When You Live in a Glass House...

I live in an Eichler; a literally glass and stick house. We have floor to ceiling glass walls that cut the house in half, six sliding glass doors, and numerous large windows beyond the glass walls (and no crawl space / attic, which can make maintenance interesting). As well, we live in one of the dustiest places around.

Day to day, it is easy to miss that the windows are getting dirty until, one day, the sun hits just right and it is an immediate “oh my! I can’t really see through that well at all!”.

Cleaning is obviously a bear. The peaks of some windows are nearly 10 ft up and the outside is over flower beds such that there is nowhere to place a ladder that isn’t either precarious or will damage something.

A neighbor stopped by the other day with “a cool gadget I wanted to show you”. I’m not generally one for gadgets (really!), but this was an immediate buy.

Specifically, he had a WinBot v2. Plugged it in and let it rip on one of my windows. End result was a clean window in just a few minutes!

I looked through the various models and selected the ECOVACS WinBot W3 Omni. The extra $100 or so gets you a battery for portability, better designed scrubbing surface, and a built in scrubber cleaner which actually works very well.

I paid $566 on a sale; as of June 27, 2026 it lists for $699. Prices fluctuate, so check the current number before you buy. In fact, you can use CamelCamelCamel to track its Amazon price over time.

Use

Use is straightforward.

Fill the cleaning liquid chamber with the included cleaning agent (which is mostly water + alcohol with a couple of additional ingredients) or tap water if you’re out of cleaner.

Hold the robot against the window you want to clean and hold the power button.

The vacuum motor will spin up and the robot will give a little left/right jog to let you know it is safe to let go.

From there, it’ll move to the top of the window and then pick its way along the top edge until it “discovers” a side. From there, back and forth in half-width rows, spraying a bit of cleaner until the whole window is done.

There are multiple cleaning modes.

Quick clean for interior windows. Thorough cleaning for exterior windows that is a bit slower and goes over edges twice.

Edge Clean does what it says. Deep clean makes many more passes while heavy-duty clean basically cleans for however many minutes you set and periodically pauses so you can clean or swap the cleaning pads.

There is also a manual control mode that lets you effectively “drive” the bot around the window. Useful for getting the thing down when it ends the cycle and parks itself out of reach.

Finally, zone clean and spot clean let you divide a window so you can clean part of it.

Finally, there are three cycles for cleaning the scrubbing pad. A short cycle, a long deep clean cycle, and then a cleaning chamber cycle that can clean the unit interior, if needed.

Hardware

The window crawler robot – the WinBot – is square with a comfy handle on top that puts your thumb right over the power button. The bottom of the bot has a scrubbing pad that is held in place by four little pull clips. Easy enough to take out by first pulling two tabs, lifting the pad, and then pulling the other two. The edges of the robot have various pressure switches and rollers to sense when the device hits the edge.

Of note, there is no active scrubber. The robot cleans the window by sucking itself against the window and pressing the scrubbing pad onto the surface, and then using the little rubber tank treads to move it about. The pads extend all the way to the edges.

The base unit holds the battery (though the battery is easily replaceable), pad cleaner and water tanks for the clean / dirty water used to clean the scrubbing pad. It also has the control panel.

The base is attached to the robot via a long cord that is coiled inside the base unit. There is even a motorized cord retractor!

There is also a hook for the robot to hang off of on the base, a little compartment for the wall socket cord (used to recharge or when not using the battery), and a convenient handle for carrying the whole thing about.

All in all, the hardware is very well designed.

Software

I wish I could say the same for the software. As with just about every modern electronic device, yes, there is an app. The app isn’t terrible, but it isn’t good. At least, the setup is a trainwreck, but, once configured, the app is fine. Fortunately, you don’t actually need the app to use the cleaning bot. All of the functionality can be accessed via the control panel on the base.

