Shark - Matrix Plus 2-in-1 Robot Vacuum & Mop with Sonic Mopping, Matrix Clean, Home Mapping, HEPA Bagless Self Empty, WiFi - Black

TLDR: The deduction of stars for this product are due to issues that are software related. From a hardware perspective, I feel this unit is a great value at this price point. It performs well when the software doesn’t get in the way. The inflexibility and tediousness in customizing the map, the tendency for the configuration to deteriorate over time (prompting new remapping headaches), and the “it’s-almost-so-asinine-it-must-be-intentional” lack of scheduling flexibility bring a 5-star kit of hardware down to 3-stars. I’m already looking at what I’ll buy when this thing breaks or becomes intolerable, and it won’t be this. SETUP: setup was simple, and it accurately mapped the entire house in about 30 minutes. My house is about 2500 square feet with tile, vinyl planks, and a lot of area rugs. Sectioning off different rooms in the map once it’s done mapping is tedious. Oh, and if you rearrange a room and want to remap it for accuracy…well, it sucks. You can’t remap specific areas…it must remap the entire house. If you do a remap, it deletes all of your boundaries and zones. Remapping for any reason means starting over. This turns remapping into a chore. Not only do you have to make sure the entire house is in a state where the vacuum can accurately scan and access it, you have to redo your rooms and zones. If you want to mop, you need to re-specify the carpeted areas. This isn’t bad if you have entire rooms that are carpeted, but we have a ton of area rugs. So accurately plotting the location of those rugs involves a lot of measuring. Then, the robot does a “carpet verification” run where it meanders its way to your carpet zones. You babysit the vacuum at this stage to make sure your zones are obeyed. If not, you go back to the app, re-do the zones, and do another verification run. It’s tedious and time-consuming. I don’t mind doing the work once, but it makes me wary of re-mapping the house when the vacuum starts acting strangely (see “Navigation” below). Unfortunately, remapping seems to be one of the only troubleshooting steps that fixes quirky software-related behavior. DEDUCT .5 STARS for tedious mapping workflows, the all-or-nothing approach to mapping, and lack of ability to import or retain zones from previous mappings. NAVIGATION: Navigation is decent…at least at first. For the first several weeks, I could send it straight to a room and it would navigate to that room on a mission and get the job done. After several weeks, I started finding that the vacuum would be confused as to where it was or what it’s supposed to do. Sometimes I’d send it on a job to clean two bedrooms, and it’d wander around aimlessly, even popping in said bedrooms to say hi, and then just wander back to its dock with an exuberant “Mission Complete!” message in the app without having cleaned a single room. When this happens, if I pull up the “mission map”, it’s representation of my house looks all out of sorts….like someone took an architectural diagram and had a 5 year-old recreate it with crayon. The robot’s understanding of the layout of my house, and the map associated with that, was completely deteriorated. I’ve found that performing a restart when this happens often helps to fix the issue, which points to a problem with software and memory. I get that. Even smartphones need a good reboot every so often. But it’s annoying that the device has no sense of when it’s in a deteriorated memory state. It pretends to obey and then goes home. I have to check the mission maps after each run to make sure it actually did what I told it to. Another quirk I’ve found is that it sometimes takes forever to go to the area you’re asking it to vacuum. It’ll wander around for 30 minutes and then finally go “oh yeah! I’m supposed to clean the kitchen!”. My workaround for that is to find the wayward vacuum, scold it, and then place it in the room I asked it to clean in the first place. It picks up from there as if it finally discovered the meaning of its life. My guess is the real fix is to remap. But given the tedious nature of that whole process (see Setup above), the workarounds tend to feel easier, especially when it’s clear that even with a remap, I’ll eventually have to remap it again when it starts acting quirky again a couple months down the road. DEDUCT .5 STARS for deterioration in configuration stability over time. VACUUMING: We have 3 dogs and two cats, and the amount of pet hair this thing picks up is astounding. The automated dust-bin emptying is a life-saver, but be prepared to empty the dock’s bin more frequently if you have pets. I run the vacuum over the entire house every day or two, and I find myself emptying it at least once a week. It’s easy to do, but it’s something you’ll need to add to your regular cleaning routine. The vacuum does a decent job sucking up debris. I can run it in a room that looks clean and it’ll come back with a huge ball of pet hair, dust, and dirt I couldn’t have noticed if I tried. That said, the suction isn’t mind-blowing. It will leave bits here and there on rugs. Don’t expect it to fully replicate the cleaning power of a full-size vacuum. I never expected that, and appreciate that it does 90% of the work for 10% of the effort on my part. The biggest thing I wanted is pet hair removal, and this thing works very, very well for that, especially