After talking to some REAL people and finding out how much they enjoy their iRobot Roomba, combined with online reviews and ratings from Roomba owners, we decided to go pick one up.  Mainly to clean our kitchen floors, but also to vacuum the playroom every day after daycare so I don’t have to!  YAY!

We started it off the first morning with the toughest job we have- cleaning up the crumbs from under the dining table.  Tough because there are eight chairs, and two sets of tri-pod legs.  

I quickly learned that I needed to put the chairs up on the table (school style) because the Roomba was too wide to get into the legs, plus the fewer “interruptions” to it’s cleaning protocol the better.  I’m amazed that it has done as well as it has- it cleaned up every crumb even in the little nooks and crannies under the table legs, which I thought for sure would present a major challenge.

So instead of sweeping the kitchen that morning, I sat on the couch and enjoyed a coffee and chat with my husband!

Later that afternoon (during naptime) I set it to vacuum the front room.  This is where I realized an OCD person would not be able to handle a Roomba.  See, it doesn’t leave perfectly straight aligned lines in the carpet.  It zigs and zags and swoops across the floor, leaving tracks like a 5-year old vacuumed.

 

Some of it’s unique features:

It knows when it’s power is running low and it returns “home” to it’s docking station to recharge.  

– It can detect dirty areas and it will spend extra time on those spots.
– It has a step sensor- if it detects the floor is “missing”, it will stop itself and not continue in that direction.
– There are laser walls that you can set up to contain the roomba to a particular area.  In this case, I only wanted it to clean our front room, so I blocked the exit to that room.

Rumor has it there’s an iRobot “Scooba” coming out to clean hard floors, but it’s not recommended for laminate floors.  Darn it! 

Mopping is my 2nd least favorite chore (sweeping is my #1, vacuuming is my #3.  Amazingly I’d rather clean a toilet!).  Ha!

Oh, by the way, we’ve named our Roomba “Rosie”….as in Rosie the robot from The Jetsons!