Roomba: Beyond experimental but not yet ready for the Jetsons
Written: Mar 24 '05 (Updated Mar 26 '05)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
|
|
| Ease of Cleaning: |
|
|
| Style: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Does reasonable job of cleaning by itself leaving you time to do something else.
Cons: Requires too much maintenance and room preparation.
The Bottom Line: We should spend our lives doing something more meaningful than pushing a vacuum cleaner around and I would recommend Roomba because the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
|
|
|
| keshishian's Full Review: iRobot Roomba 3000 Robotic Vacuum |
The Good
The new Roomba Discovery arrived within weeks of my placing a call to IRobot. It has some major improvements over the first generation of Roombas. It fully charges within two or three hours instead of the ten plus hours of the old one. The dustbin is much larger. It has a dirt detect mode which detects particularly dirty areas where it will do a couple of more spins to make sure that it picked up everything. Taking the brushes and the flapper out to clean them of hair no longer requires a screwdriver and some dexterity. It runs much longer on a full charge. We can clean our entire 1600 sf house (small Washington DC house) on one charge.
My eight year old daughter and I decided to really test it. Using a hole punch, we punched out ten chads and randomly placed them throughout a room, under a bed, along the wall, etc. After Roomba did its thing in that room, it had found all ten chads.
I should add here that we have only hardwood floors in the house and no carpets. I'm told that Roomba does ok on low-pile carpets but even the manufacturer does not recommend using it on deep carpets.
The Bad
1) I suppose there is no way around Roomba's limited intelligence to get it to clean a room quicker. I guess the reason Roomba does a good job of picking up everything is because it will run for long periods, like 15 or 20 minutes, in even smallish sized rooms. I could do the same room with our Hoover canister in two minutes, literally. While Roomba is running, a room is pretty much out of commission.
2) The virtual walls as just another battery-eating appliance. I find it easier to simply put a chair in a doorway, close a door, etc, if I do not want Roomba to enter a particular room, rather than bending down to set a virtual wall and having to put it away later and remember to turn it off.
3) I do not have the charging base that Roomba will find on its own but wonder about its usefulness. After Roomba cleans, you have to clean Roomba. If I had a charging base, yes Roomba would find its charging base after it got done with a room but you would still have to fetch Roomba to clean it before you set it loose again. The only way this feature would be useful is if the charging station also cleaned Roomba, such as the more expensive product by German company Karcher does.
4) The remote is another useless toy. It can be used to direct Roomba. That defeats the whole purpose of have a robot to some extent. I played around with it once and have not picked it up since.
5) The debris and dust bin are bigger than before but cleaning the dustbin is a bit of a nuisance because you have to pull out a little part, which does not pull out too easy, and get rid of a big clump of dust and hair by knocking it against something, creating airborne dust, or using your finders. I clean my Roomba with a shop vac, which works pretty well and really cleans the paper dust filter. In fact, I never replace that dust filter as Roomba suggests; I just vacuum it clean. What would be really great would be a port on the outside of Roomba that you could just hold a shop vac hose to to suck all the debris and dust out of Roomba without having to open it up. That is how the more expensive German vacuum cleaner gets cleaned by its charging/cleaning base.
6) Roomba picks up dust and cat hair well. But instead of it being deposited in the dust bin, it all bunches up right on the paper filter and I can help but think that the vacuuming power quickly decreases even when the dustbin is hardly full.
7) Roomba still does not clean in corners but I see this as a minor problem.
8) You have to take the brush and flapper off every month or so to take off hair that wraps around the axis of these two components. I am not sure why that never seems to be an issue with regular vacuums that have rotating brushes on the bottom of them. It is a bit of a hassle.
9) Before you use Roomba, you really need to Roombatize a room. That means picking things up that it could get tangled on, like cords, tassels on rugs, etc. It also can mean rearranging furniture to that Roomba can get into areas to clean. I put all the dining room chairs on the table because otherwise, Roomba would not be able to clean large areas under the dining room table, where cleaning is really needed. All of this would not have to be done if you were using a conventional vacuum.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 220
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
keshishian
|
|
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.