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IRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot Review
justechn writes "Many of us have seen robots in the movies and wondered how long it would take for them to become a reality. Some of my favorites when I was a kid were Short Circut and Runaway. iRobot is a company that is striving to bring some of that technology home today. Their most popular and well known product is the Roomba vacuuming robot. The Roomba is great, after I finished my review of it and sent it back I went out and bought one. It does its best work picking up pet hair. They just came out with another robot called the Looj. The Looj is used to clean the rain gutters that go around your roof. If you have ever had to do this by hand you know how much of a pain it is. This robot uses a 3 stage auger to break up clogs and sweep all the debris out of your gutter. It is also water proof so you don't have to worry if you have water in your gutter, just don't stand below it when it is cleaning or you will get sprayed." Read on for the rest of justechn's review.
"The Looj does not move on it own like the Roomba does, instead there is a remote control that controls the direction that the auger spins and the direction that the Looj moves (forward and backward). Because it requires constant human interaction I am not even sure I would classify it as a robot, rather it is more like a remote controlled car.
I recently got my hands on one and put it through my gutters. It did a fairly good job. I did have to go over some spots more than once to get all the leaves and dirt out, but in the end my gutters were a lot cleaner after it was done.
The price is also very good. At $99 for the base model it is cheap enough that you can pick one up just to play around with. The more expensive models only give you extra batteries and augers, so you are not missing anything if you go with the base model.
I only found two things about the Looj that I did not like. First, it will not turn corners, it is way too long and not flexible. Second, if you want it to move you have to constantly hold down the forward or backward button. As soon as you let go, it stops. If you could lock in the movement then you could do other things like move your ladder to the next corner while it was cleaning."
I recently got my hands on one and put it through my gutters. It did a fairly good job. I did have to go over some spots more than once to get all the leaves and dirt out, but in the end my gutters were a lot cleaner after it was done.
The price is also very good. At $99 for the base model it is cheap enough that you can pick one up just to play around with. The more expensive models only give you extra batteries and augers, so you are not missing anything if you go with the base model.
I only found two things about the Looj that I did not like. First, it will not turn corners, it is way too long and not flexible. Second, if you want it to move you have to constantly hold down the forward or backward button. As soon as you let go, it stops. If you could lock in the movement then you could do other things like move your ladder to the next corner while it was cleaning."
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=354
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For most of the world, $100 is not something you can just spend on a whim. Then again, it might be for the people who buy iRobot products in the first place.
...if you are already up there with a ladder, so you can manually move the Looj around corners etc? Scooping out the leaves is trivial at that point - the real PIA is getting out the ladder, and going up/down and moving it from side to side. Doesn't seem like this performs and real useful activity?
http://www.smarthome.com/31262.html
We also sell them in my hardware store but I don't want to link to my own site and crash the server. :)
They work great, just wear rain gear when standing underneath while using it.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Some of my favorites were R2-D2, Johnny Five and and the Looj Gutter Cleaner!!!
I is a awesome writer of advertisments.
If you have a house, you have likely spent $99 on far worse things.
If all I have to do to clean the gutters is put the ladder at each corner once - I want this.
I suspect many of the "why bother"s have never actually cleaned gutters by hand. You basically go around the house trying to find a stable spot for the ladder every so often. Every so often is defined as your own wingspan plus how brave you are either side of an extension ladder. Scoop, fling, repeat. Chase leavings with hose or bucket. For even a smallish 24'x36' house, this is tedium with the added risk of a broken arm.
OK - the wand looks interesting but you're standing under the slop.
iRobot is in Somerville, MA. And here in New England the fall leaves aren't as bad as the muck made of spring tree flowers and seeds (maple and oak).
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'm still waiting for the one called the Spooj which will, um, unclog my pipes as it were.
Now all I need is $1.4 million for a house. Maybe iRobot would provide a free house to do a Looj Cutter review with.
Considering most of the money on this product is made in Asia, they should think of an easier name.
I, for one, welcome our robotic gutter cleaning and making our lives easier, overlords.
old mucked up gutters that you neglected.
