Apply who likes to wash windows! Nobody? Well, right!

Introductory

I don’t think there are many things I would hate more than window washing. Although I'm not against housework, I especially like washing dishes due to some strange perversion, but window washing isn't one of my favorite pastimes. Yet there are good little cleaners these days, unlike when I was a child, when crumpled newsprint and vinegar water were the winners.

For a long time I lived in a housing estate on the seventh floor. There, then, it was a real test of courage to wash the windows. For those who are dizzy from a height, it is a serious challenge to balance on the stool or ladder in the open window, let’s not even talk about those who live in a modern apartment, behind unopenable windows, because they either call someone to wash the window or go for an industrial mountaineering training.

When the manager of the Gearbest store asked if I was reluctant to try out their window cleaning robot, I immediately said yes. Before my spiritual eyes, I could already see him sitting on the couch watching one of my series as the robot slammed the bottle. You will soon find out if this is really the case from the article.

Wrapping

The Alfawise WS-860 windshield washer robot comes in a box about the size of a “silly” robot vacuum cleaner. Sized box with a side length of 45 x 33 inches, but I didn’t even expect to be smaller knowing the features of the device.

Opening the lid, we find an instruction manual, thankfully in English, which is a little more understandable to me than Chinese punctuation. On the top shelf we find a remote control and a wiper pad, which - as it turned out - is a spare because one is already in the machine. The window washer itself, as well as the accessory box and a long rope with a carabiner at the end, await us by lifting the upper papundeklit. In the accessory box you will find an external power supply and next to it a long cable to connect to the machine.

The robot itself, as you can see in the picture, is waiting in an antistatic bag for us to finally go to war. That’s pretty much it, not much, not even a little, we get exactly what it takes to get our new machine on the dirty windows.

External

The Alfawise WS-860 is a 27 x 27 x 7 inch device that, when lifted out of the box, looks a bit heavy. My hand doesn’t cheat, the weight of the product will be a pound and a half, so I was wondering in advance how it would stay on the window.

The cover is white at the top and gray plastic at the sides. In the middle of the upper part you will find a fold-out lever, some buttons and an indicator LED. I will talk about their role later. There is another grille that comes with the built-in speaker.

From the bottom of the machine, I’d love to say it’s exciting, but we can’t expect too many surprises here either. In the middle is the inlet of the vacuum air duct, with a rubber sheet on each side that pulls the water off the window. Among them we find two more rubber bands, these will move the robot on the glass. There are four rollers at the corners and a velcro wiper pad on most of the bottom surface, which looks exactly like the cloths added to robotic vacuum cleaners with MOP function.

As I wrote, it also comes with a remote control with basic buttons. With this we can start the cleaning, with the four-way button we can remotely control the movement like a joystick and choose whether the robot moves on the glass in N or Z pattern. 

In terms of appearance, overall we can say that the structure does not seem absolutely crappy, in fact, it is a particularly well-put together piece. The plastics are good, not of the more fragile kind, and anyway, the machine looks as good as such a robot can be beautiful.

Operation

As you can read, the Alfawise WS-860 stays on top of the glass using a vacuum. The designer did not take care of it in several ways. On the one hand, they attach the rope as a physical aid, with which it is appropriate, say, to moor it to the radiator, because if one of the fifth falls on someone's head, it does not thank him. Another protection is that the machine also has a 650 mAh battery, which allows the robot to run for another twenty minutes if the power goes out. So a power outage will not be equal to a death leap!

The machine also received several sensors. Four of these have been placed in the corners, they detect when our window washer has reached the window frame. There’s an extra sensor on the bottom as well, which is good because it notices when the glass is over and doesn’t move on to nothing. This is rare with windows, but if you want to peel the glass next to the shower tray in the bathroom, for example, which is also frameless, this feature can be really useful.

The operation of the structure is not very complicated anyway. After switching on, the built-in carbon-free motor sucks the machine onto the window, applying a suction force of about 2800 Pa, and then, when started, travels nicely along the surface, gliding on the lower rubber bands.

Let's go back to the "Z" and "N" pattern mentioned in the remote control, which the machine can work on! I don't know if anyone has noticed, but if we turn the letter N 90 degrees to the left, it becomes Z. The explanation of what these two modes of operation mean is here. If Z, the machine follows a horizontal pattern across the window, while if N, it does the same only vertically. I will describe which one is better in the next chapter, everyone is interested in what kind of experience I gained with it in practice, so I will stop talking about rice, let's get to the point!

Use

Before I get into that, I have to say that I was very skeptical about what kind of work the robot would do. I can't explain the reason, maybe that's why I had doubts, because I know well how efficiently robot vacuum cleaners can clean. In short and sweetly, even the use of the word "effective" for this ability is wrong.

When we install our windshield washer robot, we can hold the folding lever and press it onto the glass. The power button is in the best possible position, just reachable with a thumb, so pressing it will spin the engine, create a vacuum and let you release the machine, it will not fall asleep.

