Samsung Navibot Silencio SR8895

Although robotic vacuum cleaners are still a relatively recent invention, they're evolving quickly. After the SR8845 and SR8855, Samsung has launched the SR8895, which also goes by the name of 'Silencio'. As you'd expect then, the main new feature of this vac is that it's much quieter than the firm's previous models.

While the prices of the two other models are now starting to come down, the SR8895 has launched with a rather extravagant £500 price tag!


As high-tech and as expensive as it may be, this robotic vac is still no replacement for a cylinder-type vac (with or without bag). It's more like an equivalent of an upright lightweight 'stick' vacuum cleaner, like the Electrolux Rapido range. It has a similar kind of battery life, running for 1 hour 30 minutes after charging for a couple of hours and has a similar capacity, with 0.6 litre dust tank compared with over 2 litres for a cylinder vacuum cleaner. Similarly, its suction power (although that is fairly limited, the rotating brushes help) and power consumption are on par with 'stick' cleaners, but with the Navibot you don't need to lift a finger to clean your home!

Intelligent

The Navibot SR8895 scoots around cleaning your home thanks to a camera built into the top of the robot that effectively maps rooms. The SR8895 therefore knows where it's come from, where it's going and where it hasn't been yet, and it can automatically find its charging base. It's pleasant to watch this clever little vac working its way around your home (although the novelty wears off after a while) and the logical-looking nature of its routes seems reassuring, especially compared with the random routes some of its competitors choose.

As well as its camera, the SR8895 is loaded with proximity detectors to keep your furniture safe, and to stop your handy robotic cleaner from crashing into walls and obstacles or falling down the stairs.

Cleaning Efficiency

We marked out a virtual room, with a hard floor, using the vac's virtual wall tools. Then we spread 150 grammes of rice liberally around the virtual room in order to find out how much of the rice our robotic friend could pick up.



We first of all tried out the test with the SR8895 in its intensive cleaning mode (Spot mode = deep clean of a specific zone). In this mode it collected an impressive 147 grammes of rice—that's 98% of the rice we sprinkled around. The SR8895 works remarkably effectively too, covering the room in a well-planned grid and using regular, logical routes. The robot cleans right up to the limit of the virtual wall and follows them all the way to the end, leaving no patch of floor uncovered. The 3 grammes of rice it missed we found lodged in tiny cracks and crevices in our hard floor surface. In other words, this Navibot is great for cleaning up crumbs Dustbuster-style, but it's still no match for a full-powered vacuum cleaner which would have easily sucked these grains of rice up out of the cracks.


In standard cleaning mode the vac doesn't clean quite as intensively, staying about 10 cm away from the virtual walls. It doesn't comb over the area quite so minutely and, as a result, we did find that it left some dust behind. In the rice test, this time it picked up 138 grammes out of the 150 grammes scattered around the test zone. That makes the vac 92% effective, which still isn't too bad. The 12 grammes that got left behind were mostly along the edges of walls, hiding in corners, at boundaries where the floor surface changed or pushed under furniture by the spinning brushes. A score of 'just' 92% efficiency therefore isn't particularly worrying as, when used day after day, the vac will continuously scour the area and will end up cleaning the room fully in the end.


We then tried out Samsung's latest Navibot on thick, deep pile carpet. On this type of floor, we noticed that the vac had a bit more trouble getting around. That said, it still diligently covered the whole test zone even if it moved more slowly than on the hard floor. This time though, it only picked up 42% of the rice.

Our final test of speed and efficiency was carried out in a room measuring 12 m² (129 sq. ft) this time with thin carpet tiles. In Spot mode the SR8895 took 7 minutes to clean the room—8 minutes if you include the time it took for the vac to return to its charging dock. Plus, the SR8895 picked up a decent 96% of rice and the only forgotten grains were along the edges of the walls.

Tidy Up First!

To use this kind of robotic cleaner effectively you will need to be quite strict about keeping the floor free from obstacles—something that's not likely to be inherent in anyone who buys a robotic vac to clean up so they don't have to. Before unleashing the Navibot, you need to first of all make sure that you've picked up the shoes you kicked off as you came in the door, the smelly t-shirt you threw off and the kids' toys liberally sprinkled across the living room floor. Plus, it's advisable to keep furniture feet (e.g. chairs and stools) to a minimum, as these can get in the way of the Navibot's logically mapped routes. Plus, don't forget to tidy up cables (phone chargers, games consoles etc.) which are the worst enemy of the robotic vacuum cleaner.

After trying out the robot in a perfect obstacle-free room, we then decided to see how it got on with the real-life obstacles in our office. After about 20 minutes we found the SR8895 beached on a huge tangle of monitor cables and extension leads and switched off.

Night Vision?

As the Samsung maps rooms using its built-in camera, we wondered if perhaps you'd have to leave the lights on at home to make sure that it didn't forget to clean the bathroom, for example. When we put that to the test, we found that the Navibot Silencio worked well, even in totally dark rooms with the only light filtering in from an open door—a wide open door, mind you.

The next step was to try out the vac in a room with no windows, with the lights switched on for two minutes and then plunged into darkness. The SR8895 worked fine for the first two minutes, but then got totally lost when we switched off the lights.

Too Quiet?

The SR8895 really is very, very quiet. In fact, we kind of think that this robotic vac is a little bit too 'Silencio'. When cleaning, you can hear its motor and its spinning brushes a little, and you can also just about hear a suction noise. But that's exactly the problem—the suction power just isn't strong enough to cope effectively with irregular surfaces such as cracks between the planks of a wooden floor, broken tiles, cracks and crevices in concrete flooring and the gaps under doors. Don't forget that 58% of rice was left behind on the deep pile carpet.

Compared With Competitors

The LG Roboking works quickly but can't scoot over the slightest obstacle. It would clean around the edge of a rug, for example, while the Samsung Navibot would climb up onto it with ease. It can't be programmed for a daily run either as there's only a timer function to set it off while you're out that day (like on the Samsung SR8845). For noise, the LG Roboking and the Samsung SR8895 are about on par.

The Roomba 780, on the other hand, sells for a similar price to the Samsung SR8895, and has a slightly larger dust container (0.8 L compared with 0.6 L), twice the battery life thanks to its NiMH battery (instead of the Li-ion used by Samsung and LG), but it doesn't have a camera for intelligent mapping. In other words, the Roomba follows a random route which means it can't pick up where it left off on its previous mission like the Samsung SR8895 can. It's also noisier at 70 dB.