Roomba the Grand Pooba

My need to reclaim free time and avoid the drudgery of housework continued after the Litter Robot and the Mint joined my household. While the mint helped to keep my tile and wood fresh, I'm not a huge fan of the vacuum. The house has a very good unit - a Dyson DC41 Animal Bagless Vacuum Cleaner. It's a great unit for sucking up all the animal hair and stuff. The canister is easy to empty and so forth. But, you still have to run it and I feel like there is better stuff to do with my time.

Enter the Roomba
Roomba is probably one of the better known automatic vacuums on the market. It certainly has been around the longest as it goes back to about 2002. They've evolved over several generations and now represent some of the most effective units on the market.

The unit I chose was the iRobot Roomba 770 Vacuum Cleaning Robot for Pets and Allergies and picked it up from Amazon. The first thing you need to be aware of is that these things are NOT cheap. If you aren't the type of person to consider a Dyson (also at the top of the market in terms of prices) just stop reading. It's probably a waste of your time. Luckily, I had a sizable credit at Amazon since I had traded in a pile of old text books. That managed to take a lot of the sting out of the purchase.


When it arrived, it was in a rather large box. It was a wide and flat box to accommodate the the size of the unit. It was also fairly heavy as the Roomba has grown to be a beefy unit. The packaging, while not as suave as the Mint Plus or a Drobo, was sufficient and easy to open up.

The unit is paradoxically both too heavy and not heavy enough and low enough and not quite. More on that later. But getting it running was merely a matter of pulling everything out and plopping it on the included dock to charge. I let it charge overnight to ensure it was fully ready to go.

Action!
The Roomba has a timer function to run whenever you'd like it to each day of the week, but starting in manually is as easy as tapping the large button in the center of the unit. It quickly wakes up, moves forward and rotates around so it's off the dock and away it goes. It's louder than you think but still quieter than your normal vacuum.

The Roomba doesn't feature the high tech GPS features found in the Mint (which probably explains why iRobot bought them) so it just glides off until it hits something and then turns and continues off. I will say though, that Roomba tries very hard to find the edge of walls and counters and so forth to ensure it hits all the surfaces possible. It also does it's best to work its way around and underneath chairs.

However, where the Mint is a delicate scalpel, the Roomba is a large rubber hammer. It hasn't ever damaged anything with it's physical probing but you can clearly hear and see the Roomba regularly exercising its front bumper.

You're Doing It Wrong

Good suction, but keep the way clear!

The right way to run a Roomba is to run it room by room, either by closing doors or using the included virtual wall. It makes sense of course, allowing the unit to comprehensively cover the selected area.

I completely ignore this recommendation and allow the Roomba to wander all over the house. I don't have that large of a place so I thought I'd just set it free. That seems to work well overall. On the times where I've been home and let it off the chain the unit runs wild, moving randomly from room to room, up and down the hallway.

It may not be as effective as the right way but the Roomba regularly finishes its run with a full container. This container is similar to the bag free nature of the Dyson, albeit much, much smaller. However, it snaps off the front of the unit quickly and easily and can be emptied in seconds and popped back in position. The Roomba kindly warns you of the full condition with a red lit symbol on its top next to the rest of its buttons. Cleverly, when the Roomba returns to the base unit, it backs onto the dock positioning the collection bin in the front for easy access.

More Control But Why?
This particular Roomba includes a remote. Why you'd want to use it is beyond me as a robot should ideally be autonomous. But if you want to do dumb things like drive around your cat, or even worse, your baby you can. You just shouldn't.

Play It Again, Sam?
Would I get it again? Absolutely, I've had this unit for months now and it keeps my house much cleaner than I could. See, Roomba goes under most pieces of furniture. I don't when I vacuum so it is able to fish animal fur and everything else they track with them under the bed, the sofa and so forth. Unfortunately, this particular is tall enough to underneath the sofa but rarely successfully escapes.

The suction power is more than adequate. It's so good, in fact that you are going to have to ensure that cords are off the ground, tacked down or bundled with near by cables. The Roomba has eaten idevice cables, network cables and so forth. The cables weren't damaged but were completely wrapped around the Roomba's rugged rollers so it took some pulling to extract them. Speaking of which, the Roomba is smart enough to call for help if it gets stuck or eats something it shouldn't have.

It'll also stop right there. That makes for a fun game of "Where's the Roomba?" each time you return home. I've found it in virtually every room in the house. Once, unfortunately in a nearly unreachable position underneath a king sized bed. It also will stop in place if it runs out of battery, but it goes for hours so I can't complain much.

The rollers are very good at pulling stuff out of carpets, but animal and human hair wraps around them requiring a regular (every week or two if running it daily) de-hairing cleaning. I do expect to have to replace the various brushed twice a year or so since I'm running it for hours each day.

Earlier I mentioned it's paradoxical size. The Roomba is a fairly heavy unit to carry around even though the built in handle is well done. However, it still seems to float a bit over thick carpet. At the same time, it's also way, way heavier than it's dock so it tends to push that around rather than successfully mating with it. You'd do well do consider double-sided tape or velco to secure the base if on tile, wood or similarly smooth flooring.

It's also got a little too much clearance for wood floors and sometimes bats stuff around that it should be sucking up. Additionally, for all it's size, the rollers are actually fairly small compared to the overall unit size so it doesn't actually clean the entire area it is traveling over. That also means that it doesn't really clean edges of a room so you'll still need to go over that often including corners especially.

That said, I'm happy to have the unit and am looking forward to the next generation or two that hopefully with incorporate the Mint GPS tech. If you'd like a break from vacuuming and have disposable cash say from your tax refund, go for it!