The Hidden Perk of Robot Vacuums Has Nothing To Do With Picking Up Crumbs

I was late boarding the robot vacuum train and now I see they make robots that vacuum and mop?! That might be something I explore down the road. For now I still can’t get over our little Eufy, who we call by his name and who—maybe because of isolation, but maybe not—is kind of a member of the family.

See, not only did Eufy jiggle and jog his way into my heart by being so darn cute, but he’s also really, really good—surprisingly so—at what he does. From the day my cats and I first watched his maiden run through the house (my husband has this all on video), I fell in love with his ways. My favorite move he does is the old turn-toward-the-wall-and-away-from-it-a-bunch-of-times maneuver. It’s how he gets the edges of the floor so super clean, better than humans without nozzle attachments on their vacuums do, for sure. It’s one of the ways he cleans better than I do (shhh).

But in addition to cleaning the edges, skirting around chair legs, and even skittering underneath couches to clean more thoroughly than his mother, errr, owner does, Eufy has had another unexpected but most welcome effect on our family: He helps us pick everything up off the floor!

In a strange AI turn of events, I think Eufy might be training us to be better at housekeeping. Because every time my family hears the little chirp he makes as he leaves his home base to start vacuuming the floor, it’s like Pavlov’s dogs around here. Every member of the family scrambles to make sure there aren’t any little toys on the floor that might clog his rotary brush or tossed-off clothes that might get caught in his machinery.

By making the path clear for Eufy to do his thing, we inadvertently end up with picked-up floors and a cleanup session that happened, somehow, with zero nagging. Eufy gets his job done, and gets us to do ours, too. Eufy is my favorite robot.