A Roomba is a little robot vacuum cleaner. Being a robot, it can go out, navigate your house/apartment to clean, and return to the charger base all on its own. I got one for a few reasons:

1) I needed a vacuum cleaner.

2) I didn’t need a crazy powerful vacuum cleaner.

3) I own a dust buster for the bad spots (like the litter box).

4) I hate cleaning.

5) It would be funny for the cats.

6) It was on sale ($68 during a woot-off)
7) It’s just cool.

I’ve had the roomba for a couple of months now, and absolutely adore it. One of my cats loves it as well – I have to hide it from him or else he’d have it running 24/7. He thinks Robbie’s his buddy, and I suppose in a way, it is. The other cat is scared of it. But Harry will happily chase it across the room, try to ride it, and get very upset when it stops running.

The roomba cleans fairly well. I use what they call a “lightbox” to help the roomba navigate from one room to the other, in my case, cleaning the main room, my bedroom, and the bathroom. It kinda works. When the roomba’s really working well, it cleans for about 1 1/2 hrs, goes around my entire apartment, and returns itself to base. Most of the time, though, I find it stopped somewhere in the middle of my apartment, either because it needs to be cleaned or thinks it’s stuck because it’s hit an immovable cat. If it misses a spot there is a “spot mode” I can put it in to have it clean a particular area, but that’s rarely necessary since it cleans so often.

But even when Robbie ‘doesn’t work,’ or gets lost, or Harry stops it in its tracks – my apartment still gets vacuumed. How could I possibly complain about that??

If someone is considering buying a roomba, they need to be aware of, and consider these potential issues:

- It IS a vacuum cleaner, which some folks somehow forget. That means that it is not exactly silent when it runs. To me, the sound is fine. It does not wake me up at night unless it comes into my room, and I can easily watch television while it is running around me (which I never have been able to do with a “normal” vacuum). That said, it is much louder on wood than on carpet, so keep that in mind.

- It is not the greatest vacuum cleaner on earth. This is no Dyson. I think a dust buster (or some other thing for small areas) is pretty necessary if you’re gonna rely on this as your main vacuum.

- It needs to be cleaned often. It will stop running and tell you when it needs to be cleaned, but I tend to clean it every other day without prompting (and remember, I have two cats, so there is hair/litter/stray food to clean up) It’s easy to do and takes all of 5 minutes.

- It bumps into everything. This is by design, of course, a robot does not have eyes and relies on bumping things to tell it where to go. It doesn’t bump into things very hard, but can pick up speed when it moves, so it has its moments where it flies across my room into a wall. There is padding to prevent damage, and people do sometimes add extra stuff there, but I’m a little loathe to add anything else to the roomba since Harry would just rip it off anyway. I have yet to see it hit something hard enough to cause any damage, cats included. But, people who are obsessive about having perfect furniture may not like this.

- It is always out and visible. This is a big deal to some folks. You don’t want to store your roomba in a closet, that defeats the purpose. It needs to be docked somewhere that allows it to easily roam around the entire house, which means it’s going to be pretty visible wherever it is. I do hide mine at night sometimes (just stick it in a closet), but that’s because Harry will turn it on and I don’t want the noise.

- I already mentioned that mine rarely returns to its dock, I think that’s a fairly common problem. So be prepared to come home and discover your roomba is sitting in the middle of the room somewhere.

- Rooms absolutely have to be “pre-cleaned” before the roomba can go. Which, if you’re like me with cats that will set the roomba off at any time, means you need to be very careful about what’s on your floor. Just this morning I woke up to find my roomba stuck on a cat toy in the middle of my living room. The roomba can get over cords with no problem, but stringy things will get caught, and can cause damage.

- Performance may vary, depending on surface. The wood floor in the kitchen and tile in the bathroom clean easily. The carpet in the rest of my apartment cleans ok, but not perfectly. The roomba does detect what it thinks is a dirty area and will go over that spot more than usual, which helps. However, when the roomba goes off multiple times in a day (which the cats will do), the carpet looks AWESOME after its done. A lot of people use a roomba as a “between cleaning” thing, and still vacuum their place once a week.

- It won’t do stairs. It supposedly can detect a ledge and won’t fall down, but I dunno if I’d risk it.

I love my little Robbie. It is fantastic, ultimately does all its supposed to (which is clean), and provides hours of entertainment for my cats. It is very much not for everyone, for the reasons mentioned above. Anyone considering getting one should take all of those issues into account, and really think through if this is for them. But for me, it’s perfect.