It works great on tile - the battery lasts longer on tile than on carpeting.
My last roomba was a refurb, and I had no problems with it for three years (besides having to replace the battery once). This year it did decide to go a little wacko, but it was only $80 for a $300 - $400 machine, so I felt it was a good deal. I am, however, wooting this one… I almost (thank goodness I didn’t) bought a new one from BedBathandBeyond for $200…
Can I program it to use my dumbwaiter to move between floors?
will this scratch my hard wood floors? I’m very interested, but we just had a floors re-done and I’m really wondering if it will scratch the floors or if it will be safe? Any Roomba users out there use this on their older wood floors that have been refinished?
Yeah sure - it did a great job cleaning my floors, until one day it met my Scooba. Then they fell in love, eloped to Vegas, and got married. Sheesh!
YESSSSSS! I can finally get another roomba since my first one was laid to rest at the hands of my clumsy husband. Now I can get back to my favorite weekend activity of watching the roomba clean. Sometimes I’ll even watch my cats and dog watch the roomba. I’m a wild one…
I want to buy one but I think I want the Square trade warranty. Could someone tell me what category the Roomba falls under when setting up the warranty.
Thanks
I look at it this way - you’re not spending $185 on a vacuum (and many vacuums cost a lot more), but $185 on a Roomba. What is your time worth to you? I’m not talking about your salary rate - the Roomba saves you spare time, and we routinely value our spare time way above our work time.
But the batteries are expensive! Roombas don’t last that long!
Who cares? Multiply those hours you saved by, say, $100. Huh?
All that being said, my wife doesn’t want one. “I like to vacuum,” she says. Like to vacuum? “Sure, honey.” I just call her “my little Roomba.”
“Honey, don’t go and run off with the Scooba, now.”
Normal Roombas don’t pick up pet hair well, so for anyone who has pets or is looking to get one, you’ll want to buy the 532 or 562 pet series.
The difference between the 530 robot and the 540 that the 540 has a radio transceiver built into it that allows it to communicate with its accessories via RF. That means that you have more/different/better accessories that are compatible with the robot compared to non-RF equipped Roombas.
As previously mentioned, that means that you can use the Wireless Command Center, and the use of the WCC enable scheduling capability, which is a feature not found on the robot until you spend a LOT more money. The WCC also allows you to drive the robot in places where you can’t see it (like under a bed or a couch), which is also very handy.
My favorite thing about the RF option is that it allows use of Lighthouses, which really should have been named “Virtual Doors” because that is how they act. Lighthouses are much better than virtual walls because: a) they turn on automatically when the robot starts (with a regular virtual wall you have to push the button to turn it on) b) you have the option to use the Lighthouse in virtual wall mode (robot will never pass) or in Light House mode (robot passes when it needs to) c) use of Lighthouses increases the likelihood that the robot will make it back to its home base because the Lighthouses act like bread crumbs and help guide the robot back to its home base (this is really where the “Lighthouse” name comes from) d) the robot can clean longer with more Lighthouses - when lighthouses are used, the robot cleans a single room for either 25 minutes (roughly) or until its room calculator thinks the room is clean (whichever comes first), and then the robot moves onto the next room; with no lighthouses at all, the robot has a timer in it that will cause it to return to base after about 60 minutes, no matter how big the room is; on the other hand if you have 3 lighthouses it will run for closer to 90 minutes; plus it’s nice to have the Roomba confined to one room at a time.
Also, if you have multiple robots, you can pair different lighthouses to different robots and you can create overlapping areas of cleaning… but that’s a longer story.
For more on how the lighthouses work, see this post:
http://forums.irobot.com/irobothome/board/message?board.id=80&thread.id=5075
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I had a rough understanding of the Lighthouses’ function, but didn’t know they used RF, and didn’t know about the WCC at all.
This is a very tempting upgrade from our 530, but I think I will hold out for a 562, despite the extra cost—I’m afraid the 540, like the 530, would get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of dog hair in the summer. (The 530 picks up a ton of it from the tile floor, but when there’s too much, the Roomba starts gathering it into clumps instead, and pushing or dragging them around until they get caught on the edge of a rug.)
Now to decide about the Scooba over on plain.woot!
My solution (we have two dogs and two humans) is to run 3 roombas each day (one upstairs and two downstairs at the same time).
The key (for our hair situation) is to spread the hair-carrying load across multiple robots.
It is also critical that the brushes are cleaned after each mission. Roombas in houses with lots of pet hair will last for years if the brushes are cleaned after each mission, but they can be killed in just a week if you don’t clean the brushes at all.