In several places on the net, it is advisable to spray the detergent water on the wipe, on other sites, to spray it on the bottle. Well, both methods have advantages and disadvantages. Let’s start there, it took a while before I experimented with what density of detergent solution would be appropriate. If there is too little detergent compared to the added water, cleaning will not be effective, if there is too much detergent under the rubber belts that move the machine, the belt will start to slip, slides down to the bottom of the bottle.

This is exactly how to spray the amount of detergent water on the window and / or the wiper pad. Many or few points have the same effects as before, that is, if there are few, the glass will not be clean, if there are many, the machine will not be able to move through the window.

Honestly, I experimented in the front window for a good 20-25 minutes before I managed to figure out the mixing ratio and the amount of detergent. I was a little discouraged by all the spotting.

The point is that the solution, the mixing ratio, was finally found, everything went fleeting, until I washed the windows where the sun wasn’t shining. At these, I squirted the detergent water on the window nicely, the robot started, slashing through the glass, and at the end, a pleasant-sounding lady said from the engine room that the cleaning was complete. With regard to finishing, it is important that the machine always returns to where it was started from the end, ie it should not start at the hip height, but I have to take it down a ladder from a height of three meters at the end of the cleaning.

Going back to the day, I sprinkled the water on the glass, but it evaporated in such moments that the windshield washer machine had no chance of washing away anything. This is where the other solution came into play, namely wetting the wiper pad. With this method, a relatively large surface can be washed without turning it off and rewetting.

I mentioned the lovely lady who lives in the plane. Well, he’s extremely helpful because he not only informs you when you’re done with work, but also, for example, when the power goes out or the machine gets stuck for some reason. In this case, the LED on the cover will also flash, hurrying us to do something. And the jam, as I wrote above, easily happens when there is too much water or too much detergent.

Returning to the Z and N paths, for me, Z, i.e. horizontal, turned out better because, as you can see in the attached video above, the panes are high but not too wide. If I chose the N direction, the machine slipped on the longer path, so sometimes a strip was missed. In the Z direction, however, the short round trip made the cleaning complete. The point here is to try this too, one window size will get one better and another will be better.

Experiences

The main question was what the quality of the cleaning was. Well, the experience is ambiguous. I also tried it directly on heavily soiled glass (it wasn’t the window), which was so dirty that I couldn’t really see through it. Needless to say, after a one-time cleaning, everything was as striped as if my robot was trying to smear a zebra on the window. Moreover, after the third run, the quality of the cleaning was only acceptable.

Nor was the structure good enough to apologize for the expression, but I can't really describe it any other way - as the sun sheds the glass-dried fly shit. It’s really like the robotic vacuum cleaner MOP, which is great for wet wiping, but it doesn’t sweep the floor instead of us.

The good news, though, is that the spring wash of glass that has been dirty all winter has become perfect. Dust, rain marks, on the inner surface of the children’s hand, nose and forehead imprints have disappeared nicely. If I wanted to tie it into something, it could be that the wiper pad unfortunately doesn’t reach the window frame, so in some places where the glass was really dirty next to the frame, I also needed a little manual aftercare.

Except for that one buck, everything became perfect in the end. As I washed the three-foot-high windows from the outside, the neighbors watched in amazement, and I happily sunbathed my face in the lukewarm spring sunshine, sipping my coffee. So far, I hated this part of window washing the most, because the roof of the windows is so high, including the base of the house, that I only reached the small house ladder by stretching it strongly, so the cleaning was just as it was.

Has what I saw before my spiritual eyes come true? In full! I laid the knobs on the afternoon nap, squirted the already experimented amount of liquid on the window or pillow, turned on the machine, turned on the TV, and only got up when my new girlfriend called out of the box to get the job done.

Summary

Finally, the big question is, is it worth buying? Window man is not now a week, and the machine is not cheap. Still, I see no reason to look at it as an investment for many years, taking it out of its box three or four or five times a year. It's simple and extremely comfortable, and you can not only lie down and watch TV while you're working, but you can also vacuum, for example, to halve the time spent cleaning.

So the point is to keep it and use it because it really gets rid of the awkward and disgusting window washing. I also tend to say about robot vacuum cleaners, in this case it is also true that when using a robot, we have to imagine cleaning a little differently. With a traditional vacuum cleaner, depending on the dirt, we go through the apartment every week, every two weeks. With the robot, however, do not bother to clean 2-3 every three days, and so the apartment will be perfectly dust-free. Even in the case of a window washing robot, it may be better to take it out several times, not to let the window get very dirty. Since there is absolutely no hassle of squatting the glass, we can even climb the Alfawise WS-860 on the windows every month, and then happily watch the bright summer sunshine through the striped and dust-free glass!

You can buy the robot mentioned in the article from a European warehouse, with a delivery time of 4-6 working days, without duty and VAT here: Alfawise WS-860 windshield washer robot

You can find more window washers here: Hand and robot washers