I bought a Roomba – the basic Red model, not the more advanced kind – in early May, and I love it. I run it every day on the second floor (wall-to-wall carpet) and every other day on the first floor (half w-2-w, half vinyl tile), and clean the brushes after each run to get out hair – mine and the cats’. My floors have never been cleaner. It doesn’t do corners or stairs or under really low stuff and I do have to Roomba-proof for it, but if you’re realistic about its abilities and limits, it’s great.
I love mine 
I have the “Scheduler” model, which you can program to run at certain times on certain days so you don’t even have to think about it.
I use baby gates to both contain the Roomba in the area I want it to vacuum, and to keep the dogs away from it. When I first got mine, one dog wanted to attack it - he very suspiciously watched it from the other side of the gate until he was sure it would do no harm. The other dog is afraid of it - as long as it’s gated, she’s fine with it, but she doesn’t want it anywhere near her, and it makes her nervous if I use the Virtual Wall instead of the gate since she can’t see any visual barrier between herself and the machine.
I had a Roomba, but my AnthroPC rode it down the stairs and broke it.
Does it suck or sweep?
How long does it take to clean a 12 x 12 room?
Is it noisy?
How often do you have to empty it?
I bought Roombas a couple years ago for my mom, my Dad and some other folks in my family. Everyone loves them.
My mom’s Roomba did die not too long ago. It ate some rug fringe and the slots that the plastic brush fit into all stripped out. Haven’t the time or the inclination to try to get it fixed. I think I’d rather make a battlebot or something out of the carcass.
My dog just goes to another room. She hates it. My ferret, on the other hand, likes to climb on top of it while it’s parked, which invariably starts it up. Then he rides it around.
I have a suspicion he does it just to piss off the dog.
IMO, vacuuming is not such a terribly time consuming chore that I would pay 200 bucks to have a robot do it for me. Then again, I have a small house- I may feel differently if I lived in a bigger place.
I was more than happy to pay $400 to have a robot do my dishes. Paying $150 for my Roomba seems like a steal.
It’s more of a power sweeper, but it does get a lot of dirt, dust, and pet hair.
About an hour, I think, should do it, but then you probably would want to recharge it.
This is one of the best things about it. If you turn it loose in another room, you won’t hear it at all. Even in the same room, you can still watch TV or listen to the radio, or play a musical instrument without being drowned out. For me, that’s the worst of traditional vacuuming…that BRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHH sound that just drowns out everything and makes it impossible to listen to music to make the job go by faster.
How often do you have to empty it?
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Another vote for godsend. Aside from emptying the filter, my husband and I don’t have to do any up-keep on it. We let it vacuum the apartment (500 sq ft) once a week. It’s pretty loud, in my opinion, but we let it run when we leave for work . We also roomba-proof the apartment when we leave, mainly just putting chairs up on the table and getting electrical cords off the floor. We mostly have bare floor, but we have a small area rug that gets cleaned up nicely. It’s random movement, but I’ve never noticed it miss any spots. Maybe it’s just because our place is small, but it always looks sparkling clean once the roomba’s done.
You can take away my Roomba when you pull my cold dead base station off of it. 
Love it, love it, love it. We have short pile carpet downstairs, Berber carpet upstairs. Does good on the short pile, and terrific on the Berber. No maintenance problems yet, but we’ve only had it since February.
We got the Roomba Sage for $140 at woot.com; that Roomba comes with the remote and the infrared ‘virtual wall’ which works quite well to keep it out of the room where you have papers and stuff lying all over the floor.
I’m seriously considering buying a Robomow. But if I do, I’ll be sending Yoshimi extra vitamin supplements, just in case.
So it’s a sweeper, rather than a vacuum-cleaner? I wasn’t certain.
I wonder whether I could use one. (Small apartment; hardwood floors).[ul][]Do you have to adapt your dwelling to its cleaning pattern, and , if so, how? []Are there spaces it can’t enter, things it can’t sweep up? (I’m thinking in particular of the giant man-eating dust-bunnies that tend to collect under my bed…)[]Is it smart enough to return to its electrical suoply and charge itself up?[]What does it do at the top of stairs?Does it have a place to dump itself when it fills up?[/ul]
You don’t have to adapt anything other than picking up cords and stuff. It does a better job if it doesn’t have to bang around chair legs, but it can still get around them if it has to.
