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Roomba Celebrates 10 Years of Cleaning Up After You
SkinnyGuy writes "Roomba, the world’s first multi-million unit-selling home-helper robot, turns 10 today. iRobot has cooked up a self-congratulatory infographic filled with a collection of interesting and occasionally bizarre facts to mark the occasion. Did you know that dogs, cats and babies have ridden iRobot's iconic home cleaning robot since it was introduced exactly a decade ago?"
I bought a Roomba years ago to take care of some light-colored carpeting in the living room. I'm not buying another until they come with an under-the-couch dog poop sensor, standard.
Poodle skidmarks, man. Poodle skidmarks.
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My house (and business) use Neato's, but I'd hardly begrudge the Roomba for making people think "robot vacuum cleaners should be in my house now".
When a regular vacuum can be modified to autonomously clean a room with just a few extra motors and a battery, then it would be worth a 20% markup. Also, a lot of mid to higher end traditional vacuums sell in the same price range as the Roomba - although I can't say where on the scale the Roomba's quality falls.
I've owned a Roomba for ~3 years. After the second set of batteries went out 6 minths ago, I gave up. It cleaned OK (if emptied reguarly) & would park & recharge OK (kept a close eye), but not ready for prime-time.
It didn't immediately decrease the time spent on vacuuming, though — I'd waste the time previously spent pushing a vacuum around just watching it do its thing. Now, at least, I can just let it run, but I do get a feeling of "wow, that's rather cool" each time I run it...
And designed to be user-repaired, or at least parts replaced, which is always a bonus.
Mine worked great so long as I otherwise kept an immaculate apartment. Immaculate included no chairs or cat toys.
Speaking of cats, cat hair... Oh my god the cat hair.
Mine's about 4 years old now, and I haven't used it in about 3 years. I spend less time vacuuming than I did cleaning the Roomba.
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A decent "regular" vacuum is, for me, a Dyson, and those cost right there. The cheapest used one that doesn't run on batteries could be had for about $200 (in a decent shape, for less if it's in bad shape). A new Dyson from the DC Animal family will run about $400. If Dyson ever made a robotic vacuum, it'd probably cost $1000 or more. I can't imagine a decent robotic one costing much less. Do note that a decent vacuum cleaner must have good beater brushes and a powerful, two stage cyclone-based air filtration system with a HEPA filter on the output (or three stage w/o HEPA). It can all be scaled down in size, but it will be loud as hell, and will run hot.
It's no biggie to have a 1kW turbine and a double (Dyson standard) or even triple cyclone in an enclosure the size of a Roomba, but I don't know where the heck will the batteries fit. The shaft will probably turn at 20k to 30k RPM, otherwise the motor and turbine would be too big. It might need a muffler on the exhaust, seriously, otherwise the whine will make your teeth hurt.
Never mind that you'd probably want 250Wh battery capacity at a minimum (so that it can vacuum for 10 minutes). With derating for battery life in hot operating conditions, 300-350Wh is more like it. That battery would probably cost a good chunk of change all in itself.
It'd be OK to use it when you're not in at home, but you wouldn't want to be around that thing when it's doing the job. Roomba is, performance-wise, a joke. If you want to know how bad it is, if you're cleaning your carpets using one, borrow a Dyson and see how much crap it'll pick up.
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http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-roomba-blender-makes-smoothie-out-of-everythin,29539/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/roomba-violates-all-three-laws-of-roombotics,2184/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/roomba-maker-unveils-military-robot,15331/
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Roomba gave me a great reason to try and keep my place more or less tidy. It's the only way Roomba will work.
But yes... cat hair. There are two sensible, easy, and not too expensive upgrades that would vastly improve the Roomba, but are still inexplicably missing even from the latest models:
- Ball bearings for the brush drivers on the gearbox. This is where all the cat hairs get into the gear box and foul up the gears, to the point where they run so hit the egarbox actually melts a little. Apparently there's a model or version of the gearbox that comes with bearings, but I never found one. I ended up modding the thing myself.
- A good Li-ion battery instead of the craptastic NiMH they still stick in there. And even for NiMH the Roomba packs are of rather poor quality; they all failed quickly, and replacing them with good NiMH cells from an old model airplane pack gave much better results.
Other than that, these vacuums to a pretty good job. They clean places that I usually skip when vacuuming (like under the bed / couch), and they do well on carpets; going over it from different directions as it crisscrosses the room they clean it better than I do by hand.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I grew up watching those little robots zipping around on the bridge of an Imperial star ship, so when I first powered up the thing I was a giddy. I felt like I was one step closer to the idealized future envisioned in my childhood.
Unfortunately, we're a lot closer to that Imperial future in a lot of ways we'd rather not be.
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Perhaps there really is some difference in the quality of vacuum cleaning from a Kirby but I suspect most people will comfort themselves with buying which costs 1/5th the price which is almost as good and weighs half as much. And buying it without some a salesman refusing to leave their house wearing them down for hours until they buy the thing.
Yeah, we have a Kirby, two roombas, and two Dysons (don't even ask why).
The Kirby is the all time champion for raw cleaning power, and the roombas are the worst in the same category. Dyson's in the middle somewhere, closer to the Kirby end of the spectrum.
But! The kirby and dysons won't vacuum the room for you while you are washing the dishes and cleaning the cat box. And the Kirby cannot be used except by large physically fit people (we've got two family members who can't lift it, and we originally got it because Nana could not even push it ten feet on carpet). So they are all great for 3 different use cases.
Several years ago, we demoed a Dyson unit. They look cool and have good marketing, but we were pretty disappointed by its actual performance. It cost more and performed worse than the Hoover vacuum we wound up getting instead. Right now we have a Sebo, and it works great.
As for the Roomba's performance, isn't there an argument that you can have it go out and vacuum every day? If you have it set to do that, then your carpets shouldn't get dirty enough that the lower performance is an issue. It also means that your carpets stay clean the whole week, rather than having one day where they look real nice and six days getting progressively worse (or am I the only one who vacuums only once a week?).
(Dear lord, I can't believe I'm talking about vacuuming right now.)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
By the time the salesman left it wasn't us that was worn out, it was him. He must have been there 5 hours and we paid a fraction of the original price.
The Kirby is a really good product, but I do agree the way they are sold is not very good.
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