Nexaro NR 1700 in the Field: What the Vacuum Robot Actually Delivers

The NR 1700 is a professional dry vacuum robot and nothing else. It measures 343 × 343 × 175 mm, weighs 6.5 kg, cleans a 280 mm lane, collects into a 1.4-litre dust container with an extraction port, and filters through a washable HEPA H13 element with 530 cm² of filter area. The blower moves a maximum of 21.4 litres per second. There is no water tank, no brush deck, no squeegee: it vacuums. Anything that needs washing off a floor is outside its job description, and no operating mode changes that.

The origin story is worth getting right, because it is regularly told wrong. Nexaro GmbH sits in Wuppertal and belongs to the Vorwerk Group. The robot is designed and engineered in Wuppertal, and the blower motor — the core component — is manufactured at Vorwerk's Wuppertal motor plant. The robot itself is assembled at a Vorwerk-owned plant in China; Nexaro states this openly in its own FAQ. "Engineered in Germany" is accurate. "Made in Germany" is not, and anyone selling you the machine on that phrase is selling it wrong.

On noise, the datasheet is precise: 49 dB(A) in Eco mode, 57 dB(A) in Balanced and Performance, all measured on carpet; the operating manual additionally carries a blanket emission declaration of below 70 dB(A). That is a vacuum cleaner running. In an empty office at night it is irrelevant. In a hotel corridor at night, next to occupied guest rooms, it is disqualifying. That is not a weakness of the machine — it is a boundary of its deployment envelope, and it should be drawn before the contract, not after the first complaint.

In our deployments the NR 1700 achieves an effective 50 to 75 m²/h, and one battery charge covers 200 to 300 m². Those two figures are not independent guesses — they describe the same picture. The datasheet gives 250 minutes of Eco runtime; at 50 to 75 m²/h that works out to 208 to 312 m² per charge, which is exactly the band we see. The nominal calculation, 250 minutes at 100 m²/h, would give roughly 416 m². The gap is real, it is reproducible, and we would rather publish it than let a customer discover it in week two.

It helps to see where the nominal figure itself comes from. A 280 mm lane at 0.3 m/s covers 302 m²/h if the machine never turns, never overlaps a lane and never slows down. Nexaro's official 100 m²/h already gives two thirds of that back for turning, overlap and deceleration — the manufacturer is not being optimistic here, it is being realistic about a robot that drives at walking pace on a narrow lane. Our field figure gives back a further quarter to a half, and the reason is the floor plan.

A furnished office is a hostile geometry for a 280 mm lane: rows of desks, a forest of chair legs, cable ducts, waste bins, narrow passages, door thresholds. The robot drives short lanes instead of long ones, turns far more often, and re-plans around obstacles that were not there yesterday. Nexaro names precisely these factors in the footnote to the 100 m²/h figure: dependent on floor plan, furnishing, floor covering and soiling. An empty lobby or an unfurnished showroom will come much closer to the nominal number. An open-plan office at full occupancy will not.

The practical consequence is a change of planning unit. Do not size a deployment in square metres per hour; size it in area per night. A machine that runs from 20:00 to 05:00 with automatic recharging delivers a predictable area even at 50 m²/h — and predictability is what a cleaning schedule actually needs.

The reference floors are not consistent, and that matters when you combine figures. The runtimes of 250, 110 and 105 minutes are measured on hard floor. The noise values of 49 and 57 dB(A) are measured on carpet. The cleaning rate and the mapping speed of 600 m²/h both carry the floor-plan caveat. Anyone stacking these numbers into a single scenario is stacking measurements taken under different conditions — which is exactly why we run our own.

The headline "max. 1,000 m²" cleaning area per job comes with two constraints that decide where the dock goes. The robot may be at most 35 m from its charging station, and the largest open area without distinctive objects it can handle is 12 × 12 m. That second limit is a navigation limit, not a performance limit: a long-range laser distance sensor needs structure to localise against. In a furnished office it will never be an issue — the furniture that costs you area performance is the same furniture that keeps the machine confidently located. In an empty hall it becomes the binding constraint.

Charging time is a genuine conflict between two official Nexaro documents. The datasheet dated February 2025 states approximately 95 minutes for 15–85 % and approximately 120 minutes for 15–95 %. The original operating manual of 12/2024 states approximately 110 minutes for 15–80 % and approximately 195 minutes for 15–95 %. That is more than an hour of disagreement for the same charge window, and both documents are official. We plan against the conservative figure. If you intend to fit two full runs into one night, this is the number to settle with the manufacturer in writing before you commit to a schedule.

Nexaro names lobbies, showrooms and open-plan offices as target environments on the datasheet, and our experience matches — with one qualifier that changes everything: at night, on empty floors. That is where all three of the machine's constraints stop mattering at once. 57 dB(A) is irrelevant when nobody is there. The floor is free of people, bags and pushed-back chairs. And the machine has the whole night instead of a one-hour window, which is precisely how you convert a modest hourly rate into a finished floor. For that reason offices are its home turf rather than a compromise.

