Slashdot Mirror
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
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
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?
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, 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
The people who designed this need to get their minds out of the gutter.
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.
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?
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.
...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.
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.
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.)