It can’t get under anything without like 3" or so of clearance, but it picks up just about everything, so far.
Yes it goes back to its base station to recharge, but only if it’s nearby. If it has wandered down the hall and into another room, etc, it won’t “remember” where its station is. If it’s in the same room, it can sense the homing signal and it follows it in.
It has sensors that turn it off if one of the wheels no longer has floor under it, so it stops itself from going over stairs. I think ETF’s suicided down the stairs once anyway, and iRobot replaced it free since that was defective behavior (ETF, am I remembering right? Or was that PCW?)
It doesn’t empty itself, and the container is pretty small, so you have to dump it after each cleaning. It only takes a second, though. The bin snaps off, you dump it out, snap it back on.
My problem is that I’m not a tidy man. There are so many books on my floors that the poor thing would have almost no place left to sweep.
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So it’s a sweeper, rather than a vacuum-cleaner? I wasn’t certain.
I wonder whether I could use one. (Small apartment; hardwood floors).[ul][li]Do you have to adapt your dwelling to its cleaning pattern, and , if so, how? []Are there spaces it can’t enter, things it can’t sweep up? (I’m thinking in particular of the giant man-eating dust-bunnies that tend to collect under my bed…)[]Is it smart enough to return to its electrical suoply and charge itself up?[]What does it do at the top of stairs?[]Does it have a place to dump itself when it fills up?[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
The only adaptions I’ve made are picking up the little rugs in the kitchen (Roomba doesn’t like the fringe) before he runs around in there, and stuffing the speaker wires under the baseboards. Getting under your bed was one of Roomba’s original selling points; it just zips right under there, like any other space, and does its duty.
I have the Scheduler, which comes with a base and two virtual walls; the Roomba does know where its base is, and it goes back there to recharge when it’s done cleaning. It has “cliff sensors”, about four of them it seems, at the front, which alert it when it approaches stairs. I understand you want to clean them periodically, although I have no stairs so it’s not an issue. As for the last thing you mention: apparently, a Roomba that empties itself is the most-requested new feature, and they’re working on it, but it’s not there yet.
We have a pug, and if you know pugs, you know they shed. A lot. Every day of their silly little lives. And, with the new baby, I really didn’t want “pug tumbleweeds” (drifting balls of pug hair) floating around when she starts crawling. So, I got the Roomba. I set the schedule to clean every weekday at 9 AM, well after we’ve left for work. I’ve set up the walls (which turn on at the same time as the Roomba) so that it cleans the living room and kitchen every time it runs. And every day, there’s a fist-sized wad of fresh pug hair in the Roomba’s bin. This weekend, I vacuumed with the full-size upright for the first time since we got the Roomba. Ordinarily, it would get so full of pug hair that the little cyclone would stop spinning halfway through the living room. This time, hardly any pug hair at all; Roomba had taken care of almost all of it! My wife was suitably impressed, and my decision to get the Roomba was grudgingly accepted as wise.
Anyway, it’s great on pet hair, and the schedule thing is a very nice feature.
On ‘Roomba proofing’:
You can’t leave anything around that you wouldn’t normally bump your regular vacuum into. Would you run your vacuum over papers on the floor, shoelaces, wires/cords, dog toys, etc.? If no, then you don’t want to leave them for Mr. Roomba to eat up either. On the plus side, it help you keep your place picked up more frequently.
In addition, there could be potential problem areas. I have an entertainment stand that was on legs. It sat right at the edge of a rug but had hardwood underneath. The legs raised up the entertainment stand just above the height of Roomba. He could get down but bumped his head on the under side of the entertainment stand when he tried to get back up (if that blubbering description makes and sense). My solution was to just put some small blocks under the legs to raise it up a little.
I have a scheduler. All I have to do is empty the bin when I get home from work each night and clean the brushes if it needs it (once every 2 or 3 days will keep that task quick and easy). It charges itself and runs during the day while I am at work. Which is good, because it is rather loud in my opinion… but you have a robot vacuum… why would you run it when you are at home?
And mine is mostly to keep the hair tumbleweeds at bay as well. At least a pug is a tiny dog. It could shed its whole coat on a daily basis and not compare to a 100lb. lab.