Robot vacuum cleaners are proving to be an increasingly popular member of the smart home – and Miele wants in on the action.
The company’s latest flagship vac – the Miele Scout RX3 Home Vision HD – comes with the novelty feature of a live image feed and the promise of long-lasting, powerful cleaning.
With the market currently dominated by efficient and well-priced options from Roborock, iRobot and other dedicated companies, then, where does this Miele offering fit in?
We’ve been testing in order to find out.
Our quick take
Let down by inadequate mapping and an app that is less than useful, the Miele Scout RX3 Home Vision HD struggles to offer competitive navigation around the home, hampering the experience offered.
Ultimately, if it can’t make it around the home without disruption, and is unable to make a reliable map to complete the cleaning task, then a robot vacuum cleaner isn’t worth having.
The cleaning is always completed to a superior standard, which is a notable victory. However, after months of running the Miele Scout RX3 Home Vision, we’re never sure where it will end up or how much of the job will get finished. At this price, it’s better to consider other models.
As robot vacuums go, the Miele is attractive. It looks like a high-quality product, and that matches the elevated price that Miele is asking for it – not that such devices are really designed to line up in a robotic beauty pageant, of course.
There is a digital display on the top of the RX3, along with some touch controls, meaning you can glance at it to see the status, or tap to get it to do something differently – or just to start and stop cleaning without having to reach for the included remote or the smartphone app.
The dimensions are more or less standard for this type of device, so it can easily fit under the sofa for cleaning, allowing it to reach places that a standard vacuum cleaner finds a little more difficult.
It’s also worth mentioning the internal quality and the solidity with which the RX3 fits together – there are even different brushes you can attach to suit the type of floor that you’re cleaning. In that sense, you get more out of the box than you might do with some rivals – and the internal dustbins and filters feel better designed and secured.
As with other robot vacuums, there are various bumper panels that will detect object contact and help it move around obstructions, with the device softly making contact with furniture rather than ramming right into it.
So, it’s a positive start for the Miele: from a hardware point of view, the company has designed a cleaner that looks great and feels pretty solid, with higher quality for the internal configuration.
The setup of the RX3 is a little more fiddly than some, and we found that linking it to the Miele Scout app took a few more attempts than we’d like. To get the most out of this cleaner, it needs to be connected to your network, and, with the app, that will enable full functionality.
Otherwise, it’s a case of basically attaching the correct brushes for your surface type and putting the charger in place. The RX3 will need a good charge before it wants to get cleaning, and there’s a pretty big 5200mAh battery inside, which is good for 120 minutes of cleaning at the most powerful setting – which Miele says is the equivalent of 120m2 of floor space.
The biggest problem is that the cleaner doesn’t really know where it is in the room, so the map essentially becomes useless. If it loses track of how it’s moved within that space, it then has no idea what the room looks like and starts adding phantom areas to the map. As you can see from the screenshot above, the RX3 believes it’s outside the bounds of the map.
