The Qrevo Curv 2 Flow is also optimized for hardwood floors. SmartPlan had no trouble automatically distinguishing the tile of my bathroom and laundry room from the hardwood of my kitchen. However, it occasionally relegated my carpeted living room and den to a sad Default status, rather than Carpet, and did not lift the mopping pad. In two weeks, I caught the Qrevo mopping the carpet once or twice.

The internal routing to the docking station’s dust bag also appears to have been optimized for liquids, which means that solids, like dog hair, tend to clump up inside. I forgot to check the disposal chute for a few days, and it spat out a clump of dog hair the size of a small hamster. It’s been a while since a Roborock vacuum has done that to me.

Photograph: Adrienne So

SmartPlan’s occasional unreliability made me a little nervous to just set and forget the Qrevo by scheduling a cleaning time and letting SmartPlan decide everything, as I’ve done with Roborock vacuums in the past. However, I did like that there’s now a dirt-detection feature that Roborock calls, confusingly, DirTect. You can also customize and boost the cleaning with a pet-detection feature. It has 20,000 pascals (Pa) of suction, which, while not the highest suction power of the robovacs I’ve tested, is plenty high enough for most people. (You will probably just bald your carpets if you go higher.)

Battery life is also not the best I’ve tested, nor is it the fastest to recharge. (For example, Ecovacs and its more affordable sub-brand, Yeedi, both now have models with PowerBoost technology that can top up to finish a cycle in a matter of minutes.) If I start a full cleaning at 9:30 am, it takes until 3 pm to finish, with a three-hour recharge cycle mid-clean. It can clean for about 1.5 hours if it’s required to do things like mopping. It takes about 140 minutes to clean 850 square feet.

Probably the most important consideration, though, is that the Qrevo Curv 2 Flow is brand-new and retails for $1,000. For the past several years, I’ve been saying that $1,500 is about the median cost for a brand-new robot vacuum, and this is considerably well under that mark. And it’s currently on sale for $850 until February!

While they’re fun for testing and making videos, I’d skip the flashier, pricier stair-climbing and arm-waving models for now. This solid midrange vacuum is all that you really need, at a price that you won’t have to refinance your house to afford.