"Roomba - worth picking up?" Topic

I see the Roomba Discovery is down to $180 USD and the Roomba Scheduler down to $200 USD – worth picking up?

(Roomba is the robotic vacuum cleaner.)

It is a good question. I see them a lot on sites like Woot.com and have wondered how well they both work and hold up over time.

No. Doesn't pick up worth a ****.

pavelfl, I think you meant

**** is a job for the Scooba floor washer.

I love mine. Not the strongest vacuum granted, but I let it loose in a room and when I come back the place is done. You'll still need a good vac for heavy loads though.

We have one for our small office and we set it loose on the weekends and it does an ok job. We still need to use a real vacuum from time to time (but not as often as we should -- which is why the Roomba is great)

I can only imagine the havoc caused by a Roomba in a place with cats.

I don't have one but have been thinking about it. We have 3 dogs and 2 cats and 4 kids so any additional cleaning would be a good thing. I can't see that it would replace anything but I can see it helping in between vacuuming.

I work with a guy who likes them so much he got two of them. He said it did take a while for the pets to get used to it.

When it worked it did a decent job but we went through two in pretty short time. Don't know if it was the house full of cats or what but we wouldn't get another one.

I love mine, but the battery finally died. Apparently some of the earlier models had battery packs which would develop a bad cell after about a year. Never have gotten around to buying a new battery. ($50.)

I thought it cleaned fairly well. I would run it two or three times a week, way more than I vacuum now. Of course, you need to empty the thing after every run and periodically clean lint and hair off the brushes.

My boss has one and thought it did a good job.

The Roomba did commit 'suicide' one day. While cleaning a bedroom, it sucked in a string from the bedspread. The string wound around the drum and pulled the Roomba up into the air. Bossman comes home and finds the Roomba 'hanging' from the edge of the bed.

So aside from its kamikaze tendencies, its a fine product.

We like ours, bought it almost a year ago to the day. It's still running, which is pretty amazing since we have rather a housefull of cats and dogs. I do have to clean it after each running but it does a fine job of general vacuuming. Granted to get things really clean we have to sweep before we run the robot but I can run the robot far more often than I care to drag out the vacuum and do it myself ;)

I like the cleaning job mine offers. But one thing that does bite -- it takes a full battery charge to run, and it needs to charge for many hours to sport a full charge. They suggest you mount it on the wall somewhere conveniently out of the way, and this does not describe my house whatsoever. So to run the cleaner, you need to dedicate a good chunk of floorspace for quite some time. This leaves it vulnerable to little children's fingers and trippingly huge feet.

But it is cleverly designed to stroll right under our couches, and nobody's vacuumed under there since the great seas receeded.

No. There are 2 problems. First, you can't just turn it loose until you have supervised it in a room a few times. It tends to get stuck under low furniture and radiators. Once you have figured out where to put the optional vitual wall and shoes to block it, it can be left alone. The main problem is the limited dustbin storage. I end up having to empty it after pretty much every use.

Pass