I don’t have a vacuum or clean fetish, I swear. But on the heels of my post about the Dyson vacuum, I’m going to talk about my Roomba.
The Roomba is a friggin’ robot. Yeah, I said it — I have a robot that does housework.
I’m 36-years-old now, and when I was a kid, that was the dream — a robot that did stuff for you. Sure, it doesn’t look as as sexy as Paulie’s robot on Rocky IV, but still: I have a robot that does housework. I can’t emphasize that enough.
Anyway –
We bought this at the same time as our Dyson to clean the middle floor of our house. That entire level of the house has a hard floor — it used to be Pergo, and is now ceramic tile. This floor is where the kitchen is, so it takes a lot of abuse and accumulates a lot of garbage.
The Roomba is a little, flat disc-shaped thing, about the size of a large Frisbee, but a couple inches thick. It sits on the floor in its little recharging station, until you click the “Clean” button on top. It then backs away from the station (making the classic “backing up beep” like a delivery van — seriously), and proceeds to scurry across the floor.
In practice, it works a lot like those bumper cars you had when you were a kid — it drives in one direction until it hits something, at which point it backs up a bit, and heads in another direction. It also turns around if it drives off the top of the stairs.
It’s semi-intelligent. If it hits a wall, it will incrementally change angle until it finds one that sends it on a parallel track. If it finds a object in the middle of the floor — a chair, for instance — it will creep around it by continuing to turn in towards it until it can do so unobstructed.
However, there’s no intelligence in the big picture. To my knowledge, it makes no attempt to “map” the room. It just brute forces the room through random movement, the idea being that it will eventually hit the entire room in the 90 minutes or so before it runs out of charge (and it usually does).
(Visit this page on the iRobot site and click the “Hard to reach places” link to see a time-lapse video of the Roomba cleaning a room. They color the floor to show where the Roomba has traveled so you can sense the level of coverage it gets.)
When it’s getting low on charge, it will look for its recharging station. It’s amazing to watch it. It will stop suddenly in the open and change direction when it senses the station nearby, then it starts a zig-zag course back to it. When it homes in, it starts “jogging” sideways to line up, then finally re-docks and shuts down with a little chorus of beeps.
If you watch the Roomba clean for a few minutes, you might think it’s not doing anything, but you’re proven wrong when you empty the collection bin after a run. It picks up a fair amount of stuff — lots of cat hair, bits of paper, dust, crumbs, random scraps of this and that.
The key is that it can go places where you can’t vacuum without moving stuff. The Roomba will happily scurry under the couches, under the wine rack (ever tried to move a fully-loaded wine rack?), under the dining room table and chairs, etc.
Additionally, it has a little rotating “sweeper brush” on the side that reaches out a few inches to get into the corners and drag stuff in under the brushes.
So, does this mean I never have to sweep or vacuum my floor? No. But it does mean that the interval between “full cleans” of the floor is greatly extended. I used to have to clean the floor every week or so. Now we run the Roomba once a week, and I have to fully clean the floor perhaps once a month.
(The proof is in the lack of dust bunnies. They used to accumulate under the couches and in non-trafficked areas. Since the Roomba, I’ve never seen a single one.)
You still have the help the little guy out with some things. The kitchen stools are a problem — we just move them, and sweep what’s under them into the open area for the Roomba to consume. And sometimes you want to confine the Roomba to a specific area. It comes with some “invisible barriers” that project some beam or something that it won’t pass through. However, the opening we want to block is narrow enough that we just put some object there that the Roomba can’t get around.
A few notes and nitpicks:
- It’s loud on a hard floor. It gets quiet when it crosses the rug, so I imagine it’s good on carpet, but on bare ceramic, the noise is distracting.
- Every once in a while it sucks up something that jams the brush. Either a cat toy or a sock or something. Before you run it, it helps to make sure the floor is more or less clear of non-vacuumable crap.
- My cat pooped on the floor once and the Roomba ran over it. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how badly that sucked when we discovered the problem an hour later.
- We hide the recharging station behind the dining room table, so the Roomba usually can’t find its way back. No problem — it runs out of charge somewhere in the room, and you just put it back manually (you have to empty the bin anyway…). What’s borderline funny sometimes is when you “lose” it. I once couldn’t find it for a whole week until I realized that it had gotten into the bedroom and run out of charge under the bed.
- I have to clean it out once every couple of months. The underside comes apart and you have to pull hair out of the brushes and the wheels (my daughter has thick, shoulder-length hair that never fails to wrap mercilessly around the brushes of both the Dyson and the Roomba).
The trick of living with a Roomba is to have faith in it. If you watch it for a few seconds, it will drive you nuts. You’ll find yourself yelling, “Right there! There’s a piece of paper right there! You missed it!” But let the little guy run undisturbed for 90 minutes, and he’ll save you a lot of work. I love emptying the collection bin and finding all sorts of crap in it.
We paid about $200 for the base model. There’s a schedulable model for a bit more, then there’s the Scooba, which will wash your floor for $300 - $500.
