iRobot 500 Series Roomba Vacuum-Cleaning Robot with On-Board Scheduling
by iRobot
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Our Price: $345.42
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Category: Home
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Product Details
Manufacturer: iRobotBrand: iRobot
Edition: Kitchen
Model: 550
Color: black/gray
Publisher: iRobot
Studio: iRobot
Music Label: iRobot
Product features:
- Vacuum-cleaning robot with on-board scheduling for all floor surfaces
- 2 high-speed, counter-rotating brushes; anti-tangle technology; side brushes
- Gentle-touch bumper; dirt sensor; built-in cliff sensors; self-charging Home Base
- Includes bumper extension, cleaning tool, power adapter, rechargeable battery, 3 extra filters, 2 Virtual Walls, and batteries
- Measures approximately 13 by 13 by 4 inches; 1-year limited warranty
Description of iRobot 500 Series Roomba Vacuum-Cleaning Robot with On-Board Scheduling
The 500 series Roomba cleans routinely� so you don�t have to. 500 Series robots offers the latest innovations from iRobot with unprecedented efficiency, coverage and cleaning performance. Roomba navigates and cleans rooms systematically, then returns to its Home Base� to recharge. Roomba efficiently vacuums the entire floor, under and around furniture and along walls and automatically adjusts from carpets to hard floors. Virtual Wall� Lighthouses confine and guide Roomba from room to room, then direct it to the Home Base to dock and recharge between cleanings.Tools and Hardware Reviews of iRobot 500 Series Roomba Vacuum-Cleaning Robot with On-Board Scheduling
Customer Review: great at doing what it does
Summary: 5 Stars
First, let me tell you what the roomba isn't going to do- it's not going to clean every room of your house perfectly. It's not going to do as good a job as a regular vacuum (my other vacuum is a dyson). It's not going to catch every spec of dust or dirt in your house. If you are the type of person that is going to get furious if you see a left over spec of dust or dirt, this isn't for you. Although it has a spot mode, cleaning up spilled things like cheerios on a hard wood floor would best be left to something like a dust buster (unless you want to watch it knock the cheerios all over the floor with the spinning edge brush)
That being said, the roomba is very very good at what it is designed to do- clean fairly well on a regular basis. Instead of cleaning once per week (or every other week), the roomba will do a great job cleaning a room 2-3 times per week. The frequent cleaning made practical by the roomba makes up for the lack of raw suction. My house would still probably be cleaner if I vacuumed with my dyson more frequently, but let's be honest- I'm busy, I'm lazy, and getting 80% of the job for 20% of the effort sounds like a good trade off to me. It's nice coming home to a clean living room, bedroom, etc without having to get off my lazy butt to do something about it.
This roomba is quiet. If it's in the living room, I can barely hear it in my bedroom. My cats have slept right through this thing cleaning the room they were snoozing in. I wish I had this when my daughter was born several years back, because it's hard to use a regular vacuum without waking the baby. I am pretty sure she would have no problems sleeping through this thing.
Some things to consider- not all areas are OK for a roomba. If your house is very cluttered and you have crap all over the floor, the roomba is probably not a good idea. Carpet eats up the battery much faster than hard wood, so you won't get the same amount of coverage. Small little rugs on tile/hardwood are more likely to get pushed around than they are vacuumed, so it's best to just move them out of the way before using the roomba. The roomba will get caught up in power cords, long curtains, etc, so you should block those off or move them out of the way prior to using it. You will quickly figure out what you need to do to make sure that your roomba doesn't get stuck while you're out. It's really not that big of a deal.
The brush cleaning tool they send with it (the round one) is pretty much useless. Maybe it's just the amount of cat hair that gets caught in ours (a LOT, especially when vacuuming under the bed), but trying to clean the brush with that little thing is like trying to use a banana to carve an ice sculpture out of a glacier. I find it's easier to just use my hands and rip the fuzz out.
I can think of a few improvements that irobot could look at doing with the next generation- onboard memory to remember room layouts to increase vacuuming efficiency, wireless ethernet for computer interaction like scheduling and remote monitoring, etc.
My wife and I are already talking about buying another one just for the bedrooms, and maybe one for the downstairs as well. Possibly a scooba as well. This is quite possibly the biggest innovation in cleaning technology since the invention of the vacuum almost a century ago, because unlike all of the intervening improvements between then and now, the roomba actually saves me time and effort. Compare that to my dyson- it's a great vacuum and very powerful, but it doesn't really vacuum a room any faster than my mother could with her Kirby when I was growing up.
So in a nutshell, if you've got the money, you should definitely buy one of these- maybe more. It easily joins the ranks of other labor saving household gadgets- a dishwasher to wash dishes for me, a washer and dryer to wash and dry my clothes for me, an answering machine to talk to people I don't want to, and now a vacuum to clean my house while I'm at work.
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