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An Architect's View

Scooba

May 29, 2006 · 12 Comments

We recently lost our regular cleaning lady - she moved back to Texas - so we decided to buy one of those iRobot cleaners... We went to Best Buy yesterday and charged the battery overnight and this afternoon we let it loose on the extension, which is about 500 sq ft of tiled room where several of our cats live together. We actually sat and watched it for the first 45 minute cleaning cycle... it's absolutely fascinating! It starts out in the middle of the room doing spirals and then heads out to a wall and follows the wall around for a bit then criss-crosses the room - and then alternates the three patterns. Very cool! The cats aren't sure what to make of it. Junko follows it around with mild interest and only moves out of its way when it is an inch away from running into her. Rosie isn't as brave but likes to creep up behind it and swat at it. Most everyone else has ignored it so far. A much more inquisitive set of cats lives in the main part of the house tho' so we expect to have more fun when we let it loose in the kitchen in the next day or two!
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Tags: personal

12 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Doug Hughes // May 29, 2006 at 4:24 PM

    How well does it work?

  • 2 Rick Mason // May 29, 2006 at 4:35 PM

    We have one at the office and it works amazingly well. It won't replace the regular vacuum for heavy cleanup jobs but for weekly maintenance it's pretty good. We quickly learned that you need to get the cables off the floor otherwise it will get entangled in them.

  • 3 Sean Corfield // May 29, 2006 at 7:47 PM

    The Scooba doesn't do a huge amount in the way of vacuuming but it works really well for floors you would otherwise have to mop and scrub dry. We will probably get a Roomba for regular vacuuming.

    The only problem we're finding so far is that it's really hard to get hold of the special cleaning solution!

  • 4 Tink // May 30, 2006 at 3:56 AM

    You cleaner must have been a slacker :)

    Mine washes windows, does my washing up, washes my clothes, scrubs floors, hoovers, dusts, cleans windows, takes the rubbish out, hell she does the lot!

    I'd need about 20 robots to replace her.

  • 5 Sean Corfield // May 30, 2006 at 10:16 AM

    Tink, yeah, Jenine did a *lot* more than just the floors and we really miss her! Finding good cleaners is really hard (we've been through a lot of them before finding Jenine).

  • 6 Jason Sheedy // May 30, 2006 at 9:51 PM

    Sean, i'm not much of a cat person, but that's a really beatiful looking cat.

  • 7 Jason Sheedy // May 30, 2006 at 9:53 PM

    Sorry .. i was talking about Junko. I didn't realise there were two. :)

  • 8 Sean Corfield // May 30, 2006 at 11:04 PM

    Thank you Jason! We're a little biased but we think they're all beautiful :)

    BTW, Junko, like several of the cats on our website, is available to the right home for pretty much just an adoption fee.

  • 9 Jason Sheedy // May 30, 2006 at 11:37 PM

    I think the shipping fee to Australia might kill the bank, but I do know a girl in the New York area that may me interested. :) I'll mention it to her.

  • 10 Gus // May 31, 2006 at 8:19 AM

    I look forward to seeing what you come up with after seeing this:

    musicthing.blogspot.com/2006/05/roomba-hacked-into-slightly-cruddy.html

  • 11 Sean Corfield // May 31, 2006 at 11:26 PM

    Gus, that URL doesn't work for me (but a colleague mentioned that Roomba's have a serial port and can be hacked - I don't know if that applies to Scooba as well).

  • 12 kay smoljak // Jun 1, 2006 at 7:07 AM

    Heh. we've been thinking of getting a Roomba just to entertain our cats :)

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