Read This before you Buy A Roomba! Many drawbacks!
Written: Dec 17 '03
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Pros: Fun to watch the first day you own it. Helps between real cleanings.
Cons: Extremely high price for what it actually does. Buy a good vacuum instead.
The Bottom Line: Extremely overpriced. Flimsy construction, hard to clean. But if you really can't clean your floors often enough, it can help.
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| tondelayo's Full Review: iRobot Pro Elite Bagless Robotic Vacuum |
What I found wrong:
1. It would work best only in bare rooms with hard-surface floors and no furniture. Unfortunately, not even Zen masters live in rooms like that.
2. It's really good only for the times between *hand vacuuming,* not to "clean" an area thoroughly by itself.
3. Unit will trap itself easily, especially where carpets meet bare floors and under chairs [especially rocker-recliners]; although it beeps at you when it gets trapped, you still have to be there watching and waiting to untrap it yourself.
I once tried to lie down to rest while it was running but had to get up every few minutes when it beeped at me. [Depending on what you're inclined to hear, it will beep twice, sounding something like, "Da-Da" or "Ma-Ma."]
4. Unit will clean the same areas over and over, and miss other areas completely.
It really only has about 5 moves: Spiral, turn left 90 degrees, turn right 90 degrees, turn left 45 degrees, turn right 45 degrees. The vaunted "intelligence" of the machine is just exaggerated hype.
It will frustrate you when you watch it use the same moves over and over, missing areas and get itself trapped again and again.
5. You must prep the room... it will find any electrical or phone cords, loose fibers on rug edges, small pieces of paper or plastic, etc., and draw them in and wrap them around its rollers, often incapacitating the machine.
You then have to remove these by hand which is sometimes difficult.
6. Included battery charger takes 8 - 10 hours to recharge the battery, unit will run for approximately 1 to 1-1/4 hours on full charge. It will run for a 30 minute cycle, then stop and beep a "finished" tune.
At that point, you can re-set it or shut it off, or it will shut itself off automatically after about 15 minutes.
A quick charger [advertised to charge the battery in 2-1/2 hours] is available for $60, I did not buy or try one to see if it really works.
Full charge is enough to do 1 to perhaps 3 small rooms thoroughly. Then you have to recharge it overnight again unless you buy a spare battery [$60] or have the quick charger [$60].
7. Tiny filters cost $5 each, can only be bought in packs of 3 for $15.
8. Poor construction... tiny, fragile plastic covers which you must remove to clean and tiny rubber spinning "whisk broom" part can break easily.
9. It is recommended that you clean the unit thoroughly after each cycle [a half hour, then it stops automatically]; there are 3 separate areas to clean and it's done by hand or with a small brush... a real mess and you get to inhale lots of loose dust while doing so.
In short, it's a very expensive toy, although it can help keep floors clean between hand cleanings.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250+tax
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Epinions.com ID:
tondelayo
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Member: Saverio
Location: La-La Land, Los Angeles, CA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Just one Hell of a guy.
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