Going for a job and ensuring your home stays prim and proper is a tough task. Even if there’s a homemaker, then also, making sure your house remains clean is that one thing that takes time and multiple cycles of effort throughout the day. Initially, I thought of hiring a maid for this, but then, I got this robot vacuum cleaner called the Mova E40 Ultra, and even though all of us were initially sceptical regarding its performance, it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. That said, robot vacuum cleaners aren’t a one-stop solution. And from my month-long experience, let me tell you how capable the titular vacuum cleaner is, where it falters and whether it still makes sense to invest in this Mova robot vacuum cleaner priced at Rs 47999.
The Mova E40 Ultra isn’t perfect, but it delivers where it matters. You get fairly accurate LiDAR mapping, dependable everyday cleaning, a feature-rich app and an all-in-one dock that make it easy to live with. It occasionally misses hair, struggles with stubborn stains, and some of its components aren’t very durable. But even the way it is, it consistently keeps floors clean enough that manual cleaning becomes far less frequent. So, given you have the budget, at Rs 47,999, it’s a compelling robot vacuum for households.
The Mova E40 Ultra, including the robot and its docking station, has a clean design: white in colour with minimal branding. This looks elegant, but it can attract dust on the surface. The robo-and-dock combo won’t take up much space in your room, and you can easily move it around if needed, thanks to its plastic build, which feels fine for the most part.
The clean water tank, dirty water tank, and dust bag compartment, etc., slide in and out smoothly without feeling fragile. But after a month of usage, the bottom roller brush appears to have a crack. So, you may have to eventually replace items such as mop pads, roller brushes, filters and dust bags. This is something to factor into long-term ownership.
The Mova E40 Ultra is roughly 9.7cm tall and could comfortably travel underneath most of our beds and sofas, areas that are usually difficult to reach with handheld mops.
While the robot empties its dustbin, washes its mop pads, dries them using hot air and recharges itself after every cleaning session, you’ll have to periodically clean the dirty water tank and refill the clean water tank. In our case, we were changing the water every 3 days and the dust bag once a month.
After several days of use, the washing tray also naturally accumulates dirt and muddy residue. So, the docking station itself also needs occasional cleaning instead of being forgotten in a corner.
As long as you have a 2.4GHz WiFi connection, the setup through the Mova Home app should happen smoothly. After pairing it with my account and charging itself well, on its first run, it quickly mapped the room. The LiDAR does its job well. There is no video camera here. Still, the created map was impressively accurate. Before it begins, you need to ensure it has ample charge and there is no obstruction in the areas you want it to map.
I repeat, you must let it finish mapping the first time it runs. When I first unboxed the Mova E40 Ultra, I interrupted its mapping midway because it had become late in the evening. That turned out to be a mistake. Since the map remained incomplete, I later had to ask the robot to remap the house properly.
Coming to the Mova Home app, at first, its interface looked intimidating because of the sheer number of options available. Once you spend a day or two exploring the interface, everything starts making sense. I particularly liked that multiple members of the family can install the app on their own phones. My wife, my mom and I could control the robot independently on our phones.
But I won’t lie. My parents still struggle to operate it without help. So, there’s a learning curve.
Once you get the hang of it, there are plenty of customisable cleaning options. You can choose cleaning room-wise, zone-wise or the entire house/workspace. You also get vacuum-only mode, mopping, vacuuming followed by mopping, option to select suction levels, adjust water flow, define room-specific cleaning preferences and schedule automatic cleaning sessions. You can rename rooms, merge or split them, create no-go zones, define carpets, set cleaning sequences and even ask the robot to clean only specific rooms or custom areas.
One nifty feature smart home enthusiasts may appreciate is that you can also control the Mova E40 Ultra with Alexa, Siri and Google Home. Moreover, the robot itself has physical buttons on top for basic operations, like sending it home, cleaning where it’s placed, and turning the robo-cleaner off. So, even if you don’t have your phone with you, you can get it to do the essential cleaning this way.
This reminds me of one feature I missed, which was manual navigation inside the app. There were occasions when I simply wanted to steer the robot towards a particular spot, like a remote-controlled toy car. A virtual joystick would have aided this use case.
Mova also offers Android and iOS widgets, making certain actions quicker to access. You can also use shortcuts for even more granular customisation.
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The Mova E40 Ultra isn’t intelligent enough to notice every dirty spot or decide that one area needs more attention than another. It cleans using planned movement patterns and won’t be as smart or effective as human judgment. But, even if it takes some cycles, if there’s no obstruction, those patterns get the job done eventually.
As a result, daily dust, footprints, hair follicles and loose dirt are cleaned well consistently throughout our testing. We seldom felt the need to clean the house afterwards. But it can’t clean stubborn patches, and if some hair follicles and dust are missed by it, you’ll just have to run zone-based cleaning.
Carpet cleaning produced mixed results. Sometimes, it was smartly identifying carpets and raising the mop for increasing suction-based vacuuming. The carpets looked noticeably cleaner afterwards. On a few occasions, however, the robot slightly caught onto the carpet while climbing over it before freeing itself and continuing.
Then there are occasional struggles with obstacles and the elevated feet of the pedestal fan in my room, and the tiny water droplets it leaves behind after mopping sometimes. These aren’t big issues, but some rough edges I noticed.
And as I have mentioned already, you’ll have to manually clean its washing tray, dust bag, water tank, and the surface of the robot vacuum cleaner and the docking station.
Cleaning our primary bedroom of roughly 150 square feet took about 16 minutes while consuming only 5 per cent battery in Max mode. These robots don’t clean or consume battery linearly, and your testing scenarios could differ. Still, this suggests even larger apartments can comfortably be cleaned on a single charge.
For larger homes, the Mova E40 Ultra can automatically return to the dock, recharge and resume cleaning from where it stopped. It is designed to remain docked and plugged in, ensuring it’s always charged and ready for the next scheduled cleaning. The app also shows battery level, cleaned area, cleaning history and time taken for every session, making it easy to understand how much work the robot has completed.
The robot gives voice prompts, which announce what it’s doing, whether it’s returning to wash its mop pads, charging or beginning a new cleaning task. They made it easy to know the robot’s status, but if you find them distracting, you can simply mute them from the app.
The sound of suction is the loudest in Max+ mode. During standard vacuuming, the Mova E40 Ultra is audible but never distracting enough to interrupt conversations or television viewing in another room. Maximum suction is naturally louder, but since the robot is designed to clean while you’re busy doing something else, it rarely becomes bothersome.
As for the mops’ cleaning and drying, as well as the dust bag emptying, you’ll hear momentary noise. But this noise doesn’t last long.
After a few weeks using it, my mother and wife had started calling the E40 Ultra, ‘Mova beta’, as if it had become another member of the family. That probably says more about the product than any specification sheet can. We stopped manually cleaning the floors. Mova beta did this job well, backed by features like impressively accurate LiDAR mapping, decent battery life, fairly reliable automation features, and a pretty useful and customisable app experience.
However, E40 Ultra’s pattern-based cleaning isn’t without flaws. It occasionally misses hair strands, struggles with stubborn dried stains, and obstacle avoidance isn’t very sophisticated. The build quality wasn’t very reassuring because of the way the roller brush got damaged. So, the long-time cost of ownership could go north of the asking price of Rs 47999, making it really pricey.
But if you can afford to pay, the Mova E40 Ultra still makes a compelling case. For what you are paying, the E40 Ultra strikes a sensible balance between features, performance and convenience. It may not clean every stain perfectly or work like a human, but it consistently keeps your home clean enough that manual cleaning becomes an occasional task rather than a daily one.
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