Many Australian homes are enjoying the benefits of robots in 2023, be it vacuuming, mopping, or mowing, but these robots continue to learn new tricks. One of the latest on the market is a window cleaning robot, the Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro, which helps take the hard work out of a boring task.
With its intelligent sensors and advanced mapping technology, the Winbot W1 Pro can navigate through your home’s vertical glass surfaces.
In this review, we’ll explore the features that make this robot vacuum cleaner a must-have for any busy homeowner, covering its design, cleaning performance, ease of use, value for money and more.
Design
The design of the robot is surprising in a good way. Let’s start by the unboxing experience, when you open the top of the box, you’re met with a very nice fabric carry case.
Once you unzip the carry case, you’re met with a nice surprise, a contrasting quality leather strap handle, which make moving the robot around, between windows, an absolute breeze.
I’ve used robot and mopping vacuums for years and they’re almost always just hard plastic shells, while the integration of a leather strap adds character and warmth to an otherwise hard piece of electronics.
combined with the weight, it provides a higher quality feeling than many of the other plastic robots to clean your floors.
The square body of the robot is very different from the circular robots we find running around our floorboards, and that shape is no accident, given the vast majority of glass surfaces are rectangular.
Underneath, we find where the seemingly gravity-defying magic happens. The centre of the device features an array of suction holes that create enough surface tension to hold the device to the glass. It’s important to understand how impressive this is, with the weight of the W1 not exactly light, it feels secure and gives you confidence after just a few seconds that it’s strong enough to hold itself to the window.
There are rubberised tank treads on the sides of the robot, which are smartly controlled by the onboard electronics, enabling it to move forward, backwards and turns to allow it to cover the entire window surface.
The bottom of the robot offers a velcro surface, where one of two included cleaning cloths are attached. When the cleaning’s done, they’re easily cleaned by throwing them in the wash. Also, they’re reversible, meaning you get more cleaning done with less hassle, I flipped mine over, refilled the cleaning agent and continued across 15 windows in a session.
Features
WIN-SLAM 3.0 path planning technology
If you’ve ever watched a Roomba or similar robot, you likely scratched your head and thought, where is this crazy robot going? What I was really surprised to see is just how efficient the path planning is on the Winbot W1 Pro. You start by placing on a window of any size and pressing the start button. This is conveniently located where your thumb would normally land and of course there’s the ability to start/stop it with a mobile app.
When you start cleaning, you imagine the robot would need to transit the 4 corners of the glass to understand the surface area it’s dealing with, before plotting a course to clean it all. What Ecovacs has done with WIN-SLAM 3.0 path planning is stunning.
The robot travels efficiently as it goes to work on cleaning for you. The cleaning solution is sprayed on to the glass, in front of the robot, which helps loosen the dirt, so by the time the cloth underneath reaches it, removing dirt from the surface is a breeze. Back and forward the robot goes until you hear a cheerful sound to let you know the robot has finished and yes, at this point, you need to manually move it between windows.
2,800 Pa suction power
To ensures that WINBOT W1 PRO has a firm grip on the window at all times, the engineers included an advanced suction fan. Not only is important to maintain adhesion to the window for itself (would likely break if it fell), but it’s also important for young ones, or pets who may be nearby.
Beyond safety, the powerful suction means a firmer wipe and a better clean for your windows.
60 ml reservoir
Included in the top of the robot is a rubber cover that can be opened to reveal the fill point for the robot. While you could probably use water, the cleaning solution provided enables the cleaning to be effective and not leave streaks behind, effectively making it a 2-shot cleaning pass (1 for each side of the window).
Safety Carrabeener
Given how strong the suction is and how well it works, I’m actually surprised they included this at all, but there is a tethered string attached to a carabiner hook. I couldn’t find an appropriate location to attach this to in many cleaning locations (aka my bifold doors), but others may and get additional reassurance that this will never fall freely to the ground.
Performance
I was incredibly impressed by the performance of the Winbot W1 Pro. We have always struggled to keep the bifold doors to our alfresco area clean, with little fingerprints regularly making a mess. Having a fast, easy solution to cleaning these means a once-a-week clean for minutes (most of which the robot does the work for) ensures our doors stay clean.
The speed at which each window was cleaned, was impressive to me, but some experienced cleaners out there are likely to be able to outpace it, although I’m not sure that’s really the concern of many. Each side of each window took a few minutes, which means a total of 18 windows took around half an hour.
The great news is that when it was done, it was done, I was really satisfied with the effortless outcome and didn’t feel like I had to touch up areas or redo them. Even outdoor windows that were exposed to dirty rain were no match for the cleaning power of the W1.
Given the number of windows I cleaned, I definitely had to refill the reservoir, which makes me think the tank size could be bigger, but overall, a great job and the noise while operating, was definitely acceptable (around 72db).
Issues
If you want to complain about the biggest first-world problem, it’s that you have to manually pick your self-cleaning window robot off one window and put it on the next. That is something I’m happy to deal with, but just be aware, this isn’t the single-touch clean-your-house experience that we now enjoy with robot vacuums that automatically empty their payloads when they reach capacity and keep going.
The W1 is a little needy and wants your attention every few minutes, but given the task of moving between glass surfaces, it’s basically impossible to automate this.
By far, the biggest mishap I had and the biggest piece of product feedback I have for Ecovacs, is that as smart as the robot is, it failed to identify a door handle in the way and actually wedged itself under the handle, scratching the top surface of the device.
I thought this may have just gotten unlucky, so retried and was able to replicate it, with the added twist that the downward pressure actually opened the door and saw the robot swinging on an open door above concrete.
Price and Availability
The Ecovacs WINBOT W1 PRO is available now for A$799.00. That may seem like a steep price for a robot that cleans windows, but compared to the modern pricing for floor-cleaning robots, this actually feels like good value for money.
If this price tag makes sense to you, really depends on how much you detest cleaning windows, glass doors, shower screens etc.
You can’t leave this unattended to take care of the task, but it absolutely makes the task far, far easier. In testing the device, I put the robot on a window, hit go, laid down on the couch for a few minutes, waited for the completion beep, then got up and moved it to the next, 10 seconds later I was back on the couch.
Of course, there are a million different cleaning solutions you could use, but the WINBOT 230ml accessory costs A$14.90, while the WINBOT Cleaning pads (2 packs) cost A$29.90 if you ever need to replace them.
Overall
We have a large 4 bedroom house with lots of glass to clean and to be honest, much of it went far too long between cleans because it’s so much of a hassle. Now armed with a window cleaning robot, I certainly look at that task definitely, something that is dramatically simplified by some robot help.
One thing I’d definitely recommend is to get yourself a really long extension cable, fortunately, we had one. Given the robot has a hard-mounted power plug, you need to connect it to mains power to make it work. Having a long 20M extension cord will generally allow you to move to any window in your home. At that point, the only hassle you’ll have is refilling the cleaning solution, or flipping the cleaning cloth when it gets dirty.
The Winbot W1 Pro by Ecovacs is absolutely a luxury, but one that I seriously loved using. If you can stomach the cost, it performs well and simplifies, while not completely automating an annoying cleaning task. It’s not surprising to see bundles of both floor and window-cleaning robots together and while we’re going, why not throw a robot lawn mower in there for good measure?