The reason is that the hair moves through the system. After one mission, it makes it TO the gearbox and bearings on the cleaning head. After two missions without brush cleaning the hair moves INTO the gearbox and bearings. After three missions without cleaning new hair moves in on top of the old hair and it starts to get impacted. The impacted hair looks just like a brake pad, and it acts just like a brake pad. After that each subsequent mission is like pulling the handle on the parking brake just a little further. Eventually the “brake pad” clamps down on the gears and brushes and bearings, and the brushes just stop turning. The only fix at that point is to buy a replacement cleaning head, or rebuild the gearbox on the cleaning head.
But if you just pop out the brushes after each mission when you empty the bin, the Roomba will run for years with no problems.
I clean the brushes and their bushings thoroughly every time I empty the bin.
I imagine running two Roombas at once would clean the floor faster, but otherwise, does it accomplish anything that a single Roomba run multiple times would not?
This is a great deal! I have an earlier version of the iRobot (for which I paid much, much more $). Bought one as a Christmas present for my sister-in-law who has two dogs and several cats. It will definitely get a work-out at their house!
So…how do you keep it from falling down the stairs?
I love my older Roomba but I have a dog and cats and I spend more time cleaning all the hair out of the thing than it would have taken me to just get the Hoover out. It’s really cool to see it work but it’s still just an expensive gimmick.
Darn, I saw this and then forgot about it until it was too late. I would have bought 1 or 2. I hope it shows up in a Woot-off soon. It’s nice to see one that’s not a refurb.
In hairy environments, the roomba will accumulate hair at the leading edge of the bin, and it forms a “hair dam”. So the amount of hair the robot picks up is not linear relative to runtime. It picks up more at the start of the mission and less and less as time goes on.
I suppose that if you ran one roomba every twelve hours, then it would be gathering the hair as it was put down by the pets, and it could keep up. But this model only works well for small areas.
There is a limit to the amount of space that one roomba can effectively clean. And there are lots of variables that factor in - how much furniture, what kind of flooring, how many pets, what kinds of pets, how much non-hair-debris, and what type, etc, etc.
Another important factor is battery life. Two roombas cleaning one space will work their batteries less than half as hard as one roomba cleaning twice as often. This is also a complicated multi-variable issue, but it has to do with the charging and discharging cycle. Long story short, giving the robot 24 hours to complete that cycle (and not discharging it as deeply in the first place) will extend the life of the battery.
There’s a formula I started working on:
of roombas / sqft / dog = ???
The reason it ends in ??? is that it’s more of a matrix than a formula, with type of pets, type of flooring, climate, and all sorts of other variables in the mix; and figuring all that out requires an amount of work and research that I’m not currently in a position to monetize.
There’s also the consideration of having two or more roombas whirring around for an hour or so once per day instead of one for 90 minutes or so twice per day. And there’s one 2 minute cleaning and bin emptying and hand cleaning session instead of two.
So… the short answer is - yes, there’s a difference between running two roombas at once instead of one roomba twice.
Which method is best for you is something you have to decide for yourself, based on your situation. And to get the most out of your roomba(s), you should really pay attention (at first) to how the rooomba is doing, how much it picks up, how clogged the brushes get, how clean your floors are, how convenient it is to use and maintain the robot…
In general, I’d say that if you have a very large house, you should have more than one roomba. If you have a smallish house and multiple pets, then you should have more than one roomba. If you have a large house and several pets, then you should probably have 3 or more roombas. Assuming of course that, like me, you love to be able to walk around barefoot and feel a clean floor, or roll around on the floor with your dogs and not feel like you were just laying in a gutter in the street.
On the other hand, if you have a house with no pets and relatively little dirt, and roomba is used mainly to keep the dust from building up under the couch and bed, then you could easily use one roomba, schedule it to run once every day or every other day, and only empty it once per week (or whatever makes sense).
To each their own for sure. But don’t feel like if one roomba doesn’t work, then roombas don’t work well; and don’t let anyone tell you that they aren’t good for pet hair. They are a great time saving tool, and when used properly, and configured for their environment (and their environment configured for them), they give you cleaner floors, more spare time, and in my case, less allergy problems.
When I bought my first roomba it never crossed my mind to buy another one (other than as a gift). I was much more in the mindset of “if it’s going to clean a larger area, the robot should be bigger, or run longer, or have a bigger bin, or stronger motors, or whatever-er.” But the reality is that it makes MUCH more sense to just have more robots. I don’t want it bigger because a smaller robot gets into tighter places. I don’t want it to run longer because the whirring is annoying and one of the dogs is a little scared of it. And that’s why I keep buying them and adding to the flock.