Dirty windows? Let the robot clean them for you with the Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro

Saturday, 06 May 2023 12:38

Dirty windows? Let the robot clean them for you with the Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro

Hate cleaning your windows? Or have windows that are hard to reach? Well, let Ecovacs new Winbot W1 Pro robot do the work for you.

No doubt you've seen robot vacuum cleaners. Ecovacs has a range of its own, including the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni - pretty much your own robot butler that sweeps, vacuums, and mops your floors.

With floors and carpets out of the way, now it's time to simplify your window cleaning too. In fact, if you are like me you have windows that haven't been cleaned since ..... who knows! It's boring, they're hard to reach, and many other reasons abound.

Ecovacs now makes it much simpler with the Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro, a window cleaning robot that sucks onto your windows and drives around giving them a good spray and wipe.

I mentioned this bot in the iTWire mother's day guide mother's day guide and it's still a great Mother's Day gift idea, but also deserves a more detailed explanation.

The bot is an efficient high-performance cleaning experience that literally works vertically. When you set it up, you'll find the bot itself, cleaning liquid, a power cable and safety harness, and two replaceable mopping pads. Rinse one of the mopping pads and squeeze it out, then stick it to the base of the Winbot. Add some cleaning fluid, and stick it to the window. Well - almost.

For safety reasons, the Winbot insists it is plugged into power. It has a battery but it won't operate without a guaranteed power supply. This is because it needs to maintain a firm grip on the window via its suction fan with 2,800Pa suction power, and if you cut power there's a risk it will simply fall to the ground and there goes your expensive, helpful robot.

The safety harness is a loose bit of cable with a carabiner clip, much like if you were mountain climbing or abseiling, and serves pretty much that exact purpose too - ideally, you'd secure this somewhere so, again, if the robot falls, it doesn't smash on the ground. However, while the robot will complain if it doesn't have a power supply, it won't make any fuss if the safety cable simply dangles to the ground.

That's a tricky thing; obviously, you don't want your robot to smash, but at the same time, you want it to get into the hard-to-reach places you can't get to. So, if you could climb above the window anyway maybe you wouldn't really need the robot to do your work. Nevertheless, iTWire has taken the Winbot W1 Pro all around a two-story home and - don't tell Ecovacs this, who loaned the robot to me - I didn't use the safety line upstairs at all. Or outside, come to think of it. I only used it when I was cleaning inside windows and it was easy to hook onto the curtain rod. However, at no time did the Winbot ever falter or give any hint it was at risk of falling. Each time I used it, it clamped itself firmly to the window, roamed around spraying and wiping and rendering the glass so clean I'd walk into it if I didn't know it was there, and then loudly told me when it was finished so I could remove it.

On this latter point, the Winbot isn't quite like a robot vacuum cleaner. Those you can program to do their work while you're out of the home, at any scheduled time of day or night. They do their magic and report back to base whenever they need a charge, or to fill or empty water or the dust tray. A window-cleaning robot is much different, due to the challenges and pitfalls of vertical cleaning. You can't set the Winbot to clean windows by itself - you have to go to the window and stick it on - and you can't leave it by itself - because it will sit there clinging to your window for dear life, noisily blowing its fan until you take it off.

However, even so, it's still tremendously versatile. For instance, while I could quite easily take it around my downstairs windows - both inside and out - it was a different matter upstairs. I didn't fancy climbing my balcony and wandering over the roof tiles, but I could remove a fly screen and then reach out, affix the Winbot to the outside window, and close the window as much as possible save for two cables.

Not only will the robot find its own way around your window, with built-in intelligent detection and WIN-SLAM 3.0 path planning tech, but you can manually drive it too. There's a free companion Ecovacs app that gives you all the control to adjust how it cleans and sprays, how thorough to be, and, importantly to let you drive it around if ever it chooses to finish out of arm's reach.

So while you ultimately can't wander too far from the bot, it definitely helped create spotless windows that I'd otherwise simply not deal with because of their difficulty to access. What's more, the requirement for power need not be onerous if you have a device such as the EcoFlow RIVER 2 portable power station. Without being tethered to a wall socket I could move the bot around outside and upstairs and all over. The EcoFlow RIVER 2 has power for days and days so unless you plan to leave the Winbot stuck to your window while you go on a camping weekend, you're not at risk of running out of power and letting it fall.

The device is simple to operate and maintain. Simply wash and squeeze out the mop pads, fill the reservoir with cleaning fluid, and that's about it really.

Instead of letting your dirty windows be the status quo, the Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro truly does make it a cinch for you to go around your whole house in several hours, leaving all your glass sparkling, both inside and out.

The Ecovacs Winbot W1 Pro is available from the Ecovacs store and from Bing Lee, for $799.

See it in action here:

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