Comment by solatic
20 hours ago
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I have the same experience. If anything, 1/4 cost underestimates the savings.
The analogy is like pointing out that you can have a robot vacuum clean your floors every day. Before the robot, you'd do it maybe once a week, just no time - "too expensive" to even think about doing it daily. The robot makes it happen all the time for a tiny, tiny fraction of the cost.
That analogy might be good, but doesn't resemble reality: the robot vacuum I had never made it anywhere near as clean as when I just hired people to come in once every two weeks to vacuum and clean floors.
I think you are both right. But I think the parent argues that the robot still keeps it good enough. And IME significantly better than a week+ into a 2-week period between the maid services. My 2c.
Don't use analogies to argue on the internet. Analogies can never be perfect, and this just gives people the chance to focus the argument on those imperfections in the analogy, rather than stick to the main point.
Meanwhile, the vacuum requires maintenance, repairing more frequently, as it runs more often. Power on time of motors is 7x as much, eg daily instead of weekly. And the robot takes more care, so each clean is 2x or 3x run time of a human. So 21x usage rates, and run time is parts wear and tear time.
Edge cases handled automatically by a human doing the task (getting stuck), means for the robot case that manual interaction is still a thing. Occasional, yet not making autonomous behavior, human free time.
Emptying the vacuum bag is a thing too, some things are not abstracted away.
Every time you add an entirely to a task, the task time goes up. Coordination is a time cost.
The savings you suggest are often not so stark. Not even for our friendly vacuums.
> increased maintenance
For sure. Still much cheaper than vacuuming every day.
> getting stuck
I appreciate that this is a function of the specific environment and robot you buy, but as a personal anecdote, this doesn't happen to me in practice. There was a setup cost, but once that was done, it doesn't get stuck.
> Emptying the vacuum bag
Not that frequent at all, considering that daily vacuuming keeps things remarkably clean and thus little is added to the main bag in the docking station each day. This is also far less work and far more preferable than doing the vacuuming myself.
I can't imagine living in a place that has too little dirt that you don't have to empty a bag but so much that you have to clean it everyday. I do know places where maids clean the floor daily because why not, but that is different.