My Roomba Experience

For some time, I had been telling my g/f about Roombas. I didn’t necessarily know if they were all that they were cracked up to be, but for busy people they certain seem like a great idea.

My g/f is a busy person. She’s a work-a-holic when you get right down to it. She’ll deny it but everyone else seems to agree. She also has two mostly inside dogs. They aren’t foof dogs, but because they are inside a bit they obviously shed. Staying on top of shedding dog can be difficult and no matter how much you feel you vacuum or try you are still going to have pet hairs everywhere.

She also has hardwood floors which means that unlike carpeting where the dirt and hairs work themselves into the carpet they are more visible. Personally, I like this because you can get the floors much cleaner than carpeting and you know they are dirty because you can see it.

I kept thinking I should get her a Roomba and kept mentioning it to her, but never got one. They aren’t exactly cheap and I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on something she really wouldn’t like. A couple of weeks ago Woot! had refurbished Roombas on clearance and a substantially reduced price. I showed her the link and she bought one!

She got it in and the next day all she did was talk about how awesome it was. She had one minor problem with a sensor getting dirty in shipment, but after she cleaned the sensor it started kicking ass and taking names – or rather dog hair! As she put it, it’s the best appliance she has ever bought and would marry it if it were possible.

She had to go out of town for a couple of days so I asked if I could borrow it to fuck with….er try it out. She brought it over and the first night we drank wine and watched it clean my kitchen floor for about an hour. No joke. That was the highlight of the evening. As it turns out, that is one of the negative comments about it. You spend a ton of time watching it clean your floors. I guess all new Roomba owners do this and I certainly did my fair share. I wanted to see how it reacted in given situations and I wanted to see if I could figure out its basic interpretation of it’s sensors and how it would pattern cleaning a room.

It did a great job in the kitchen and I have a fairly large and oddly shaped kitchen (to a vacuum cleaner robot anyway). It even got under the cabinet edges. Apparently its height just allowed it to clear them so it got under them really well.

But the next day I really saw the value in it. It takes longer to clean a floor than you would with a traditional broom or vacuum cleaner. But, unless you are obsessed with watching it you can go do something else. The next morning I stuck it in one of my guest bedrooms where Hopper had been staying. He vacuumed the floor before he left and had only been gone for a day or so. I put it in there, expecting it to scream or something but when I turned it on it started its little dance of cleaning the carpet. I left it in the room and went to make breakfast. Check that again -> it’s cleaning the carpet, and I’m making breakfast. When I was done with breakfast it had finished and I put it back on the charger and cleaned the bin. I was amazed at how much crap it picked up and the carpet had just been vacuumed!!!

You have to stay on top of cleaning the bin and the rollers and stuff. The Roomba isn’t huge so its parts are a little smaller and require a little more fastidious attention than a regular vacuum cleaner. The good news is that it breaks down for cleaning far easier than a regular vacuum cleaner so this only takes a few minutes, isn’t difficult and doesn’t require tools for a quick cleaning. I did most of this on my countertop in the kitchen.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that I have tile, hardwoods and carpet in my house. The carpet definitely wears the battery down faster than the tile and hardwoods. I pretty much allowed it to do a room and then I’d clean it and charge it. Note that if the charging dock is in the same room that its cleaning it will automatically dock and start re-charging on its own (slick!).

The next room I tried was my master bathroom. Here, the Roomba was defeated!!! First it was defeated because it caught so much crap in it that it stopped and yelled at me to clean it. Ok, cleaned it, and put it back down. This time, it started going under the cabinets and it would get stuck. The carpet in the bathroom is thicker than the tile in the kitchen and it would manage to wedge itself under there. Sometimes it could get out, sometimes not. I ended up using my bathmats to make a small barrier by rolling them up and sticking them under the cabinets. This was enough to deter the Roomba from committing suicide.

It took 2 days between charging and letting it have a room for some period of time (average time was probably 30 ~ 45 mins, but I have fairly large rooms). But again, the cool part was other than me watching it I didn’t have to do much. The more you use it, the less you have to clean it, too! Let’s face it, I had been gone for a while and I wasn’t exactly on top of keeping the floors real clean prior to, or after, coming home. So the Roomba got a really good workout.

All the way until the very end I was constantly amazed at how much crap it kept picking up from my floors. Even my hardwoods had been recently cleaned and it still picked up a ton of crap. One advantage of the Roomba is that it will do an area three or four times as well as get under your bed and other areas that you might not sweep or vacuum on a regular basis. Trust me, I know how much crap my regular vacuum pics up and this is easily comparible and perhaps better simply because it gets those hard to reach areas and does them several times.

It’s not very loud, so you can set it down and let it go. I don’t have dogs, but my g/f says they are fairly ambivilant by it whereas they used to attack or run scared from the regular vacuum cleaner. Most Roomba owners say the same thing.

There are ways to confine it to a single room so it doesn’t try to do the whole house at once. They make invisible walls that you can turn on and set down. The Roomba won’t cross those barriers, but in most cases you simply shut the door and walk away.

One other thing is that you have to “roombaize” the room before you let it go. This isn’t much, it’s very simple things like remove objects that might hamper or inhibit the Roomba’s ability to clean up. As an example, my shoes in the closet needed to have their shoestrings tucked in the shoes so that they wouldn’t get sucked up – it’s supposed to have a de-tangler, but I didn’t want to test it. In my office I removed my trash bin, chair and stool to make it easier. These are things I would move anyway if I were vacuuming so I didn’t see this as a major issue. If you wanted to leave them there it would make its way around them anyway.

But I did have a few minor issues with it while it was here – it didn’t like transitioning from my carpet to a thick area rug in my bedroom. It saw this as a barrier and wouldn’t go over it. In my office, it did a pretty good job of tangling itself in some cables but in all fairness I probably have far more cables under my desk and stuff than you do. Even with all those cables it only did this once. It also managed to high-side itself on one of my borders between my hardwoods and tile floors. Surprisingly, it was able to un-stick itself in just about every case except when it really wedged itself under my cabinets.

Being a bit of a geek one thing I would really like is for the Roomba to be able to repeat the last status code. I can’t hear the sounds it makes if there is a status update while its in another room. So when I go in the room I don’t know if it finished successfully, puked because the filter was full, etc. Pressing a button and having it repeat the last status would be highly beneficial.

Since I’m all about convenience I would really like it to set out on a schedule and do rooms without me having to carry it around and all that stuff. Guess what? They do, just not the model that she picked up. You can program it to leave the dock and go clean rooms while you are at work or whatever and it will re-dock itself.

If I had this model I’d probably just make an effort to let it do a room a day. For most of us that means each room would get hit about once a week (count every room – kitchen bath 1, bath 2, etc.). If you are really messy you could do it more than once a week or get one that you can program.

Overall I was very impressed by it and am going to consider getting one of my own if I see them on sale or refurbished.