A week with an iRobot, reflections on our Roomba

So its been a week since we brought home Herbert (or Wall-E, or ‘the robot’) – our 530 series iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.

In that time he’s been used daily, both out of need and novelty, and in that time we’ve been impressed with the results we’ve been getting.

For me, the biggest surprise about the Roomba is that its actually a quite effective vacuum cleaner – that may sounds a bit odd, but I’ve been living my life with the expectation that a vacuum cleaner needs to be big, loud and have thousands of watts of screaming power – by comparison the Roomba seems to have the suction of a asthmatic sparrow.   Roomba’s secret seems to be that it mainly uses its brushes to pull material off the floor.  Suction occurs simply to pull the material off the brushes, not off the carpet.

Watching him (yes, we’ve given it a gender identity) move around the floor, following walls, stopping before stairs, swirling on dirty patches, gives you an appreciation for the ingenuity of iRobot – we’ve only had to rescue him twice, once when he choked on a dropped sock (he shutdown, beeped and then told us to ‘check brushes’) and once when he got himself tangled in some curtain cords.

The robot probably requires the kind of care you might provide to your coffee machine, a 2 minute clean at the end of each job, with a longer clean after a few days to get hair off the brushes and bearings.   All the parts that can be removed are helpfully color coded yellow.

Roomba cleans best room by room (don’t let him loose in your entire house) and of course, the floor needs to be clear of socks, clothing, paper and the like.

Roomba is cheaper than you might think, ours being about $AU500 with a 4 year warranty – half the price of the most expensive Dyson upright cleaner.

I’d recommend Roomba to any time poor family who likes gadgets and hates vacuuming, and I wish it had been around when I was single – letting it loose in my apartment when I went to work would have been fantastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roomba

http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp