Ron the Roomba

A few weeks ago I blogged about Woot! and how my husband and I have purchased two things in two weeks. We recently escaped buying a TV, but that's neither here nor there. One of the things that we did buy from Woot! was a Roomba.

Now, my husband has wanted one of these things for a really long time. Our house has a central vac, and we have an upright as well, and any time I would haul out either of these, he would say, "Don't you wish we had a Roomba?"

I was skeptical for a long time. I wasn't convinced that a Roomba would be able to do a good job, and it seemed like a lot of money.

I think the beginning of the end came when we got our two parakeets--Turbo (the green one) and Bailey (the blue one). These birds shed feathers like you wouldn't believe. And they get seed hulls all over the place. Even if you keep them in their cage, the mess they make gets blown around because feathers and seed hulls are light. So, even though we're not messy people, I would have had to vacuum every 3 or 4 days to keep the house looking neat.

And of course, I didn't do it. I was lazy and thought that "hey, since no one's coming over, I don't need to vacuum." But then someone would come by, and I'd be embarrassed because the house was dirty. So, when my husband called from work and said, "There's a Roomba on Woot! Want to get it?", I said yes.

We got a great deal on it; we got the Roomba Scheduler for $145 (including shipping), and it normally retails for around $300 from a place like Sears. That was probably the biggest selling point for me--even if it totally sucked (or didn't suck, I guess), we wouldn't have wasted that much money.

It came with a docking base/charger, two virtual walls, and a remote control/scheduler. The virtual walls allow you to split up rooms into smaller sections, or to block off parts of a room where there's lots of crap on the floor. The scheduler allows you to program set times for the Roomba to run, and the virtual walls will even turn on if you program them in.

I haven't used the scheduling feature of the Roomba yet, but overall, I'm really happy with it. It's not the best vacuum ever--to be honest, it misses a lot of the feathers on the floor because it blows them away instead of sucking them up. But I'd say it gets about 50% of the feathers, and even more than that of other dirt. And it gives your room the "just vacuumed" look, so that anyone who comes in will think that you did just vacuum and that any feathers on the floor happened in the last 10 minutes. Which, given my two birds, is entirely possible.

And even more importantly, Ron (yes, we named our Roomba) vacuums our main level--the dining room and living room--about twice a week. That's about 8 times more often than I vacuumed before. So even if there are still a few feathers on the ground, the house looks exponentially better. He's pretty self-sufficient, too--he has these great wheels that raise him up if he gets stuck on something, and then he just turns around and goes the other way. I have no qualms about leaving the house to go grocery shopping while leaving Ron running.

Plus, he's fun to watch. Will Ron get the dirt by the front door this time around? Will he get stuck in the corner by the fireplace? How long will it take him to make it back to his charger?

You could spend as much time watching him as you would vacuuming....