Do you use a robot vacuum at home, and is it really worth it?

[msc545]

If so, what kind do you like and do you like it or do you feel like it's too much trouble?

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3 mo

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[goaded]

We had one, I quite liked it, my wife didn't (it didn't do a perfect job!).

If you never leave anything on the floor and you choose a cleaner that can fit between/under every piece of furniture, it's probably worth it.

In our case, we had to put chairs up on the table and move things around before letting it do its thing. It was still less work than vacuuming by hand, but not totally automated.

The container is very limited in size, so you have to empty it quite often, too. (There might be some that do that at the base station, I don't recall.)

YMMV.

[msc545]

Sounds like you had one of the really old ones. The new ones will avoid furniture and objects on the floor, so you don't have to move them. And the new ones, like the ones that I have, have a base that they empty themselves right into. You have to empty the base about every 3 months.

[goaded]

Oh, it did avoid them, it's just the chair legs were too close together for it to fit between them. The ones that would fit through were taller, so they wouldn't have fit under the sofa...

Small things, pieces of paper, coins, would clog it up.

[msc545]

Yes, what you're describing was an old one.

[msc545]

The new ones have LIDAR mapping, and they don't get much of anything ever.

[goaded]

It was a Kobold. The Roomba site (are you selling them?), which just waited a minute before annoyingly playing a video loud, doesn't seem to give the dimensions of the devices.

[msc545]

I don't understand why the dimensions are important.

[goaded]

Because if the legs of the chairs are, say, 30cm apart, and the cleaner is 31cm wide, the area under the chair won't be cleaned. If the height of the cleaner is over 15cm, it won't clean under the sofa.

[msc545]

Nobody has chairs like that.

[goaded]

Of course they do. OK, mine are 32.5cm between the legs, 13", not 12", but the vacuum cleaner was slightly bigger.

Like these ones: www.ikea.com/gb/en/cat/kitchen-chairs-25220/

[msc545]

Yeah I will. In that case, what you can do is just a place what's called some barrier tape on the floor around the chair and the robot will ignore it. If you don't want anything placed on the floor then on the app that controllers Roomba you can mark the area where the chairs are as a no-go area. These are all problems that have been solved a long time ago that you keep talking about.

[goaded]

I'm not sure we're talking about the same problem. I *want* the floor around the chairs and table to be vacuumed, to get rid of fallen crumbs or whatever. A smaller cleaner would be able to do that, the one we had couldn't, so we had to pick up the chairs before it ran.

[888theGreat]

I used to sell Roombas

[msc545]

I have two Roombas at the moment, and they both work a treat.

[goaded]

I guess you don't, any more... Are they any good? Are others better?

[msc545]

@goaded I have Roomba 105s, which are not exactly new, but they don't run into things or get stalled. And they have self-emptying features, so I never have to empty a dustbin. And they clean the floor beautifully. My only criticisms of them are that they are a little bit noisy and also I would like them to have longer battery life, but what they do takes a lot of power, I guess. I recently purchased a larger battery for one of them, and I'll see how well that works.

[goaded]

Sorry, I was asking @888thegreat - salespeople know their products, they have to to lie about, sorry, promote them. A little inside knowledge...

My ideal cleaner would be able to clean stairs and all three floors of the house (don't get me wrong, the three floors together are probably about the same area as a modest US house floor).

[888theGreat]

@goaded I sold the original , so smarter ones today. And they have Scubas that do hard floors and I think they have a robomower now and pool cleaners. I used sell for Friendly Robotics , the RL 500, RL 550, RL 800 , and RL 850

[Maybe_Maybe_not]

I see one in motion, quite often, it's really slow, it takes 1 hour to clean 50m2. Plus it will get stuck with any small object. And the mapping fails at times. I could question costs as well, initial, maintenance and energy ones.

Personally, it's a big no lol.

Maybe it's interesting if you have 200m2 of perfectly flat surface, it will spare you some hassle in that case, but not your wallet.

[msc545]

Sounds like you too have one of the very old ones. The new ones go quite a bit faster. However, even if it goes slowly, at least you don't have to supervise it.

[goaded]

It doesn't matter how long it takes, you don't have to watch it!

My dishwasher takes hours to wash things it would take me half an hour to do by hand, but I don't have to spend half an hour at the sink!

[msc545]

@goaded exactly. I honestly don't care how fast these things go. In fact, I wish they'd go a little bit slower sometimes. I don't have to watch them. Although I will say that watching them can be kind of fascinating in a weird way.

[AviatorTom]

We had a Roomba for a while, a Christmas present from relatives. It kept getting stuck under the sofa so we stopped using it.

Some robot vacuums have run away from home...

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HP83yXoKK1I

... with unfortunate results.

[msc545]

You didn't set it up properly.

[AviatorTom]

@msc545 What setup? We took it out of the box, charged it, and let it go, just like the instructions said. It worked fine for several days, then kept bumping into the sofa legs under the sofa and couldn't find its way out.

[msc545]

You need to set up the app properly so that this doesn't happen. You can mark out areas as being essentially forbidden or no trespassing, and they can include and should include anything that the unit can't get under easily or over easily. You can also do this by physically putting some special tape around these areas, but I prefer to just mark them out on the map.

[AviatorTom]

@msc545 I wouldn't want the vacuum to avoid under the sofa, that's where most of our dog's hair ends up. We manually vacuum now.

[msc545]

Okay, well, if the sofa is too low for the vacuum, then there's not much you can do about that other than to make sure it doesn't try to go under the sofa. I have one area in my living room that's like that, under a chair of all things, and I just vacuum under there every once in a while manually.

[AviatorTom]

@msc545 The sofa is not too low. There are 6 legs under the sofa, one on each other and two in the middle. The vacuum kept hitting a leg, changed direction, hit another leg etc. and eventually came back to the first leg, which caused a repetitive infinite loop.

[msc545]

Was this a Roomba that had LiDAR navigation?

[AviatorTom]

@msc545 I didn't ask it! We just tried to use it.

[msc545]

If it has a little round thing in the middle of the top that is elevated about an inch or so that is a lidar antenna and that changes things. Also, if you read the material that came with it, you will find out very quickly if it's a lidar. Finally failing all that. If you just know the model number of the thing I can check to see if it's a lidar for you.

[Simslover92]

If I had a house, I probably would have invested in one but since I live in a small apartment, I don't feel the need to buy one.

[Telekinetic-Potato]

My cousin had one but the floor was always very clear and picked up. It knew the map of the whole house so it would rove around once or twice a day and have the place looking great. She put googlie eyes on it.

[DryGermanGuy]

My parents have one and the results are okay, albeit not superclean, so to speak.

[RandomGirl42]

Omg, it wouldn't last 5 mins here! 🤣

[purplepoppy]

I thought those things died out. You never hear of them these days

[msc545]

you should probably tell that to the two I use in my home that saved me hours of time every month or a lot of money to pay somebody to do it.

[NathanDavis]

as a mildly germophobic one...

nobody will do a better job for me, than me..

[Staximus]

I don’t need any more excuses to be lazy and not move around haha

[Sevenpointfive]

no. i almost got my nephew one to build for Christmas. i should have got it for him.

[msc545]

You still can

[Sevenpointfive]

you know what's stupid. i'll buy them gifts. i'll give them all of the info. and they still end up saying they thought they got it for them. i guess that's what happens when two people don't really talk to each other. but i won't be doing that again. plus, they are teenagers now and should know what Christmas actually is about.

[Massageman]

no and no. If I thought it was worth it, we would have one.

[msc545]

Okay, keep pushing the vacuum around.