The floor covering points the same way. German offices are predominantly carpeted, and carpet is the natural terrain for a vacuum robot with a rotating main brush and HEPA filtration. It also vacuums hard floors — but the hard floor in an office building is usually the corridor, the kitchen and the sanitary area, and those want washing rather than vacuuming.

Camera-free navigation is the procurement argument that decides German office deals. The NR 1700 localises with a long-range laser distance sensor of laser class 1 and AI mapping; Nexaro's FAQ additionally describes SLAM algorithms and sensor data fusion. There is no camera in the machine, so no image of your floor is ever produced. In a works council meeting that is the difference between six months of review and a signature. On data handling, be precise about what is actually promised: Nexaro states that its servers are located in Europe and that the software is AWS-based. Further commitments — encryption in transit, exclusion of third-country transfers — are not made in the manufacturer's public documentation. If you need those, take them contractually; do not read them into a datasheet.

Connectivity is the quiet advantage and the quiet trap. The robot carries its own 2G/LTE-M mobile connection with global roaming, and the mobile costs are included in every HUB licence — no customer Wi-Fi, no IT ticket, no firewall exception. The trap is in the manual: the installation site must have 2G or, better, LTE-M coverage. A dock in a basement without reception is a problem discovered on commissioning day, which is one site visit too late. Check reception where the station will stand, not at the front door.

The operating manual schedules maintenance in operating hours, not in weeks, which is the honest way to do it. A visual inspection is due after 25 operating hours. After 50 operating hours the list gets longer: empty the dust container, clean the filter and the motor protection filter, clean the side brush, the main brush, the sensors and the charging station. Fifty operating hours is about twelve nights at full Eco runtime. Whoever owns the machine on site needs those twelve-night touchpoints in their routine, or the HEPA element quietly throttles the airflow and the field figures get worse than the ones in this article.

Wear parts follow the same clock: side brush after 350 operating hours, auxiliary rollers and drive wheels after 500, filter replacement after 750, main brush after 1,500. Nexaro's FAQ converts this into an annual rhythm for typical use — filter and main brush once a year, side brush four times a year, rollers every two years, wheels every four. Specified service life is 3,000 operating hours, and from 3,000 hours the manual schedules a service at Nexaro customer service. The battery is at roughly 70 % of capacity after roughly 800 full cycles, which is the number that actually determines when field performance starts drifting down.

Two contractual details belong in the same calculation. The 12-month statutory warranty is exactly that — statutory, not an extended manufacturer promise. And the Nexaro HUB is not an accessory: mapping, no-go zones, the work scheduler and firmware updates all run through it, and the datasheet notes that some functions are only available in the paid Pro.Multi licence. That licence ships included for 36 months; after that it becomes a running item in the operating budget rather than an optional extra.

On service, be careful what you expect. Nexaro operates a German-language support line during German business hours and, per its own FAQ, a central repair facility in Germany. A nationwide on-site service network is not something the manufacturer describes anywhere in its public documentation. If your site plan assumes a technician on the floor within a day, that is an assumption to verify before signing, not afterwards. In our full-service model this is exactly the part we take on: keeping the maintenance intervals, supplying wear parts, and running the manufacturer contact so the machine is a result rather than a task.

Large carpeted areas during the day, with people in them, are not the NR 1700's job. That is where the Whiz belongs: a bigger machine built for carpet corridors, officially rated at up to 1,500 m² per charge with around three hours of runtime, taught once by walking a route and repeating it afterwards. The trade-off is worth stating plainly, because it is the mirror image of everything above — the Whiz detects obstacles with a 2D/3D camera among its sensors. Where camera-free operation is a hard requirement, that removes it from the shortlist, and the NR 1700 becomes the right machine despite its 50 to 75 m²/h.

Hard floors that need washing are a different class again. Vacuuming does not lift the grease film in a staff canteen, the road salt in an entrance area or the shoe abrasion in a corridor — those need water, brush pressure and a squeegee, and that is the domain of scrubber robots. If that describes most of your floor, start with our guide to scrubber robots rather than with a vacuum.

Large dry hard-floor areas with coarse debris — warehouses, production halls, DIY stores — call for sweeping instead of vacuuming. The MT1 covers that case and works entirely without water, which is often the deciding factor in production environments where a wet floor is a safety issue rather than a cleaning result.

And if you are still at the stage of deciding which class you need at all, work that out before comparing individual machines: our overview of which cleaning robot fits which operation sorts the classes by floor, area and time window. Getting the class right matters far more than getting the model right — a perfectly chosen vacuum robot on a floor that needs washing is still the wrong machine.