The first day of spring is right around the corner and if you're looking for some help cleaning up your home, a robot vacuum could do the trick. Even better if you can snag one with self-emptying features, which allow you to basically ignore the robo-vac until you have to clean the base once every month or so. One of our favorites, the Shark AI Robot Vacuum with Base, is $150 off right now at Amazon, bringing it down to $500.
Buy Shark AI Robot Vacuum with Base at Amazon – $500
The AV2501AE model is discounted, which is slightly different than the model we included in our guide (RV2502AE) in that it has a black and bronze design. However, both vacuums share a number of key features including self-cleaning brush rolls that help pick up pet hair, LiDAR navigation, UltraClean Mode, obstacle avoidance, Alexa and Google Assistant support and a bagless, HEPA base. The latter helps Shark's robo-vac stand out among most of the competition — you don't have to pay extra for proprietary garbage bags, rather, you simply detach a portion of the base when you need to empty it and then snap it back into place.
In addition to that convenience, Shark's machine impressed us with its cleaning power and its solid mapping skills. The first thing you'll have it do is an "Explore Run," in which it creates a map of your home that you can then label with room names in the companion mobile app. This makes it easy to send the robo-vac to clean only your bedroom when necessary, and you can create no-go zones as well. With a 120-minute run time, the machine can clean a good portion of any home before it needs more juice, and its handy "recharge and resume" feature allows it to power up and get back to cleaning without any additional prompting.
Shark's mobile app is pretty easy to use as well, and it lets you create cleaning schedules, start jobs from anywhere and activate UltraClean Mode when you need all of the suction power possible to clean up big messes. Overall, it's an excellent self-emptying robot vacuum that's competitively priced, especially when discounted like this.
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