I bought one of these when they first came out last fall and liked playing with it, but unless you regularly use it to clean your gutters, you will find that it gets bogged down in heavy mucked up areas.
These tend to be right in the middle of the run and I have to get on the roof or move the ladder to free it up.
and if you have a valley that feeds into a gutter that gets clogged with small twigs and branches, fugedaboutit.
That being said, it is fun to use and works pretty much as advertised you just have to approach heavy obstacles slowly and go back and forth like you are drilling through it.
My gutters a really a pain to clean and just knowing I can go play with the Looj makes me more likely to drag out the ladder and clean them more often.
I like microcars
What does this thing do when it encounters one of the gutter supports? I've typically gone up/down the ladder a few times a year, but my latest idea is using an attachment for my leaf blower that blows the crap out of the gutter... yeah it goes all over and it's a mess, but it works from the ground.
I follow up with a little treatment from the hose and we're done... There's also attachments for pressure washers that blast out gutters from the ground too...
The people who designed this need to get their minds out of the gutter.
Or you can just get gutter covers. When I moved into my house 3 years ago, I cleaned the gutters out once, decided it sucked and got gutter covers. Each cover was less than a buck and we got enough for the whole house for less than the price of a Looj. Sure, it was a bit of extra work to put on the covers, but it's just a one-time investment and I've never had to clean gutters since.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I got one of these off a Woot the other month. It performed as advertised on the vast amount of dry crap on one side of my house. It tossed all the (slightly damp) leaves and twigs out quite nicely. Yes, I still had to get up on the ladder once to put it up there, but I didn't have to climb down, move the ladder three feet, climb back up, rinse and repeat -- the looj probably saved me a good hour.
Unfortunately, the other side of the house was worse with the gutters containing standing water and a kind of vegetable soup. The looj didn't have any problem being submerged, but it was pretty much ineffectual. It simply showered me with foul-smelling water and pushed the mush ahead of it until it got stuck. I ended up doing that side by hand.
So if you use the looj a couple times a year and on non-flooded gutters, I think it's a good little tool. It keeps me off the roof, and that's easily worth a C-note to me.
You can see some good First Robotics matches at The blue Alliance under the match archives. This year Simbotics, ThunderChickens, and Robowranglers won the World Championship.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
The USA needs reliable and cheap robots. Reliable because they are complicated, expensive, and difficult to fix because there aren't many people who are expert with robotics technology.
Cheap because the USA is shares a border with a country that millions of people who are ready, willing, and able to come here and work for about $40-$50 a 8-10 hour day. Any robot that we buy has to be able to do productive work for eight hours a day and cost less than $50 a day for energy, maintainence, and pro-rated purchase cost. Americans will continue to use Mexicans for robot work as long as it's cheaper to use Mexicans than it is to use robots.
Some things robots must do because it is unethical to induce humans to do them, such as mine-field clearing. Sure you can force some poor black kid with three 'po-session' convictions to go out and dig up mines with a spoon. But it is unethical and quite possibly immoral to do so. Historically, ethics and morality have never stopped people from doing evil things (they contract it out to people who are further down on the social-class ladder). But those days are passing as more people realise that the evil ways of the past can not continue, regardless of how convienent it was.
Oh, you are just such a racist! I hear you saying. Well flip the switch on your politically-correct-conditioning circuitry for a while. Let's drop the labels and talk straight for a few minutes.
Yes, there are millions of poor Mexican peasants in the USA working at a half or third of standard American pay. This is because NAFTA allowed American agri-business like Cargil with huge US government subsidies to flood the Mexican agricultural economy with corn so cheap that the Mexicans couldn't afford to live by growing it. And because NAFTA allowed American bio-industries like Monsanto to replace traditional Mexican corn with patented bio-engineered varieties that the Mexican farmers couldn't afford to buy. People aren't coming here from Mexico because they want to. They come because they have to, or starve. So stop modding me down and calling me a racist. It's a complex subject and the best thing that you could do to help solve it is not stand on the border with a gun, but study and master conversational Spanish (and even one of the pre-Columbian Central Mexican Indian languages (that are spoken by thousands of immigrants who don't speak Spanish very well), that is -if you're up to a serious intellectual challenge, C++ is nothing compared to it) so you can just talk to people and find out what the situation is really like without having it filtered first by the creeps in the news media. Whew! So stop modding me down!
