A robot to clean my floor... aah, the life of luxury!

As a kid, I remember telling my parents I was going to invent a robot to clean my room. I was a slob and I hated to clean and such an invention would've changed my life. It would've made me a millionaire... and a lazy one at that! Needless to say, if I'm on epinions trying to make a few extra cents by writing reviews, that little dream didn't quite come true. However, this Christmas, my dream of having a cleaning robot did! My husband, being the wise man that he is, decided to buy me the iRobot Roomba and for the past 4 days, this handy little machine has been hard at work.

First a little bit about our house... we have a one-story home with both tile and berber carpet. We do not have an "open" floor plan but the more traditional rooms separated by walls. We have two children, two cats, and a dog. That means there are a lot of toys pet hair for the roomba to contend with.

The first thing you'll discover about the roomba is that it comes fully assembled with little more to do than take it out of the box. It comes with a power pack that connects it to a wall outlet for charging. Before the first use, it has to charge at least 16 hours so don't expect to use it right away. However, subsequent charging times are much shorter. Also in the box are a couple of extra brushes and a pair of "virtual walls." These handy little laser-beam emitting boxes allow you to block the roomba from going into unwanted areas and concentrate on one room if you prefer. They require batteries but are super easy to set up. You just place one in a doorway or pathway where you want the roomba to stop and it acts as a barrier, just like a wall. Now if they'd just invent something like that for my dog!

Once your roomba is charged up, it's ready to start cleaning. You just push the clean button on top and off it goes. It moves around the room until it bumps into something (a wall or furniture) and then it turns and goes another direction. According to the manual, the roomba automatically calculates the size of the room and adjusts the cleaning time accordingly. It moves back and forth in all directions until all areas of the room have been cleaned. One feature I really like is the "dirt detector". This is a little blue light on top that glows when an extra dirty spot is found. The roomba then stops and makes several passes over that one area before moving on. Another great feature is a little spinning brush on the bottom that is designed to get dirt along the baseboards. I can't believe how well it works! It looks like little more than a child's paintbrush but it is really quite effective. As the roomba moves along the wall, the little brush spins and picks up any dirt, dust, or hair near the baseboards. This is a great feature when you have pet hair to deal with!

So far I've found the roomba to be a great little vacuum. It did a great job picking up all the needles from the Christmas tree, crumbs from the kids' cookies, even the dirty footprints Santa left in front of the fireplace. It moves easily from the tile to carpet and even goes under the couch to clean (note - our couch is raised up on feet several inches). I love the spot clean feature. If you don't want the whole room vacuumed, you can set the roomba down, hit the spot clean button, and it'll spin around in a 3-foot circle cleaning just one area. It doesn't have a very big dirt compartment, but even with all our kid and pet dirt, we haven't had a problem with it getting filled up too quickly. It's also super easy to empty... just push a buttom, take it off and dump.

Now for a few little drawbacks... You really have to keep cords and little items out of the way. We have a small area rug without rubber back that the roomba likes to suck up. (It doesn't bother the rugs with heavy backing.) The good thing is that if it does suck something up, it will just stop. The roomba also got our Christmas tree skirt a couple of times. Also, if you want the roomba to run at certain times (like when you're at work), you have to get the scheduler which costs another $60 or so. You can also purchase a docking base for it and it will return to recharge itself when finished cleaning. For the price, I kind of think they should at least include the base. However, even as is, it's a great gadget that does what it advertises and saves you some work.