Vacuum Robots

Irrenhaus

Hi,

Thinking of getting one. Not set on a brand yet. Any comments welcome. I found another discussion here about iRobot's but was from 2012 I think almost 7yrs later they may be some improvements.

I have pets in the house Black Lab and Cat. Also combination of hardwood floors and area carpets.

Cheers

VR3

I'm waiting for the next generation of the version that self empties.

Irrenhaus

VR3 wrote: »

I'm waiting for the next generation of the version that self empties.

Next generation from this one?

VR3

Yes

CH46E

We like our Roomba (770 IIRC). We have 90% tile in our home with two dogs and one the sheds like no other. It works great on tile. Not nearly as well on carpets as far as picking up dog hair.

We have had it for 3 years now and the battery only last about 60% of what it used to per charge.

If you have dogs be mindfull that if your dog has a accident (poops in the house) and your roomba is on a auto timer it will spread the dog poo all over the house.

BlueFox

LOL. Sounds like a WMD.

Emlyn

I know from experience that Labs shed a lot every day. I've never had a robot (still think of them as gimmicky) but have found that the lithium powered portable vacuums have greatly improved in the last couple years, mainly because of improvements in battery and motor technology from Asia. One of these is a good example:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FFMTW8X/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07FFMTW8X&pd_rd_w=lL7Ww&pf_rd_p=8a8f3917-7900-4ce8-ad90-adf0d53c0985&pd_rd_wg=PB2Bx&pf_rd_r=MSJVC7KQGTSZNPYSD5TN&pd_rd_r=ba6b3583-99fb-11e9-b500-9959ee5ce66b

No cords to mess with. One battery will last for my 2600sf house, but it comes with two. It's not as powerful as a plug in larger vacuum but it will handle most jobs and can be used every day to keep floors clear. A plug in vacuum is better at sucking more dust out of carpets, but I've found the one above works just as well for hard surface floors.

tonyp063

We have a Eufy 30c, given to us by my step-son. We use it.

If you have, like us, a small space with a goodly amount of *stuff*, it's ok at best.
Certainly no substitute for doing it ourselves.

But that's another story

mlistens03

We had a Roomba a while ago, and while it did work well in our first house, our current house has an almost 8-shaped floor plan (one end is cut off) and because of the way that they work, it would pretty much always go to the back room and bounce around in there until the battery died. So if your house is somewhat oddly shaped, it may get lost, like ours did.

OleBoot

An extremely long post from elsewhere outlining the dangers of owning a Roomba:

So, last week, something pretty tragic happened in our household. It's taken me until now to wrap my head around it and find the words to describe the horror. It started off simple enough - something that's probably happened to most of you.

Sometime between midnight and 1:30am, our puppy pooped a massive t u r d on our rug in the living room. This is the only time she's done this, so it's probably just because we forgot to let her out before we went to bed that night. Now, if you have a detective's mind, you may be wondering how we know the **** occurred between midnight and 1:30am. We were asleep, so how do I know that time frame?

Why, friends, that's because our Roomba runs at 1:30am every night, while we sleep. And it found the ****. And so begins the Pooptastrophe. The poohpocalypse. The pooppening.

If you have a Roomba, please rid yourself of all distractions and absorb everything I'm about to tell you.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog ****. If the unthinkable does happen, and your Roomba runs over dog ****, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle. Because if that happens, it will spread the dog **** over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a home that closely resembles a Jackson Pollock **** painting.

It will be on your floorboards. It will be on your furniture legs. It will be on your carpets. It will be on your rugs. It will be on your kids' toy boxes. If it's near the floor, it will have **** on it. Those awesome wheels, which have a checkered surface for better traction, left 25-foot **** trails all over the house. Our lovable Roomba, who gets a careful cleaning every night, looked like it had been mudding. Yes, mudding - like what you do with a Jeep on a pipeline road. But in ****.

Then, when your kid gets up at 3am to crawl into your bed, you'll wonder why she smells like dog ****. And you'll walk into the living room. And you'll wonder why the floor feels slightly gritty. And you'll see a brown-encrusted, vaguely Roomba-shaped thing sitting in the middle of the floor with a glowing green light, like everything's okay. Like it's proud of itself. You were still half-asleep until this point, but now you wake up pretty damn quickly.

And then the horror. Oh the horror.

So, first you clean the child. You scrub the **** off her feet and put her back in bed. But you don't bother cleaning your own feet, because you know what's coming. It's inevitable, and it's coming at you like a freight train. Some folks would shrug their shoulders and get back in bed to deal with it in the morning. But you're not one of those people - you can't go to sleep with that war zone of **** in the living room.