Yeah, back to robots. We can grow a lot of food but a lot rots on the vine or ground. Especially fruit crops here in the Cascadian Republic of the former United States. We need cheap, dependable, solar-powered, and very advanced agricultural robots. Japanese ones are too expensive. Detroit robots are meaningless to us, we have no use for stationary automobile frame welding machines that cost a half-million dollars. We need a machine that can roll along the ground in the field, find the strawberries, pick the strawberries without destroying the mother plant, place the strawberry in a container with others, and move this container to a pre-set centralized location. We need thousands of these machines all working at the harvest. Then when the strawberry harvest is over, we need people who can reprogram them for the next crop.
What it would be ethical for us to do is to retrain all the millions of Mexicans that have been impoverished by misguided government and corporate policies to be our cadre of advanced agricultural robotics technicians and programmers. They know the crops and the harvests and would be willing to learn the software and electronics involved. What? Just turn a million Mexican peasants into robotics engineers? You laugh? Now who a racist?
Horrible wobbly tippy things
So I used to use a top-rope from the chimney, and a jumar.
As long as you don't break the tiles, all is fine
Down with categorical imperatives
I've got one and despite having printed out the test template to check gutter clearance, it still gets hung up under some of the support spikes. Check your gutter size carefully before ordering.
"Some of my favorites when I was a kid were Short Circut and Runaway."
When you had so many others to choose from...
I've got your sig, right here.
I'm sure a lot of hard R&D went into this, but something you've still got to get on a ladder multiple times for? C'mon.
Am I the only one who thinks home robotics is a VASTLY under-developed market? Yeah, I know how tough AI is, but I still get the nagging feeling we could be doing so much better if someone made a hard run for it. Seriously, look at Windows -- the damn robots don't have to be perfect, they just have to be ok.
Back in the late 70's & 80's the mantra was a computer in every home, today it should be a robot in every home... but I have yet to hear a single person step up and so much as declare it. Imagine the publicity in simply DECLARING such a thing...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I have both the Roomba and the Scooba and while I was initially pleased with both, I've been less than happy with battery life. Although iRobot states that the rechargeable battery will last for "hundreds of cleaning cycles" that hasn't been my experience, with the batteries for each dying far short of that mark.
Before the batteries did die I was very happy with the performance of these "robots." But ultimately would not recommend either until either the batteries last longer or the price drops for replacements ($80 for the Scooba battery & $70 for the Roomba). I just checked, and the Looj battery is available for $30 so it may be a non-issue for some.
Obviously YMMV but thought I'd give you a heads up!
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Every 6-12 months I check in on the "Roomba" lines, whether just vacuums, or wet mops, or other kinds like this new "gutter cleaner". They all look pretty cool, and the idea is good. But every time I check with people who actually have them, I confirm that they break really easy. They wear out, or they can't take the kind of hard bump that most moving appliances have to take.
At $99, replacing them once or twice every couple-few years is a little expensive, compared to a $250 vacuum that lasts 5+ years. And when they break, there's the whole hassle of getting a new one.
Why isn't there a version of these clever little slaves that cost twice as much, but last twice or three times as long without breaking?
--
make install -not war
He wants to borrow your Looj.
Does anybody have any experience with these lawn-mower robots?
http://www.friendlyrobotics.com/
Table-ized A.I.
Seriously, you put it on once and you're done.
Water flows through the mesh and into your gutters, leaves and twigs are kept out.
Is there something I'm missing here?
My wife got me one for my birthday this year. We have a 30x60 pole barn on our property with gutters that constantly need cleaning else they overflow.
Before it was an 3 hr ordeal to hike to the top of the latter 15 feet off the ground clean ~3' of gutter climb down move and repeat for all 120' of gutter on the barn...
