Nigel (one more time)

Alfred was fired due to performance issues.

 After some research I decided to give the "robVac servant" another try and decided on the Neato D7 with all the bells and whistles.

Then there was Black Friday offering coupons, discounts and all that jazz. I managed to wrangle one Neato D7 out of the online store for almost 50% off, still a lot of money but, but, but ...

Setup, again, was a breeze, no surprises there. The big aha moment came after I turned the roboVac on. Contrary to the first Neato bot, were the startup noise was compatible with a jet engine, the D7 in Eco mode was a low humming which brought a smile on my face right away. So far so good. I downloaded the Neato App and it connected to Nigel (notice it has a name now) right away. Contrary to Alfred I was able to setup the cleaning schedule with ease. Then I left him alone in anticipation for the next scheduled cleaning day.

Monday came and went, I forgot about Nigel until I arrived back home. Then my curiosity peeked. I opened up the app to see if things worked out the way I wanted to. Sure enough they did. There was the floor plan with the areas Nigel reached for cleaning, there was the dust bin filled with, well, dust and stuff. The first go around worked well. I was somewhat skeptical due to some of the reviews indicating that this and that did not work - must have been user errors I presume. After emptying the dust bin I decided to just let the program run its course. By the end of the week I had statistics about area cleaned, time taken to do so, and a clean living environment.

One more item I wanted to mention which comes with Nigel is the fact that it interfaces with Alexa, and it actually works right out of the box.

The upgrade 

After picking up an announcement about zone cleaning on Flipboard with the new version of the software I was feverishly looking forward to test that feature. However, annoying things like work prevented me from further testing the "no cleaning zones" or the "zone cleaning" itself. Comments to come soon.