Roomba

My mom recently wanted to keep up with the Jones. She bought a Roomba. (and a car mounted GPS, but that is another story)

I was tasked with setting up the Roomba today. She hadn't taken it out of the box. I plugged in the base station, put the battery in the Roomba, and started it going. That thing works pretty well. Misty didn't care about it, the casts didn't care about it, and it wasn't annoying. It was fun to watch. It cleaned the downstairs living room very well. It even did under the couches.

It has this mode that when it finds a "particularly dirty spot" it will go into "deep clean mode" and go over that section more. This happened on a section of the carpet, and I could see why. That is pretty neat. If you have seen our living room, it is a pain in the ass to vacuum. This thing had no problems. It changed from rug->hardwood floor->rug easily. It pushed a trash can into a corner out of the way. We left it running while we loaded the washing machine.

Matt and I were moving a washing machine and spilled some water. As we were loading it into the truck, we joked about how we hoped it wouldn't eat any of the animals. As luck would have it, it did get into trouble. It found the spilled water, and was trying to suck it up. I freaked out, dried it, and everything was ok. I was surprised about how much STUFF it picked up. It is currently charging, and I set it up to start cleaning again at 8:00 pm on Sunday (today). Hopefully the family is watching tv during prime time and freaks out.

You program the Roomba with a remote control. You can hook the remote control up to your computer with usb. I don't know why (but I can think of a few reasons). You can steer the Roomba with the remote, or schedule when it will vacuum. It won't fall down stairs.

You can make "virtual walls" and it came with two of those units. It automatically finds the base station for charging when it is needed. All in all, it was fun and did what it was supposed to do. I think that if my mom can remember to clean it out it will be worth it's cost.