Now i set the latter up once, run it down and back and im finished! A 10 min job.
Like others have mentioned it does need some back and forth jockeying in heavy debris but otherwise works great.
...Cheap because the USA is shares a border with a country that millions of people who are ready, willing, and able to come here and work for about $40-$50 a 8-10 hour day....
...Oh, you are just such a racist!...
Since when mocking Canadians became a racism?!
It's in our Constitution, you insensitive clod!
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no, i didn't read the parent
A teenage son with a leafblower.
I live in a one store home with the "decorative gutters." They have a flat bottom and long runs. Perfect? Not by a long shot. The antenna kept getting hung up in the gutter brackets! Since the brackets are about every six feet, I was moving the ladder constantly. Since it just barely fit between the roof overhang and the gutter it was a booger to even get in the gutter. If it ran into anything lumby - acorn, small pine cone, it would ride up and even flip on it's side. It was a waste of money! It's underpowered. I'll probably pimp it out and use it on halloween to freak out the trick-or-treaters.
...but robots won't have to pay into SSI to help keep it solvent for the baby boomers. America's next big crop is old human beings.
Back when I was in grade school in the late 80's I entered an invention competition, and my invention was a gutter cleaning "robot" which was just a toy car with a squeegie attached to the front.
All they've done is used tank treads instead, and made the squeegie spin!
I won the competition at my school, but I didn't place in the regional competition. :(
And I never bothered to improve on my invention after that, because even when I was inventing it I knew it was a stupid idea. But I guess if you have millions of dollars to spend on marketing, you can sell anything.
...welcome our gutter-cleaning masters.
I don't know where you're getting your info but I was living on the border before, during and after NAFTA's passage and I guarantee you that illegal immigration is nothing new. Additionally the maquiladora industry was thriving long before NAFTA was even a thought.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
It's just a simple, self propelled power tool, and a very narrowly specialized one at that. What makes it a "robot"?
Doesn't work worth a shit. A damn shame - I hate cleaning my gutters.
I have some mature trees in my area, though. Between the cottonwood relative and ash in the front yard and the maple tree down the street, my gutters stay full of debris year round. Maybe if I used it religiously it would work perfectly.
Many of us have seen robots in the movies
What are these "robots" of which you speak? I have yet to see one of these in the moving pictures.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It works well if you have long gutters, otherwise you still move the ladder a lot.
You don't need to move the ladder to the end of the gutter to pick it up. Simply run the Looj in reverse and bring it back to you.
The key to running a Looj is do it *slow*. Forget the speed on the iRobot web site. If you run that fast it will flip over (usually recoverable by reversing the auger) or get stuck. You also don't need a lock in forward. I've gotten the best results inching it forward every few seconds.
Yes it's slow (but not as slow as moving the ladder every 6'), Yes it's messy (all the stuff falls to the ground). But *IT WORKS*. My gutters were a mess, 1=2" of basically mulch!
Now that the gutters are better, running the Looj next time should be faster.
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
AKA gutter guard, gutter strainer etc etc... Price from $2.39...
Deleted
In what sense is this a robot? As I understand it, it moves back and forth along your gutter when you push the corresponding buttons. If this is a robot, then so is an RC car.
A gutter cleaning robot would emerge from a pod at the top of your roof, and walk around with spider-like legs. It would first map out your roof and send a 3D map to your computer. You would then indicate on the map where it should dump the gutter contents over the edge, and it would go to work. It might take all day to clear out the gutters, but you would be free to leave it alone (after you got bored of watching it.)
A properly functioning gutter system will greatly reduce the amount of water that reaches the foundation of the house, thus avoiding more serious issues. Keeping the walkways clear is mostly cosmetic.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
I wonder if you added up all of the cheap vacuums you burned through plus the Roomba, if you could perhaps have afforded a REAL vacuum cleaner.
I love the Roomba from the geek perspective. Unfortunately, I don't believe it's HEPA, and to be honest I'm not sure how fine of particles it actually retains. I've generally found non-HEPA vacuum cleaners to be very efficient invokers of allergic responses.
