If you own a robotic vacuum, which one do you own and how pleased with it are you?

We have a Roomba. It’s okay, but that’s all. We have timber floors and it doesn’t do a great job of picking up dog hair. Our ordinary vac works better.

I bought a Roomba (It cost somewhere around $800) for my parents. They generally spend most of their time on the first floor, and the Roomba just stays upstairs. It gets itself stuck sometimes (mostly because my mom hasn’t Roomba-proofed the space—clutter under some of the beds) but she is always shocked to see how much dirt it picks up despite how little use the space gets.

It’s not a miracle worker. It doesn’t really deep clean like a high-end full-sized vacuum. What it excels at though is keeping up with the surface dirt on a regular basis, minimizing the dust in your house and making your life easier. The Roomba never gets tired, or lazy. If it’s not stuck somewhere, it will complete it’s cleaning every time it’s scheduled to do so (which is a lot more impressive than my track record).

It’s been several years now and I think they’re really happy with it for what they use it for. If guests are going to come stay in the upstairs guest room, my mom will still pull out the regular vacuum, but otherwise she never has to worry about lugging it up the stairs.

I have a Roomba named Mildred. I’ve had her for over five years now. She’s just the base model Roomba — nothing fancy. She does a great job on our hardwood floors and always picks up a lot of dirt and hair. I’ll run her first then mop the floor.

I have a couple roombas. One was gifted “for parts” but I was able to repair it. In my opinion they are more like toys. They do an ok job but are not really all that practical yet. You spend about as much time fiddling with them as you would just vacuuming yourself.

I have an early Roomba, the 400 model. All of my floors are hard-surfaced. The machine is great and does a better job than my regular vacuum cleaner on dog and cat hair.

Newer Roomba models are very expensive and loaded with all sorts of features; for example, you can operate them remotely by cellphone. I’ve never seen the benefit of these fancy add-ons. Roomba use requires some minimal preparation, such as moving electrical and window-blind cords from the floor, or setting a virtual wall so that the machine won’t tumble down a staircase. I can’t imagine hitting “go” from far away and hoping for the best.

I researched and was going to buy a Roomba last holiday season. I found at Kohl’s, with a sale and a coupon (as Kohl’s offers on a regular basis), I could have gotten one for about 150. I researched how they have laser block type things that will prevent the Roomba from going into a certain room or area. I have a sunken living room, so I could envision a problem there. I have cats and dust, but not a large house. I thought it over and decided that it might not be the most practical thing for me.

I have 2 Rumbas (one I bought, one was a gift). They’re okay for keeping a clean house clean, but no good for cleaning a dirty house. I have pets, and so I have to stop them every few minutes to empty the catch-basin.

My parents have a Roomba, probably an early model as I remember them getting it quite a long time ago. I seem to remember that they had to do a lot of work to clean it out. It had some kind of rotating part that hair got tangled around and they had to get their hands dirty to get it cleaned out. So for them, it was more effort than the effort it saved. The design has probably been improved upon since then.

We are on our 3rd Roomba now. We had a Lab mix that seemed to shed all year. The Roomba would pick up about 80% of the dog hair every time it ran (3x per week). That kept the situation under control. I would have to clean it out after every other run. It’s a bit noisy and moves randomly, so not ideal but for our dog situation it worked well enough.

THANKS for sharing your experiences. I am determined to buy one before Christmas.