About a week ago our upstairs Eufy robot vacuum stopped working. It would start every morning at 8am as scheduled but then beep loudly for about 15 seconds and then just sit there until someone picked it up and put it back on the charger. Upon further inspection, the unit couldn't move forward. It could spin and go backwards but not forward. Having had this experience before, I knew what to do but turned the unit off and let it sit for a week.
This evening I have a number of meetings with Japan that will run quite late and so I thought I would take some time this morning and fix the busted robot vacuum. The first thing I did was clean the brush and wheels. My wife's sewing room is on that floor and the vacuum picks up a lot of string. Surprisingly the brush didn't have too much wrapped around it. The wheels had some. Once I removed all the string, I tested the vacuum. Nope, it still couldn't move forward.
I turned off the Eufy, flipped it over, and set it on my worktable. For the record, my worktable today doubles as my dinning room table at meal times. Next I removed the 8 screws that attach the front bumper to the vacuum. The bumper covers the front 3rd of the device and has about an 8th of an inch of play. I could still move the bumper in and out. When I pulled off the bumper I could see a lot of dust balls and fluff. I pulled out my hand-held vacuum and can of compressed air. Then I cleaned out the front third of the Eufy vacuum. Once everything looked clean, I put my bad pet back together and gave it a test. It worked fine and so I let it loose to clean the floor.
Today's electronics are meant to be disposable. That means when they stop working, you throw them away and buy new ones. Call me a bit old fashioned but I think you should be able to get more than 3 years out of a robot vacuum. Having had them for about a decade now, there really are only a few things that can go wrong. The first is the battery going bad and those are fairly painless to replace. The second is the front bumper getting jammed. To fix that you generally just need to clean it out. If you clean it out and it still won't move forward, you have my permission to throw it away. If you clean it out and you can't figure out how to put the vacuum back together, visit the University of YouTube and you should be able to figure it out.
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