I’m a proud papa of an iRobot Roomba

Years ago I had one of the early models. It constantly got hung up on flared table legs, extension cords, carpets, and would get stuck after trying to go under a couch. It's little chirps and cries for help became really annoying, as instead of having an autonomous, hands free vacuum, I was doing more work than I would have, doing the job with my plug in cannister vacuum.

I understand they're better now, but yes, as someone else wrote ... please give us updates on your Roomba critter.

I've had a Roomba i7+ for three years and am totally satisfied with it.



The new version has the Pet Owner Official Promise (P.O.O.P), with a forward facing camera that recognizes "pet waste", so if your Roomba runs over it they will replace it for free.


For me it was a no-brainer, I live alone and have cats. As long as you give it a good looking over once in awhile, keep it clean, keep the brushes in good shape, it's a great product.



Don't tell anyone, but I use the knockoff version of the filters and brushes found on Amazon, and they work just fine.

We've had roombas for quite a few years (going back to the mid teens at least). We got the first one on a black friday deal. We've upgraded a couple times and passed the older ones off to the kids.

We currently have two of them, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. For the most part they work very well. They map and clean in an organized pattern (unlike our first one which used a random pattern) and they return to the dock to recharge and resume cleaning. They're not flawless though. The basement one gets caught under our recliner all the time. Ours doesn't have the auto-dump but we typically only need to empty them about once a week.

They have trouble docking, but that's on my wife. I've tried to tell her that the instructions say they need to be on a wall with at least 3 of open space. She wants them tucked into corners or hidden next to a piece of furniture. So a couple times a week we have to save them, but, for the most part, they work very well.

My wife loves the perfect back and forth pattern they leave on the carpet and they do pick up a ton of pet hair and such. Using these, we can generally get by pulling out the central vac about once every two weeks. I imagine we'll continue to use them.

"PLEASE CHARGE ROOMBA" is heard fairly frequently in our house.

Oh, and we named ours.  The upstairs unit is called Bertie (Bertie Bot) and the downstairs unit is Bennie. 

Mark, that sounds really cool! Hope it works well for you and lasts a long time.

Yeah, getting a thread wound around the brush happens with any vacuum cleaner as does the bag filling up. The difference is the amount of dust it can hold before cleaning is less here. Changing bags is why we bought a vacuum that is bagless.

Ouch.  Ours doesn't have any disposable items like that per se.  The little side sweeper brush needs to be replaced about once a year and there's a filter that we replace when we replace the side sweeper.  In between we just bang it on the edge of the trash can and hit it from the clean side with some compressed air. 

I recall one of my earliest posts at the FDP was "So I bought a Roomba". It, like the FDP, is long gone. My wife has been eyeing them again lately. Man, they're expensive.

Following with interest. Down here in my not-so-new home state of Texas hard floors with area rugs are the norm with carpeting in the bedrooms. I wonder how well one of these would work here given that we have three littles that are messy beasts.