Mint, The Automatic Floor Cleaner: A Gizmo Review

Say "Hello" to Mint, the Automatic Floor Cleaner. If you've watched the video above and you're a homo sapien that attempts to keep clean-ish living quarters, you're probably intrigued.

I've had an eye on the Roomba, a robot vacuum for a few years as a family member swears by hers. I put it on our wedding registry. The wedding came and went and no Roomba. Eh, I guess it wasn't in the stars. Thank the lucky stars that we didn't get one, otherwise I would have quit looking and never found the Mint! Actually, I wasn't really looking for a floor cleaning robot when I was at Target this past weekend. I went with a general need of a different vac as the upright we have does terrific on carpet, but our new house is all tile. It tends to shoot a lot of the stuff, particularly the cat litter back behind it, making me feel like I'm standing in a sand blaster. So there I was, innocently comparison shopping vacs in the aisle and on my phone and then I spotted it. No, not the Mint, but those wonderful yellow temporary price reduction flags they have at Target. Being the bargain hunter I am, I shimmied down the aisle to take a looksie. And there it is [cue the choir of angels], the Mint, a little robot to clean my floors for me and it now only costs $20 more than the vac I was considering. I'm thinking, "For $20 extra, I can DEFINITELY take me out of the floor cleaning picture." So after some anxious "Should I really be spending this kind of money on this?" phone calls to Greg, I put it in the basket. (Ok, it cost half to a third of a Roomba depending on the comparison model, but I'm a tight wad. I don't usually spend more than $75 or so on a single item without some major research and thought.)

Once I got home, Greg pounced wanting to play with his new toy. First of all, I will be horribly honest and say that I hadn't vacuumed the house in two weeks. Gross, I know. Double gross since with the tile emphasizes the little bits of dust that love to stick to my feet. This has ALWAYS driven me crazy and what drove me to Target looking for a solution. Since moving to our new tile filled house, I've either just bitten my lip and tried to ignore the feeling as it returns the day after a good vacuuming anyway or wear shoes in the house. I love shoes, but my feet are most happy when they're naked. So, all that to say, the Mint had it's work cut out for it. We pulled it out of the box and it came with a quick start guide. Good for we patience challenged children as the instruction manual is like 30 pages and that's 29 too long. lol. So we get the batteries in the navigation box in and plug the 'bot into the wall charger. The instructions say we need to charge it over night/until the lights go from red to blue. Well, a few hours later, it's blue!

We put it to work in the dirtiest areas we've got: our kitchen/dining room/living room/hallway area which is all open-ish concept. There's not a door we can shut to wall off an area from the Mint there. The navigation cube was placed in the center of the room and turned on. We put one of the microfiber sweeper pads on it (super easy), pushed the power button, then the sweep button and let 'er rip!

It ran for a good while, probably about 2 hours as it wasn't truly fully charged. (It really needed the overnight charge to fully charge.) It was interesting watching it work it's way through the area, working it's way around obstacles. It would run back and forth across the room until it came to obstacle, then work around it and continue on. With particularly difficult obstacles, like the chair leg forest in the dining room, it would get frustrated and move on to something else, then to come back later. It couldn't get the entire area we wanted. The navigation system has a limit of about 20 feet square or so and it also died before completing. I did feel like it got every square inch of the area it did do. It picked up the fine dust and small bits of sugar, flour, etc. in the kitchen; however, it could not get the larger bits, like large blades of grass. It picks up much like a Swiffer does, as basically it's an automatic Swiffer. The larger bits it tends to push to the wall, or next to another obstacle like the chair legs.

The next night we tried out the mopping action in the bathroom. It was a very small area and finished quickly. Again, think of the Swiffer in it's capability. It's not going to get the caked on mud off the floor. The idea I feel like is for we real cleaners to get the floors sparkling, Spring-clean clean and then the Mint can be set to work to keep it that way. In the bathroom I got to see the Mint's really pretty nifty ending program: it goes back around walls and obstacles, then parks itself where it started and tweets a little "I'm done!" tune.

So, to wrap up this review that is entirely too long (congratulations if you've made it here): I definitely think it's worth it for me as a person that craves a clean floor, but doesn't have the time to vacuum the floors everyday like I would if I could. Just a word of caution: remember, this is basically a Swiffer with a battery. It's not meant for super messes!