Trifo Ollie robot vacuum review: Pet friendly but erratic

Trifo is a budget-friendly robotic vacuum model, based in america. It sells a number of robotic vacuum fashions, of which the Ollie is a mid vary choice. In the event you’re within the US, you should buy Extremely (with a mopping operate) or Pet variations of those fashions. In Europe, you possibly can go for Customary or Pet.

Pet fashions include a pet hair extractor accent, air freshener capsules and a laser pointer that clips on to the robotic’s facet.

We’re reviewing the Ollie Pet.

Design and look

• Low profile at 8.5cm
• Highly effective 4,000PA suction
• Two-hour battery life

The Ollie Pet has a particular plectrum-shaped gold lid. In reality, it’s not a plectrum in any respect, however a Clover or Trifolium leaf, from the plant which impressed the model’s identify.

In response to the Trifo web site, Clover is a helpful plant and the Trifo vacuums are helpful robotic vacuum cleaners – okay, the analogy isn’t totally clear to us both, however we appreciated the truth that it isn’t a featureless dinner plate like so a lot of its rivals.

At round 8.5cm from the bottom, the Ollie is extraordinarily low profile, making it a good selection for individuals who have furnishings with a low clearance peak. Nonetheless, we’d advise you to measure up before you purchase. If it’s an in depth name, it could be higher to have a robotic vacuum that may’t get below your couch, fairly than one which will get caught each time.

Carry up the Clover-leaf lid and you’ll entry the robotic’s 600ml bin. It’s not a foul dimension in any respect, however you’ll nonetheless must empty it someplace between each different day to as soon as every week, relying on how a lot mud and hair it’s picked up.

The Ollie Pet has highly effective 4,000PA suction, which is sweet for any robotic vacuum, not to mention one at this value level. You need to use it on carpets of as much as 2cm depth however keep in mind that it’s going to solely choose up floor particles and hair. You’ll nonetheless must get an strange vacuum cleaner out to deep clear your deep pile. On arduous flooring it’s glorious and can take over all of your common vacuuming.

The Ollie Pet has a most battery lifetime of two hours and it wants as much as three hours to totally cost. This working time must be ample for many houses.

Within the field, together with the robotic vacuum and a guide, you’ll additionally get a compact black charging dock and a white energy cable – a perplexing selection as a black cable would have been extra aesthetically pleasing. The dock is sufficiently small to be hidden away in the back of a settee.

As that is the Pet mannequin, you’ll additionally get the pet hair extractor, which is a cleansing head that can be utilized rather than the usual rotating brush.

All you could do is swap the usual one out for the pet-friendly one and the robotic vacuum will likely be optimised for eradicating pet hair. It permits the Ollie to benefit from its suction and implies that there’s no want to chop hair from the comb roll.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

This in itself is a very good cause for pet house owners to purchase the Ollie. However it’s not an ideal repair when you’ve got carpets – you’ll nonetheless must vacuum them for a correct clear.

Nonetheless, the nicest factor we are able to say about the remainder of the pet-friendly add-ons are that they’re pointless. There’s a laser pointer that attaches to the robotic vacuum on your pets to play with, which superficially looks as if a enjoyable thought, earlier than revealing itself to be fairly a foul one.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

First off, do you actually need to prepare your pet to pounce on the robotic vacuum? That’s absolutely going to finish badly for one or the opposite.

And laser pointers can injury your pet’s eyes, so we actually wouldn’t advise clipping one to a robotic vacuum and letting your pet go off and play with it – particularly because the pointer is straightforward to knock off.

Even stranger is the truth that the laser pointer attachment comes with some powerfully lemon-scented cartridges and a slot to clip one in. In the event you wished to perfume your room, it might appear to make extra sense for this to be in or close to the vacuum’s dustbin, or at the very least someplace throughout the vacuum’s air circulation system.

However at the very least this fashion you possibly can relegate the entire attachment to the storage field, the place it may be safely forgotten.

The way it performs

• Noisy (70dB) robotic vacuum
• Mapping refused to finish throughout our testing interval
• Erratic navigation

On paper, the Ollie Pet has all the pieces you’d need from a robotic vacuum at an inexpensive value level, making it a tempting selection. However throughout our testing, it was a barely completely different matter.

The primary points materialised throughout set-up. Connecting was a bit extra of a trouble than with rivals, at the very least in our expertise. As you’d anticipate, you obtain the free to make use of Trifo app (obtainable for iOS and Android) and go from there.

The app itself is solely designed and simple to make use of, with simply the knowledge and features you want. You’ll be able to schedule cleansing, see how lengthy earlier than you could substitute the brushes and filter, edit your map and see a show of the cleansing time and battery life.

The Ollie can also be Alexa-compatible – so you possibly can choose to start out cleansing with a voice command.

The ultimate step within the set-up includes the robotic utilizing its digicam to learn a QR code from the cellphone display – which isn’t as simple as utilizing your cellphone display to seize a QR code on a robotic. It concerned a good bit of crawling round on the ground and a few makes an attempt earlier than the robotic was in a position to learn it.

As soon as it was able to go, one factor grew to become abundantly clear. It is a noisy robotic. Trifo says it’s as loud as 70dB when it’s at work, which is identical quantity as a washer.

However the noise doesn’t cease when it’s docked and charging. Even then it makes a high-pitched whine that’s irritatingly audible in a quiet room.

As quickly because it was charged, it was able to go. Throughout its first clear, it’ll additionally make a map, which you’ll then be capable of save and edit, including no-go zones.

Sadly, after sending it out to scrub twice, we couldn’t save the map. And the map itself had gone badly mistaken, with overlapping partitions. We contacted Trifo, who requested us to delete the map and begin once more.

However even after an entire reset and the creation of an correct map, the enhancing operate nonetheless didn’t work.

Foundry

We additionally discovered that the Lidar navigation was idiosyncratic at finest. Generally it labored completely, and the robotic stopped a centimetre in need of a chunk of furnishings, turned and vacuumed neatly alongside it. At different occasions, it appeared to navigate by headbutting into numerous items of furnishings and ricocheting off.

On one event, it drove right into a wall in a bit of the room it had already mapped, paused, backed up and did it once more. We filmed it repeatedly smacking into the wall for round a minute earlier than we needed to intervene. By the way, we despatched a 30-second video clip of this to Trifo after we contacted them concerning the mapping points, however they didn’t deal with this facet of the issue.

As an extra characteristic, the Trifo Ollie has an onboard digicam, so you possibly can view the stay feed to verify in in your pets and your house while you’re away. By this level, you received’t be stunned to listen to that we had issues with this operate as properly, though when the digicam labored, the picture high quality was good.

Value and availability

The Trifo Ollie is obtainable within the US from Amazon and Walmart, and in Europe direct from Trifo. It’s competitively priced for its cleansing energy and have set – particularly in the event you purchase it when it’s on sale, which appears to happen usually.

Verdict

In some respects, the Trifo Ollie is excellent worth. In reality, when you’ve got pets and also you pay lower than it’s MSRP/ RRP, we think about you’d be greater than happy with its cleansing efficiency. It does a superb job on pet hair, in addition to basic mud and grime. The truth that you received’t must take away hair from its curler makes it even higher for pet house owners.

However throughout our check, we discovered the navigation to be fairly actually hit or miss and the remainder of the sensible options erratic, making it arduous to advocate.

In the event you’d prefer to see extra robotic vacuum choices, take a look at our round-up of one of the best robotic vacuums we’ve examined.