Don't buy cheap vacuums.
We have two dogs and two cats. We finally broke down and bought a Dyson Animal a few years ago. A bit over $450. Seems pretty extravagant at the time. But it works extremely well, picks up all the dog hair and other crap.
It is not good on throw rugs because it tends to lift them, so you have to be careful.
I'll agree that the name, is well frankly retarded.
Don't Wii know it.
</sarcasm>
Two years ago, my wife and I coughed up ~ $600 for a Dyson vacuum cleaner, which was pretty much an unimaginable sum for a minor household appliance at the time. It's been worth every penny. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
One of the worst customer service experiences I've ever had was with iRobot. I'm not going to go into details but basically our roomba broke after 3 months of use and it took them another 9 months to resolve the issue. 9 months.
I will never purchase another product from them if it can be helped.
Implementing robots will result in a massive unemployment epidemic. See this article by Marshall Brian, the creator of How Stuff Works.
You MUST take into account sociological factors when you're talking about a major robotic influx. The bottom line is that our economy is set up to use human labor right now. If there is not something in place to help people continue to work, perhaps at a lower rate (such as a 20 hour workweek limit, or something), all of the money will just flow up into the top 10% like it has been. It has to be on our terms, not the gigantic companies. Cargill already uses robotically controlled tractors to harvest the fields. But is it giving me, the average American, any additionaly leisure time? No.
The opportunity is such that we can either have a permanent vacation, and the robots allow us to flower and flourish culturally, or it will be permanent enslavement and povery since the upper classes no longer have a use for us workers.
And that was the problem with Marxism. Someone had to do the work, and they wanted to get more if they did more of their fair share. Well, if robots are doing the work, why can't we as a people collectively own them, and collectively enjoy the fruits of their labors; food, housing, etc. Granted some of those top 10% people will have to give up some of their power and come down to our level, but in this world of robots, any luxury can be had for almost nothing.
Marshall Brain wrote a novel about it called Manna.
If we had a real plan NOW to build a society of leisure based on robots that no one owns, I think it could be accomplished in a few decades. It would involve the formation of a large non-profit stock company where we all buy shares to get this thing built. It's not going to be totally simple, but it will be worth it.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The Roomba was the second cheapest option we considered
I too love my Roomba. The Roomba Discovery is quite robust. It's also possible to repair! I know because I've done it. (Replaced the edge-cleaning rotary brush motor.)
Panasonic makes cheap vacuums that hotels and other companies give their custodial employees. There's no fancy HEPA filter or any whizbang features. It's just a very cheaply but robustly made vacuum with a few basic attachments that are flimsy but really work. The first one I had lasted 12 years, which included a stint being used by a housemate working as a professional maid. The next one I bought was from a Fry's in Houston for around $50 new.
If you have serious allergies and need a HEPA filter, go ahead and buy some fancy vacuum. If you just want a basic vacuum, I recommend you look for one of these. The attachments are flimsy and won't stand up to abuse, but the actual vacuum parts seem to be very robust.
I think people that buy robots like these are loojers.
Like many other urban Britons, I have a flat in a moderately tall building (3 storeys in my case). Health and safety rules preclude ladders this tall, so basically any time maintenance is needed, you have to work from indoors or use scaffolding.
It would be /really/ handy to have a remote control gutter cleaning tool (I hesitate to use the word robot) that climbs the inside of a downpipe in order to reach the guttering. Someone make it. I'll buy it.
I tried the metal guards, but pine needles like sticking in the.
Now I use a Shop-Vac with 20foot of extensions and a 180 u bend on the end. Works well, and the extensions I got even have a side handle on them to help with hefting the tube up and controlling it.
Now I don't bother with ladders...
If more folks had green roofs, they wouldn't need gutters. Green roofs improve the r-value by 20+%, as well as reducing storm water runoff. They also reduce fine particulate matter in the air and CO2. I have read about them at http://www.cleanerairforcities.blogspot.com/ Did I mention they also look great!?