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.

Minty Fresh

I had never heard about the Mint family of devices before. If you haven't either the short version is that they are floor cleaning robots similar to the concept of a Roomba but for hard floors rather than carpet. I actually found out about it from woot.com which, in its typical style, had a one day sale on an older Mint model. I read the reviews and saw some issues with that model. However, when I looked into the newer model it seemed that most of those problems had been solved albeit at a higher price.

Robot Round-up

It's been awhile since I've posted a technology item here, so let's get to it.

Robots in our homes aren't exactly new. We have machines that clean and dry our clothes and dishes, machines that condition the air and water the lawn and so on. I've had a lot of schedule challenges lately and wanted to find a way to get back some free time. I've made two recent key investments in home automation.