Shark AV2501S AI Robot Vacuum black (Open Box)

absolutely abysmal cleaning and battery performance I bought this botvac to replace our Neato. The neato has been good but Neato is no longer producing botvacs and the support is all but gone. With that in mind we decided to replace the Neato even though it’s still performing well, at least for now. We started looking for a self emptying model and one that’s only a vac because we have very little hard floors, a mopping unit would be a waste. Not having a proprietary bag was a big plus too. We looked at a lot of reviews after much debate settled on the Shark AV2501S AI Ultra as it checked all the boxes and had decent reviews. $550 was on the high end of our budget but when the price dropped to $279 on Amazon we quickly pulled the trigger! The unit arrived over night and well packed as expected. We unpacked and put the botvac on it’s base and allowed it to charge over night before we even set it up. Setup went Ok, but the first indication of problems started as soon as we had it do it’s first mapping run. We watched it and it missed lots of areas that the Neato had no problem navigating even though the Neato is slightly bigger. We wanted to check the full cleaning power so we set it to max and turned it loose. It came of the base ran about 1 min and then returned to it’s base... WTH? First fail. Restarted the full house clean on max again and same result! Second fail! Ok, maybe it’s something I did wrong. Factory reset, set it back up, did another mapping run and sent it out again. SAME THING! Fail three. Ok, I’m a bit stubborn so I send it back out again with recharge and resume & evacuate and resume both on. It only makes sense right? Low and behold, it actually starts to vacuum the house but… after about 45 min it returns to it’s base to empty and recharge. WTH? It’s supposed to have a 120min battery life! 3 hours later it finishes it’s run. Almost 4 hours to vacuum the house... The Neato did it in about 1 hour with plenty of charge to spare. Fail four! At this point it’s been an all day affair. Frustrated we leave it to charge over night and try again in the morning. The next mornings attempt 2 went not much better. I deactivated the recharge and resume & evacuate and resume and sent it back out again with max. Shark states it has a 120min run time so we figured even though it was on max it should have no problem with our house which has 800sqft of open floor space. At first it wouldn’t start because it was asking to empty the dust bin. Ok, completely emptied the base and bot, blew them out with compressed air so they were squeaky clean and tried again. Success! It finally starts it’s run. At about the 40% battery remaining level or so I noticed the suction sound reduce down to the “normal” level. Not cool… It did manage to finish the run but I noticed it wasn’t picking up even small pieces of debris. Fail five! Ok, my butt is really getting chapped about now so immediately I sent the Neato out on max power as we always do. Keep in mind the Shark had already done a run and the Neato needs to have the dust bin emptied every time so it’s empty too. Time to compare the results. All the stuff the Shark clearly missed is gone and it only took about a hour as usual. Let’s see how much the Shark and Neato picked up. I took both dust bins and dumped them each onto a sheet of paper. OMG! The Shark performed abysmally. While I didn’t do any scientific measuring you can see the Neato picked up at least 5 times or more debris than the Shark. And that was right AFTER the Shark had done it’s run. Bottom line – the Shark’s performance is atrocious. The suction is poor, the battery life is poor and the mapping is poor. This thing is headed back to where it came from! So disappointed...