So you clean the Roomba. You toss it in the bathtub to let it soak. You pull it apart, piece-by-piece, wondering at what point you became an adult and assumed responsibility for 3:30am-Roomba-disassembly-****-cleanups. By this point, the **** isn't just on your hands - it's smeared up to your elbows. You already heard the Roomba make that "whirlllllllllllllllll-boop-hisssssssss" noise that sounds like electronics dying, and you realize you forgot to pull the battery before getting it wet. More on that later.

Oh, and you're not just using profanity - you're inventing new types of profanity. You're saying things that would make Satan shudder in revulsion. You hope your kid stayed in bed, because if he hears you talking like this, there's no way he's not ending up in prison.

Then you get out the carpet shampooer. When you push it up to the rug - the rug that started it all - the shampooer just laughs at you. Because that rug is going in the trash, folks. But you shampoo it anyway, because your wife loved that damn rug, and you know she'll ask if you tried to clean it first.

Then you get out the paper towel rolls, idly wondering if you should invest in paper towel stock, and you blow through three or four rolls wiping up ****. Then you get the spray bottle with bleach water and hose down the floor boards to let them soak, because the **** has already dried. Then out comes the steam mop, and you take care of those 25-ft **** trails.

And then, because it's 6am, you go to bed. Let's finish this tomorrow, right?

The next day, you finish taking the Roomba apart, scraping out all the tiny flecks of ****, and after watching a few Youtube instructional videos, you remove the motherboard to wash it with a toothbrush. Then you bake it in the oven to dry. You put it all back together, and of course it doesn't work. Because you heard the "whirlllllllllllllll-boop-hissssssss" noise when it died its poopy death in the bathtub. But you hoped that maybe the Roomba gods would have mercy on you.

PSOVLSK

We have the Shark Ion Robot. We have probably 1500sqft of hardwood floors in the kitchen, dining, living, and entryway that are all connected. It runs for about an hour and a half each day. This doesn't take the place of sweeping, but it sure cuts down on the frequency.

If you're anal, it will drive you nuts the way it will hit something, turn, hit something else, and then turn right back into the thing it hit first. Also seems that it should be able to find it's way to the bass better than it does. Neither of these things really matters and may not even bother some people. Overall we've been very happy with ours.

Luckily I've never dealt with the issue OleBoot describes

mrbiron

I’ve had a Roomba 800 series for about 3 years now. Love it.
Runs every day for an hour+. I empty the bin every other day. My main floor is mostly wood, little bit of tile, and an area rug. Only have one cat but also have two dirty children.

Like mentioned above, it isn’t the be all end all, but a great supplemental in between.

phipiper10

We had a Roomba 700/800 series, I forget now. It was good few years but “dumb”. It was slow and slammed into walls and furniture and wore the paint off some items from repetitive banging.

We recently got a xiaomi roborock s50. It is faster and takes less time to clean.

It moves logically, which you would think isn’t a big deal but if you ever spent any amount of time watching your Roomba move around you know what I mean.

It doesn’t smash every wall and chair. You can use the app to check its status.

You can see where the device is in real time and the cleaning pattern. You can eve stay/stop it remotely with the app.

You can review the cleaning history.

Get alerts for when it starts/stops or is stuck

Partition certain parts of the house right in the app with swipe of a finger.

It lets you know when the basket is full or when you should put on new brushes or filters.

It’s quieter than the Roomba

You can wet clean with it but I have never used that feature.

tophatjohnny

I don't mind caring for my home the old fashioned way 😂 not cheap as the best things usually aren't but for those that don't mind manual cleaning way up and above what any bot will do and you want one with a timer that also sucks unwanted particles from the air you suck in with your noses and mouths...Schoettler Research in CA produce one bad whama mamma called The Patriot and we love ours. The dust level in our home and on my gear had dropped by more than 60% by using this system and we love it...well..I love how well it works. As for the bots..maybe when I can no longer walk.

mhardy6647

We just kinda embrace the dust here.

tophatjohnny

mhardy6647 wrote: »

We just kinda embrace the dust here.

Kinda hard not to but doing my part to decrease it as much as I can. 😄🎩

joecoulson

In my house we have multiple individuals who have respiratory issues. The Roomba 980 we have is a part of reducing the dust in our house.

We have two dogs and a cat, which works against us but we have kids so some of you might understand the struggle. The dogs are in crates when we leave the house, which is when we run it (so the **** concern is non-existent. Our house has mostly hardwood with carpet in the bedrooms. It’s a ranch house and the only area it will not automatically get is the sunken living room.

