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Robots Taking over the World! (and cleaning)

 
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Anyone have a Roomba and love/hate it? (I'm looking for strong emotions, no lukewarm crap)

Regardless... the pool cleaning robot is awesome, I want aa pool just so I can use this, check out the video: http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=316
 
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I have a roomba, broke a few weeks ago after a few years of running. Been to busy to rip it apart and see what is up.

It is great for my house since I have all hard wood floors. Only thing I wish I had was one that had the built in timer so it would run on its own.

We been thinking about getting the scooba.

Eric
 
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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.
 
Scott Selikoff
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How well does it do crossing carpet/hardware boundaries?
 
Andrew Monkhouse
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The Roomba - no problems with the transitions between the carpets and the kitchen or the carpets and the bathrooms.

It supposedly has logic to stop itself falling down stairs. Personally I would question that - I think that if approached the stairs on an angle it might get stuck, but I have only my belief to go on - I don't have stairs to play with. Regardless, it comes with "virtual walls" that you can set up to stop it going into areas it shouldn't.

The Scooba (being a mopping system) is something you really don't want on carpet.

Regards, Andrew
 
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