iRobot iRobot® Scooba® 350 Robotic Cleaner

I have a traditional vacuum and quite honestly living with 2 dogs, 1 dalmatian that sheds literally 365 days a year and a lhasa apso, meant that I had to drag the upright vacuum out of the garage every day to go over the carpets. It also meant that I had to shuffle the couch back away from the coffee table to try to get under the coffee table with a traditional upright vacuum.

A long time ago it seems I saw one of these gadgets and couldnt afford it, but just last week I picked up the Roomba Red for only $149.

When I got home I unpacked it from the box and started charging it immediately. It took aproximately 4 to 7 hours to attain full charge. After it was fully charged I plunked it down in the most open area of my living room and set it to clean. It immediately started going in circles until it bumped into the coffee table upon when it went into what seemed like really intelligent patterns on my floor, it went in and out of my coffee table legs (we have an odd coffee table, it's got 4 legs - one on each corner - and they are all connected to a center point under the coffee table), where I would have had to move the sofa out of the way to get in there because of the angles.

During it's initial cleaning it made it into the kitchen, living room, two bedrooms and 1 bathroom.

While it was working I noted the spots that it had trouble in because of the junk I had laying around on the floor. Obviously if you dont have junk on your floors like books, or toolboxes or boxes from moving into the house then it's going to get better coverage. Basically I had to put away the same stuff that I would have had to put away to do the job properly with an upright vacuum. Once I did this the Roomba Red did a great job.

I used to have to drag the upright out of the garage on a daily basis if I wanted to keep the house fairly hair free (but living with a dalmatian I have learned that the house will NEVER actually be hair free), but now that I set the Roomba to go every day when Im away (and sometimes while Im home because I just love watching how intelligently it does clean the house), and no longer need to drag out the upright except maybe once per week to clean the hard to get to spots for the Roomba.

Some hard to get to spots in my home for the roomba seem to be the front door and dog hair accumulates at the edge of the front door when you open it (obviously neither an upright or a roomba is going to be able to get this area when the door is closed. So I have to open the door and get that area with my uprights nozzle/crevice cleaning tool.

There are certain things that the Roomba doesnt like, for example we have new berber carpets in our home and as such we used a couple of scrap pieces in areas that we thought would be high traffic areas so as to keep the carpets looking new longer. We have a runner of berber in the living room from the front door so that we dont get a traffic pattern stain and one more piece in one of the bedrooms that has the door to the garage, well because these scrap pieces are not edged, the roomba has a tendancy to pick up a loose fray of the scrap carpet and wind it around it's brushes much like a traditional vacuum would do. So we had to pick those two carpets up and just rolled them up and stored them away in the garage for now.