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Last Thursday, we welcomed a new arrival into our home - an iRobot Roomba Robotic Vaccum Cleaner. Sound geeky? Yes, but hand on my heart, it’s the best gadget I’ve ever had the compulsion to buy.
At £250 it’s not cheap, but then again, does a Dyson push itself round the house? The Roomba 560 vaccumed my kitchen in about an hour and I couldn’t beleive how much dust it picked up. I’m sure this is partly testiment to just how much it needed cleaning, but for me it shows just how good this gadget is. There’s an easy to remove bin at the back and two rotating brushes underneath. There’s also a flailing brush at the side - think street sweeper and you get the idea - that is really really good at getting into the corners and along the edges of the room.
In the box, came a charging dock and 2 lighthouses. When Roomba finishes it’s cleaning cycle it will actually dock itself and begin to recharge. How cool is that? It navigates around the room and finds the dock (whether it started in the dock or not). The 2 lighthouses can be used in two different modes. Lighthouse mode and Virtual Wall mode. If you want to restrict Roomba’s movements around the room, you set up the lighthouse to create a virtual barrier. The lighthouses require 2x C batteries each. In lighthouse mode, you can instruct Roomba to clean one room at a time by placing each lighthouse in the door way between the rooms. It’ll clean the first room, then the second and then the third room in turn before finally returning to the dock.
By the time I left for the work the other morning, Roomba had cleaned all but one room in the house. I scheduled it to clean the last room at 9am yesterday morning, and when I get home tonight I’ll find out how much crap was actually in the carpet!
