My mother bought us all Roomba Pro Elites for Christmas this year, and my sister and I really like ours (haven’t heard from my sister-in-law about what she thinks of hers yet).
Seconding what others have said, a Roomba isn’t going to replace your regular vacuum cleaner, since it can’t do stairs, doesn’t have attachments for furniture and dusting and such, and doesn’t really deep clean the carpets.
However, for daily maintenance, especially if you have a pet who sheds, it’s great. The manual talks about the Roomba keeping things “barefoot clean,” and that’s absolutely true. I also LOVE how it cleans under the bed and underneath a lot of the furniture. I have allergies, and it really helps to have all that dust and all those dustbunnies and cat-hair tumbleweeds gone.
Our floors are all either wood or tile, and most rooms also have a large area rug with a relatively flat weave. The Roomba handles all of that quite well. The thickest is a wool Oriental rug that is probably at the outer limits of what the Roomba can handle – it doesn’t seem to run quite as quickly or smoothly over that rug as the others, but it still gets all of the visible (and bare-foot-feelable) crumbs and cat hair off it.
If you have a carpet with long (more than 1-2") fringe, the Roomba will get tangled up in it, but you can use a little “virtual wall” thingy (the Pro Elite comes with two) to keep the Roomba off the fringe, or tuck it under the rug or put something like a board on top of it. We also have a rug with shorter fringe, maybe 1" long, and the Roomba goes back and forth over that just fine.
The first few times you use the Roomba, you may feel like you’re chasing a rambunctious two-year-old around as it heads like a heat-seeking missile for all the non-Roomba-safe stuff you forgot about while you run after it shouting “No! No!” and waving your arms about ineffectually as you arrive just too late to prevent it from sucking up the ends of long curtains, tangling itself in the blind cords, and choking itself on pages from the magazines you didn’t realize had slid under the bed. One nice thing is that the Roomba will stop itself and give off a plaintive set of beeps when it gets into trouble like that, though.
Once the Roomba has found all the hazards so that you know how to set up the room before Roomba-ing the next time, things are much easier. However, some rooms just aren’t that Roomba-proofable, as Sangre Azul mentioned.
Like our office: There are tons of cords that can’t really be permanently lifted off the floor because they stretch between our computers, my husband has a bunch of crap like computer parts and manuals and parts boxes that he likes to leave all over the floor near his desk, and there are three big rolling desk chairs that have to be dragged out into the hallway where there really isn’t room for them so that the Roomba doesn’t get caught in an infinite loop between two of the chairs or something. That means I don’t Roomba the office nearly as often as I do the other rooms, because those rooms are just so much easier to prepare for Roomba-ing.
And this is just an idiosyncratic thing, but I really can’t stand to watch the Roomba as it works because it cleans in such a random, unsystematic pattern that it deeply offends my sense of order and efficiency. It starts by going in an outward-spiraling pattern, which is fine, but then it bumps into something and after that, all bets are off, baby; you don’t know where that thing is going next. It sets my teeth on edge! But that’s just me. And it does seem to cover the whole room. Eventually. So I just leave the room while it works and keep an ear out for plaintive beeps.
