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An Architect's View

Roomba Rocks Too!

June 16, 2006 · 6 Comments

After the success of our Scooba, we bought a Roomba Red ($150). It arrived tonight while we were out having dinner. It arrived with a fully charged battery so we set it up and let it run riot in the hallway and kitchen... Very, very impressed with this! It cleaned up all the litter in the hallway that the cats had dug out of the boxes and it cleaned up all the kibble in the kitchen that the cats had dug out of their food bowls. And the cats think it's fascinating as it runs around, whirring and spinning around whenever it detects dirt. It's great! Every home should have one. Or several!
View count: 237

Tags: personal

6 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Steve Ray // Jun 16, 2006 at 10:48 PM

    I hope these things keep working for you. We bought an original Roomba maybe 3 years back; it worked for a few months, and then it ceased being able to charge the battery. Thought it was the battery, but no, a new one made no difference. Perhaps it gave up trying to battle the amount of dog and cat fur that we had at the time. The whole thing just collects it's own set of dust, now. I've suspected that Roomba would have improved it's products over the intervening years, but I've never gotten around to buying a new one.

  • 2 Roger Benningfield // Jun 17, 2006 at 11:40 AM

    Sean: We love our Roomba Discovery, but I just don't think the Scooba is ready for prime time.

    So much of the Roomba's appeal is its "set it and forget it" nature... as long as you empty the dust bin every few cycles, it pretty much requires no thought. Meanwhile, Scooba can't even charge itself, let alone change out the water in the tanks, add cleaning solution, and so on. The result is that we run our Roomba all the time, but only occasionally kick on the Scooba.

  • 3 Roger Benningfield // Jun 17, 2006 at 11:44 AM

    Oh, by the way, Sean... have you noticed that your permalink pages don't have the entry's title in the HTML title?

  • 4 Sean Corfield // Jun 17, 2006 at 2:59 PM

    Interesting feedback. We've been running the Scooba every few days in general. Because we already had to rearrange the "cat room" in order to scrub the floor, the Scooba has made the process a lot less time-consuming - cleaning its tanks etc is no big deal compared to what we used to have to do.

    The Roomba we have is the cheap "Red" one that you charge manually (i.e., you plug it in whenever it's finished its cycle) but if we like it, we may consider buying a self-charging one as well.

    Roger, yeah, I never put the entry title on the permalink pages. I know I should. I just never got around to figuring out how to make that happen with the custom FB41 (now FB5) front end I built to Ray's Blog CFC app. I'll look into it.

  • 5 Sean Corfield // Jun 17, 2006 at 3:04 PM

    OK, the page title is fixed with a bit of a hack :)

  • 6 Kirk Mower // Jun 17, 2006 at 8:31 PM

    I noticed that there web site is a CF web site as well -- so they must know what they are doing ;-)

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