iRobot Roomba Scheduler 4230 Robotic Cleaner

After a less-than-satisfactory experience with a Scooba floor washing robot I was able to sell it as 'slightly used' on ebay at a small loss and got a reconditioned Roomba with the balance in my paypal account. Our floors are very irregular Indian slate with wide grouting. The Scooba got stuck a lot and was frustrating although it did an excellent job on the one, small, smooth-floored room we have.

The Roomba negotiates the irregular slate floor fine and vacuums up lots of stuff, even after the cleaning lady has had a pass at it. Roomba works fine on our short-pile & berber carpets, too, raises the pile after a few runs, and does as well or better than the Oreck our cleaning lady uses. Now, her instructions are to vacuum the stairs and the few places the Roomba can't reach and to spend the time freed up by the machine vacuuming the uphoulstry and scrubbing the slate/grout with a boat brush instead of a sponge mop.

At first I though I had a dead-on-arrival unit since it wouldn't work but a few minutes even though the charge light was solid green. A chat at the iRobot website said to leave it on charge for 3 days, un-interrupted. That got it going fine and now it's been used a dozen times, cleans for an hour and a half on the 'max' setting, and finds its way back to its charger so it's ready to turn loose in another room when I get back.

Another problem is that if it picks up leaves or rocks, we have a _lot_ of plants that come inside during the winter so, it will stop working until its brushes are cleaned.

It will move from a hard floor to an area rug with no problem as long as there are no fringes, which it will grab and choke on. And, it has trouble negotiating the threshold strip between rooms so I set out the virtual wall to keep it contained to one room -- this works best anyhow, seems like 12 X 15 might be the biggest area it can roam effectively.

I'm hoping that a later version of the Scooba will have the big wheels of the Roomba, which makes it able to handle irregular floors.

And, we've got good places up & downstairs where the Roomba can park itself so will probably get another one and use the 'scheduler' features more effectively.

These iRobot machines are not toys. Although I'm new to them, they appear to be durable and are excellent applications of robot technology. The iRobot site has replacement parts reasonably priced, and I expect to get a few years' service out of the Roomba.