Our floors look great!

Well, other than the fact that they are turquoise-colored with purple flecks (graduate student housing standard). But the carpet has never been so consistently clean! We love our Roomba! Lots of people have been asking me about it and I thought I would post a little review for those who may be curious but were too afraid to ask ;).

Roomba really is pretty much as great as I was hoping it would be and any skepticism I may have had turned out to be happily unnecessary. Roomba's maneuverability is impressive and he (yes, ours is male) gets around really well. I think my favorite part about Roomba is how he cleans under our couch, beds and dressers! On his maiden voyage we all watched in disbelief as he boldly ventured under our couch. We held our breath, wondering if he would ever be able to get out from under there (our couch has a heavy flap around the bottom), but we all cheered as he strode out again several seconds later without batting a sensor-lash.


One thing the owners manual makes sure to highlight and I thought would be worth mentioning here is that Roomba's cleaning patterns are different from the way humans clean. Humans of course tend to be fairly methodical, cleaning one area thoroughly before moving on. Roomba appears to clean in a more random pattern, but apparently it's all robotic and on sensors, and he can detect when a particular area is clean. The bottom line is that the floors look fantastic at the end of a cleaning cycle, and that's what's important.

Now that I have a Roomba of my own I have found myself wondering why more people don't have them! I think that two of the biggest barriers are skepticism (which I have already addressed) and cost. Many people, myself included, thought Roombas were terribly expensive and I always day dreamed about getting one "someday." Well, luckily Jake did a little searching and found out that they can actually be very affordable. The one he got for me is a base model from the previous generation of Roombas and fit within our grad student budget (well, as a really special birthday present with a 20% discount, anyway). And even though it's "just" the older base model, it works great! We saw the newest, current model with all the bells and whistles at Costco the other night and it cost less than what you would pay for a new, traditional vacuum. It certainly cost less than what we paid for our vacuum when we first got married.

So there you have my thoughts on Roomba. I don't know if I will ever cease to be amazed that my vacuuming gets done while I'm doing something else.