A few notes:
With robot vacuums, it’s a learning process. You will find that after first running these, You will have many areas that either trap or confuse it. If doors to rooms are loose and partly open, it has a tendency to close the door behind itself and get stuck. Also, laces, power cords, socks, etc are all items it will gobble up and get stuck. It really doesn’t do any damage, just gets stuck and doesn’t complete cleaning. Sometimes it can get stuck between chairs in dining rooms. Sometimes it can get stuck under furniture if the space is too low (we had to add spacers to one of our couches so it could get under). It also needs clean HEPA filters pretty regularly to be efficient at getting all dust and dander. There’s the cons.

Here are the pros:
If you plan ahead, after learning all of the places it could get stuck, and pre clean (picking up all shoes, socks, putting chairs upside down on tables, hair dryers, charging cables etc) and run this thing while you are out and about, it’s killer!!
We now come home to our entire house being cleaned for 3-4 hours straight sometimes. We also purchase 3rd party filters that cost a fraction of the iRobot brand. It doesn’t edges great, it gets dust from under furniture which is hard to reach. Just perfect for us. But it took some learning to get there.

I’ll follow with pics of the cleaned floors

joecoulson

mrbiron

Joe, you have the oddest shaped house. Almost reminds me of an ant farm or a level in Zelda.

joecoulson

Ha, funny!

We love our layout, being in the construction industry, it's nice to have a layout that isn't like every other new house out there. It is very unique and one of the major reasons we purchased it.
Keep in mind there are a couple of rooms not showing that fill those empty spaces

scubalab

We need a robot to pick up all the shoes and dog toys before our Roomba can run...

Seriously though, we have two - one upstairs and one downstairs. The one upstairs is a model about 8 or so years old. It's on it's second battery, but doesn't get much use any longer. The one in the kitchen is a newer model. We run it here and there, but nothing comes close to vacuuming the old fashioned way. Ours tends to get stuck under the stove, in the bathroom, stopped with a shoelace in it's grip, or wedged under a chair. Rarely does it make it back to the base...

ADJ

We bought a BoostIQ RoboVac 11S about 6 months ago and have been very pleased with it. It doesn't have wifi or gps so you have to use the barrier strips that come with it or block off doorways if you want to keep it in a certain area. it does a good job picking up everything and it always returns to its base. We have two dogs that shed and it gets most of their fur out of our carpet. Still no substitute for a full-sized vac but it's great for in-between vacuuming, especially in the kitchen.

Irrenhaus

Well so finally I decided to get one. I ordered a Roboroc S6 and should be home on Friday when I get back home.

https://us.roborock.com/blogs/blog/learning-the-advanced-features-of-your-roborock-s6?gclid=Cj0KCQjwgJv4BRCrARIsAB17JI7-MhiBzuFvc_hbnqQZOIUxrO5o4ICl1mld9TFuQg2tvFdxiTtYvrUaAnpzEALw_wcB

Will update over the weekend.

Cheers

Mikey081057

Ha... I just bought a Roboroc S6 Pure... I like it... Now I have a cleaning service but now that I have a dog, I like to run this thing a couple of times a week and it keeps the tile floors and the one room where I have a rug and hardwood nice and clean so we can walk around barefoot. (I hate feeling "stuff" on the floor beneath my feet)... So far so good and even my cleaning lady approves!

pitdogg2

Very surprised that beast of a pocket terrier doesn't try to turn it upside down and kill it.

txcoastal1

And remember dogpoop and robot vacuums don't mix....they smear

Mikey081057

Tommy doesn't **** in the house and I always make sure there are now obstructions when I launch the app manually..

I am going to try the wet mop feature later...

Mikey081057

BTW it was Tommy's first Bday on monday


He loves ice cubes on the patio in the afternoon heat

Mikey081057

I should put a rabbit on top of it... and then send it back to Amazon.

pitdogg2 wrote: »

Very surprised that beast of a pocket terrier doesn't try to turn it upside down and kill it.

Nightfall

No offense meant to anyone but vacuuming isn't that hard. My last roommate bought one and that dumb thing would get stuck on things, bump around in circles, the battery would die in the middle of nowhere, it was noisey especially if you were on a bottom floor and it was upstairs, it was more of an annoyance than helpful. Maybe he just bought a garbage brand or something. Even if it was perfect it, to me, is not a big deal to vacuum/Swiffer/sweep for 20 minutes and the job gets done better.

Nightfall

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDTmK7gZhe8&t