The 7 Chores I Stopped Doing This Year (And the Robots That Took Over)

I got into this business because I'm fundamentally lazy. Not lazy as in "won't work" — lazy as in "deeply unwilling to do the same boring thing twice if a machine can do it instead." Useful trait when you're running a robotics store, less useful when you're trying to seem responsible at family dinners.

So I tracked it for a year. Here are the seven chores I quit, what replaced them, and the actual time savings. No padding.

1. Vacuuming the main floor — gone

I have an open-plan kitchen and living area, about 1,200 square feet of oak floor that used to require a 25-minute vacuum session twice a week. A scheduled robot vacuum on a daily run replaced it entirely. Maintenance is emptying the bin once a week and pulling cat hair off the brush roll once a month.

Time recovered: ~50 minutes a week. Over a year that's 43 hours. That's a workweek I got back from a single device.

2. Cleaning the pool — gone

This was the one I'd been putting off the longest. I'd convinced myself the manual scrub-vacuum was meditative. It was not. A cordless robotic cleaner — we sell the Aiper Scuba N1 Pro — runs while I'm at work, climbs the walls, scrubs the floor, and parks itself on the steps when it's done.

Time recovered: ~45 minutes a week, May through September. That's about 18 hours a season, plus my back stays in the upright position God intended.

3. Mowing — mostly gone

Six months in with a MOWRATOR S1 4WD. I'm still "operating" the mower with a controller, but the physical labor is zero. Slopes that used to require a walk-behind handle themselves. The auto-dumping bag means no stopping every 8 minutes to empty clippings.

Time recovered: ~45 minutes a week in season. But more importantly, my body recovers. I used to need a recovery day after a full mow. Now I'm not exhausted.

4. Filtering my drinking water — replaced with hydrogen water

This one's the wildcard. My wife got the ECHO H2 hydrogen water machine and I rolled my eyes for about a month before I noticed I was sleeping better and getting fewer afternoon energy crashes. Maybe placebo. Maybe not. Either way I drink way more water now than I used to, which I'm 100% sure is real.

The chore that died here wasn't water filtering — it was hauling 5-gallon jugs from Costco. Less back pain, fewer plastic bottles in the recycling, water tastes better. The tankless RO version is the next step if you want full filtration too.

5. Skimming pool leaves — gone

An Aiper Surfer S1 skimmer is the small device I didn't know I needed. It does laps on the surface and pulls in floating leaves and bugs while the floor cleaner does its thing below. Together they basically eliminate the need to skim manually before a swim.

Time recovered: ~10 minutes per pre-swim. Doesn't sound like much. Adds up.

6. Mopping — gone (mostly)

The same robot vacuum mops on its second pass. I still spot-mop spills with paper towel, and I still pull out the manual mop maybe once a month for a deep clean, but the weekly Swiffer ritual is dead.

Time recovered: ~20 minutes a week.

7. Driving to the lake to fish — different kind of "chore"

Okay this one's a stretch but I'm leaving it in. I got into bait drone fishing this year — an Xpece ONE with a bait release. Used to drive to specific spots three times before I'd find one with action. Now I scout from the dock, drop bait where the fish actually are, and skip the bad spots entirely. More fishing, less driving.

Not really a chore, but it freed up four or five Saturdays this season. Counted as a chore because I was about to give the hobby up.

The actual total

If I add up the conservative weekly minutes — vacuum (50) + pool floor (45) + mow (45) + skim (10) + mop (20) — I'm at 170 minutes a week saved during peak season. That's about 2.8 hours.

Annualized, with seasonal averaging, it works out to roughly 140 hours a year of physical chores I no longer do. That's three and a half full work weeks of life.

The cost to set up all of it was real — call it $7,000 in equipment over a few years. But I'd been spending $4,800 a year on a lawn service alone. The math caught up fast.

What I won't automate

I cook dinner. I make the bed. I read books on paper. I walk the dog myself. None of those feel like chores. The line for me is: if I'd happily do it on a Sunday morning, keep doing it. If I'd avoid it on a Saturday, automate it.

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