The robot never bypassed those rooms on other test runs, so the only explanation I can come up with is that they were too dark at the time.
Customized Cleaning
Wyze makes it easy to edit the map of your home for customized cleaning. Initially, each room is given a generic name like “room 1,” “room 2,” and so on, but you can tap the gear icon in the upper right corner of the app, then select Edit Map to rename them. If necessary, you can then split or merge rooms on the map.
If you have an open floor plan, you might want to split large areas into multiple rooms for targeted cleaning. I have an open kitchen, dining, and living space that was initially labeled as one large room. I was able to split this area into three rooms, and correctly label each one. That way, if there’s a mess in the kitchen, I can send the robot right there.
The ability to merge two rooms also came in handy, as the app initially mislabeled one room as two. In this case, I was able to easily merge them and name the room with a few taps.
Another useful feature lets you create virtual walls to prevent the robot from cleaning certain areas. Just tap the square icon on the right side of the map, tap Add a Virtual Wall, and a red box appears on the map, which you can move anywhere and resize to close off that area.
In the settings menu, you can also adjust the suction level, view the robot’s cleaning records, and create cleaning schedules. When creating a schedule, you select the start time, which days you want it to run, the suction level, and whether you want it to clean the whole house or just specific rooms. You can set up a different schedule for every day of the week.
In the app’s Clean Records section, it shows the date and time of each session, how long the robot cleaned, and the square footage it covered. You can click into each entry to view a map of the robot’s route.
Maintenance
The Wyze Robot Vacuum requires similar maintenance to other vacuums in this price range, meaning you’ll need to manually empty the dustbin after every cleaning session or so. Wyze recommends using the small included brush to wipe off the dustbin and HEPA filter. You’ll also need to occasionally remove and clean the main and edge brushes, and wipe off the sensors on the bottom of the robot.
For optimal cleaning performance, Wyze says to swap out the main brush for a new one every six to 12 months, and to replace the edge brush and HEPA filter every three months. Wyze makes it easy to see the remaining usage time of these accessories and purchase replacements in the app; just head to Settings > Accessories. The vacuum comes with one extra HEPA filter in the box.
A Feature-Rich, Budget-Friendly Robot Vacuum
With its first robot vacuum, Wyze upholds its reputation for offering fully featured yet affordable smart home devices. For $250, the Wyze Robot Vacuum offers some of the same capabilities as far more expensive models, such as LiDAR-powered home mapping, route planning, area cleaning, and virtual walls. Even considering its lack of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice support, it’s one of the smartest robot vacuums in this price range. The Roomba 675 remains our Editors’ Choice winner primarily for its better battery life and obstacle avoidance, but both are excellent options depending on your needs and preferences.
