First of all, the name is horrid. It might not be so bad if searching for “sweep ez” on Google didn’t turn up a different product altogether, but it’s not like ‘SweepEZE’ is that strong to begin with. That is, of course, presuming that it is pronounced “Sweep Easy” and not “Sweep Easy E,” in which any appeal to the hip-hop crowd is probably mitigated by the uncomfortable image of using an automatic vacuum to sweep up E’s cremains. So I’m thinking Sweep Easy is what we’re working with here.
I had a Roomba in here last week, reviewing it for another publication, which was actually the first time I’d had one of the robot vacs in my home. I liked it — I mean, how could you not, with all the bleeps and whoops — but I don’t think I’ll be dropping $250 on one quite yet. The main issue was simply that for all its greatness, it kept choking on rug fringe and my girlfriend’s panties (my panties were too larger to be inhaled, thankfully), so the “automatic” part of the thing became entirely too hands-on. So back to the broom I went.
So since I’m not doing a very good job explaining what the SweepEZE is, let me take care of that now. It’s simple, actually. Essentially, it’s a stationary vacuum with a motion sensor. Sweep up your floor like normal, but instead of getting down on the floor with a dust pan, instead sweep it under the SweepEZE and it sucks it up into an internal bin. That’s it. There is an alternate mode where you can disable the automatic suction, forcing you to instead kick a little switch on the front to manually activate the suck (something I like to think of as “Feline Safety Mode.”)
And that’s it, basically; Plug it into the wall and go. There’s a lot of suction, too. It was able to ingest one of those plastic freshness rings from a pint of Ben & Jerry’s without issue, and cat hair and whatever else, although thankfully not coins. In fact, that was a pretty great trick – sweep everything, coins included, into a pile, then let the SweepEZE pick up everything else but the coins, instead of digging through nasty piles of dust and god knows what.
If I have one issue with the SweepEZE, it’s the price. Most places I’ve seen it for sale have it for around $80. Considering you still have to do the sweeping part yourself, plus emptying out the large internal dust bin from time to time, I think a purchase price of around $40 to $50 is a little better. As a borderline gimmick-gadget, though, I wouldn’t expect the price to stay that high for too long (J&R, I noticed, already has it for $70).
Still, for the elderly and the lazy, it does mean you won’t have to bend over nearly so often, and we did find that having it in always-on, motion-sensing-mode (many valiant cats died to bring you this review) that doing just a quick sweep up happened a lot more often than usual. I don’t know if that’s because it was new and we wanted to play with it or if maybe we were hypnotized by its blue LEDs, but for whatever reason we’ve been sweeping a lot more.
Now if I could just an all-terrain Roomba that would empty itself into a SweepEZE, I could start throwing all my trash onto the floor and just wait for the robots to get it. More than I do now, I mean.
Manufacturer Horseshoe Bowl doesn’t have a product or home page that I can see, so if you’re interested in picking one up, you can either hit Amazon (they have it for $70, too) or just hit Froogle and see what you can find. For a As Seen On TV product, it’s well built and does what it says it’ll do.
