Roomba

For those of you who were wondering, the Roomba is pretty cool. I have a robot vacuum. It doesn't fit underneath the couch or coffee table which is a little disappointing, because that's where all the dust bunnies like to live - YMMV. In the hour long cleaning session it performed of the living room and kitchen, it attempted to get itself stuck on various pieces of furniture and rugs and floor dividers. In all but two encounters, it managed to unstick itself and continue on its way. Those two encounters were it trying to fit itself under the unfortunately not-high-enough-to-fit-robots-entirely but not-short-enough-to-keep-them-out coffee table. I can sympathize with the Roomba, because I also think there is some pretty awesome dirt under the coffee table, and were I a robot vacuum, I would also expend much effort to wedge myself underneath to try to clean that dirt. Alas, I am neither robot, nor vacuum.

One feature I would like to see on the Roomba, is the ability to put it on a rug and tell it, "Clean this rug." At which point the Roomba would stay on the rug, and clean only it. The iRobot company does allow you to program your Roomba if you are so inclined, so maybe I could whip up an algorithm for that, but I'm probably not that good. And at some point in the future, a combination Roomba/Scooba would be awesome - just one self contained floor cleaning machine. Another weak point is corners; since the Roomba is round, it naturally can't get all the way into the corners, but it the area left uncleaned is really quite small.

Overall, I'm really impressed. If you don't have one already, and a $99 Roomba deal crosses Woot.com or any other site, I highly recommend picking one up. It did a great job removing dirt and dust from the hard floors, and an even better job on the carpets. If you have a lot of animal (or - shudder - body) hair or if you just haven't cleaned in a really long time, it can get overwhelmed and fill it's collection bin pretty fast, and might not pick up as much until you empty the bin. But then it's not really a spring cleaning kind of machine, it's more of a once or twice a week press-the-clean-button-before-going-to-work-and-there's-no-more-dust-when-you-get-home kind of cleaning. Or if you have the scheduling kind like me, you can just set it to clean at say 1300 every Wednesday and never worry about it since it just returns to its charging station in the corner when it's done (just have to remember to empty the bin every so often).

Errr... 5/5 stars for Roomba.