I have both the
Roomba and the
Scooba.
In my old apartment, the Roomba was fantastic. I would hit the start button when I left every morning, and come back to a clean apartment. Roughly once a month it would work itself into some area it couldn't get out of, and I would have to rescue it, otherwise it was always back on it's charger.
I just moved into an apartment with brand new carpets. The Roomba is having a hard time of it, simply because there is so much more general carpet fluff to pick up. Once it gets over the initial problems of too much fluff, I expect it will be great.
In my old apartment I found that running the Roomba every day worked very well. If I left it for 2 or 3 days then it would take a couple of days before I was happy that the rooms were clean again.
The Scooba is also great, although I don't use it anywhere near as often. It is designed for largish kitchens, and has a 45 minute run cycle. Due to the way it works (sweep, then wash, then rinse, then dry) you can't really reduce that cycle. Since my current kitchen floor is around 1/10th the size of the floor that I believe it could adequately cover in that 45 minutes, my floors do end up spotless
, but I think it is probably overkill.
I had thought about buying a
scheduler, however I personally find that it works better for me if I just hit the start button on the way out of the house in the morning - that way there is no chance of it ever starting up when I am at home myself - say for instance if I programmed it to always start up at 11am on weekdays, then next July 4 when I am likely to be at home, it would start up while I am at home, which would probably startle me.
Regards, Andrew
P.S. If you are thinking of buying a Roomba or Scooba through Amazon.com, then the links I have put on this page will give a small percentage of your sale back to JavaRanch.