on hard surfaces. As far as blockages, sometimes hair will get wrapped around the roller. It can be prone to blockages. What I’ve learned over the last several months is that reliability in the performance of this vacuum all comes down to maintenance (which is very important if you really put this thing to work). For this price point, I think the vacuuming capabilities are within the realm of reasonable. MOPPING: The mopping feels a little like an after-thought, but it does a decent job. I appreciate that it vacuums and mops at the same time. I’ve found that the mopping is adequate for getting rid of the typical “grubby look” that hard floors take on with normal traffic. It wipes nearly all the grubby away and leaves the floor looking shiny and clean. Some streaking can happen, but it’s barely noticeable. It’s not going to scrub away sticky messes from spilled drinks or food, but I wouldn’t expect it to. Again, it does 90% of the work for 10% of the effort. There are disadvantages though. For example, you have to use the mopping bin, instead of the typical vacuuming bin. There’s no self-emptying of what the vacuum picked up when the mopping bin is attached. You must manually empty the vacuumed debris between jobs, refill the reservoir, etc. For this price point, I think these limitations are within the realm of reasonable. AUTOMATION: My house is on the larger side for a single robot vacuum (2500 square feet). With some coordination, this vacuum can clean everything once per day. The key is compartmentalizing jobs. The battery life isn’t terrible, but it’s nothing to write home about. You might get two hours on default settings. But good gosh does it take forever to charge. 3+ hours to get from 10% back to 100%. This means that I usually tackle different parts of the house throughout the day and let it charge between. The problem is scheduling, which is unacceptably feature-poor. Let’s say you want the robot to start cleaning your living room, dining room, and kitchen at 1:00 AM. You can’t do that. You can tell it to start cleaning at 1:00 AM, but it’ll try to clean the whole house. I can’t schedule the cleaning of specific rooms, which is just a ridiculous omission. So whether the house gets cleaned while I’m working or not is fully up to me remembering to open the app multiple times throughout the day and manually define what I want it to do. Most of us have busy, yet predictable lives. If we have the ability to define rooms to clean, and we have the ability to schedule the vacuum to start working, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to combine those two ideas. My ability to fully schedule cleaning for my home in a way that works for my predictable schedule is limited by lazy software development (or planned obsolescence). DEDUCT 1 STAR for glaring deficiencies in scheduling and automation. MAINTENANCE: It’s worth noting that though robot vacuums can help reduce the amount of manual cleaning , you do have to allocate some of that time to maintenance. The roller gets hair spun around it. Crap gets caked in the grooves under the roller. The pre-filter screen on the dust bin gets clogged. The inside of the dust bin gets caked in crud, and hair gets stuck in tight spaces. There’s also aHEPA filter that will need to be replaced periodically. For my level of use, I replace it once a month. There’s a filter to the left of the dock’s dust bin that WILL cake up very quickly. You can rinse and wring it, but if you don’t keep up with it, the vacuum’s ability to dump its collection of nasty will diminish until you clean or replace that filter. The dock’s dust bin has a prefilter that also needs to be cleaned periodically. There’s a HEPA filter on the docking station that will need to be replaced periodically. The mop pads need to be washed. The sensors should be wiped clean every so often. None of these things are particularly difficult, and even all of them in combination is only about 10 minutes of work per week, but keeping up with them is the difference between a good, reliable experience and a frustrating experience fraught with clogs, errors, and underperformance. It just be nice if the system reminded the user to perform critical maintenance tasks, especially if those prompts were informed by algorithms based on usage and data. These things collect a ton of data. It knows when the brush roller is hampered by hair and will use the most generic robot voice to tell you. It surely knows when the volume of air it can pull through the filter is reduced, but it won’t share that with you. DEDUCT .25 STARS for lack of software-prompted maintenance.

Im satified! For the money, shes awesome. Mapping - Great Self cleaning- perfect "MATRIX" clean - best vacuuming these rugs and carpets have ever had without paying someone or renting a cleaner. Ease of app. - well done. Im old and I get it. Lol Great tool for the house. Works with Alexa, and maybe Google. I do hope that eventually, that it only needs me to say "Becky" instead of this interaction; "Alexa, ask Shark to clean kitchen." "Okay, which robot?" "Becky." I only have one robot. Lol That may be more Amazon than Shark too, though. Overall though, buy it.

What a back-saver this cleaning bot is! It's amazing how accurate it's mapping feature is, and how easy it is with the app to label my rooms, send it to specific areas of the house, and know when it is done or just emptying it's dust bin. Worth every penny!