There is an odd new trend where manufacturers have decided that every complex electronic device must have a voice. The WinBot embraces this trend and the device will announce various bits about its state as well as providing warning not to stand under the bot when it is cleaning (duh).

I’d rather have indicator lights on the control panel, but the voice is fine.

As for the setup?

Out of the box, the device wants to immediately guide you through to actually using the robot. If you want to link the app, which you need to do to be able to connect to WiFi and WiFi is required to update the firmware, you have to interrupt the out of box sequence and it isn’t at all intuitive as to how to do that.

As well, the device is super finicky about connecting to WiFi. It flat out failed to connect to my house network, so I created a dead simple stupid network. That failed too, but for a completely different reason. So I tried my house network again and it failed again even after factory reset. Not doing anything different, I tried one last time and that worked.

As a part of the setup, the device “phones home” to check for software update. If that fails, then the whole setup fails and it rejects your WiFi network. However, not completely, it seems. Some parts of the App UI will still show the WiFi, but not let you pick it.

As I said; trainwreck.

However, once it is configured, it is fine. The app talks with the bot via bluetooth and the UI for controlling the bot is pretty straightforward.

Typical pains of owning a modern technology focused device where the human computer interface wasn’t really properly thought through.

Verdict

Fortunately, once you get through that mess, actually using the WinBot is straightforward and the results are excellent.

The battery provides about 3.5 hours of runtime.

Most of the windows in my house can be cleaned fairly easily using traditional cleaning methods. But not all and the really tall ones are truly hazardous to clean unless you have a proper ladder and/or tools.

Hiring a professional cleaner would cost anywhere from $500-$1,000, depending on options. Not something we’ve done very often because of the cost.

Thus, $700 for a window cleaning robot that actually works pretty darned well is worth it for us. Of all the “extras” the Omni offered over the regular version, I think the automatic scrubber cleaner is the most valuable. I could run an extension cord easily enough, rendering the battery a nice convenience, but not a necessity.

The scrubbing pad cleaner, though, is highly optimized to cleaning the oddly shaped scrubbing pads and it does a really good job. I wouldn’t want to use a model without it.

One downside with the W3 vs. the older models is that the scrubbing pads are integrated with the plastic frame and clips. They are significantly more expensive to replace ($10-$15 per pad). However, I don’t think they’ll need to be replaced often. I just did all the windows in the house and it looks pretty new. The device came with 2 scrubbing pads.

Overall, the WinBot is definitely a quality of life upgrade! It is surprising how much more open the house feels now that the back glass wall is basically transparent again. If the WinBot catalyzes said windows being cleaned more often than once every six months to a year, it is worth every penny!

Notes

Basically:

Choose your cleaning cycle to optimize time use vs. cleaning needs.

The robot navigates our slant-topped windows pretty well. Seems to actually clean in the triangle at the top effectively. I don’t know how well it would deal with curved top windows. Narrow windows are also a challenge. It works in my ~18” wide window, but just barely.

If the window is super dirty, you may have to go through the cleaning cycle twice, cleaning the scrubbing pad in between.

I have also noticed that a silhouette of the scrubbing pad will be left on the window from wherever the bot stopped and you removed it. Easily fixed by immediately wiping down the window with a clean cloth (there is enough cleaning fluid left behind that there is no need to add more).

For particularly filthy outdoor windows, I suggest hosing them down first. If you do this, let the window fully dry before you run the WinBot. Any significant amount of moisture will cause the treads to slip, which the bot will detect and complain about.

Also, remove any spider webs as they’ll get wrapped around the corner rollers of the device. Doesn’t cause any problems, but is a pain to clean.

At the end of a cleaning cycle, the WinBot will park itself pretty close to wherever you started it from. It will announce that it is done and leave the vacuum powered until you grab the handle and hold down the power button.

I’m curious what would happen if you let the battery run out. Will it try to navigate to the bottom of the window to hopefully make for a shorter fall? Not really interested in testing that. Maybe.