All,
I hope everyone is having a great day!
While sitting here having my morning cup of coffee, I thought it would be an ideal time to write a brief review of my experiences thus far with my new Roomba 770 robot vacuum.
In short, this thing is AWESOME!
What can I say, it does as advertised. We wanted one of these to place downstairs due to the fact we have a dog. Having to sweep the hardwood floors every few days was getting annoying because the bulk of what we would pickup was just dog hair. Now, add to that the winter time grass clippings that are inevitably going to make their way in, it became a daily ritual, or should I say annoyance. I have had my eye on one of these things for awhile, but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger, as their only “con” is their price point.
Recently (February 27th, 2015), my wife and I had our first child, Isabella Brooklyn! What an experience it has been thus far, words cannot describe it! We were lucky enough to have my parents come up from Dothan, AL to help us once we came home from the hospital. After my mom saw the grass issue I was talking about, she surprised us with a Roomba 🙂
The rest is history.. This thing is awesome, like I mentioned before. With its scheduling engine, you can program it to come out & clean at a preset time, during certain days if you like. Currently, we have ours set to come out at 1:00am everyday and do its thing. It will come off its base, go scout around for a couple hours, and finally return to the base on its own for recharging. This particular model, 770, also came with two invisible walls which are perfect to keep the Roomba out of rooms/spaces you don’t want it to go, or are afraid it would get stuck in. For example, we have one of ours in our downstairs bathroom because the bathroom mat would certainly give it trouble due to it being super soft. The second is under our dining room table to prevent it from going down a narrow pass between our fireplace & rug (it was having issues getting out once it got in lol), but no problem, we just stopped it from going into that corner. Since setting up the invisible walls, it has not got stuck again, and does its thing every morning.
In the pictures you see below, one is the trash after I dumped the catch compartment lol. I came down & saw the red light on indicating it needed to be emptied. So, if anyone is questioning its efficiency, please take a look at the pic 🙂
Another question I have received is how loud is it? Since ours is running downstairs only, even sleeping with our bedroom door open, it is not loud enough to wake us. You can hear it if you listen; however, it is certainly not as loud as your Dyson vacuum cleaner 🙂 It makes a beeping sound while backing up, then the only noise you hear are the motors. Another great option if the noise bothered you is to simply have it come out while you’re at work, problem solved (just be sure to not arm your alarm w/ motion sensing enabled ha).
This sucker even comes with a remote control, so if you get bored, and feel like driving a vacuum cleaner around, you can do it 🙂
In summation, I LOVE this thing! It does everything it said it was supposed to, even has two tiny HEPA filters in the collection chamber (also comes with 2 replacement HEPA filters out of the box). It does amazing on hardwood floors, and regular carpet. I would not recommend trying to use it on shag, bath mats, or anything else that is “soft” in design. It has no trouble going from hardwood to traditional carpet as we have one bedroom downstairs that is carpeted and it hops in there & does it thing also. The invisible walls are perfect to setup barriers if needed. I highly recommend this model as it does come with the scheduling engine as some of the lower models don’t have the schedule option, you have to manually hit clean when you want it to come out, which, IMO, defeats the purpose of having it all together. The beauty of having a robot clean for you is to tell it WHEN to clean for you lol, it’s called automation 🙂
*The one final thought I would leave you with, when you get yours, don’t try and watch it clean lol. It will drive you mad!! It uses advanced algorithms and laser sensors to judge the room size, where it’s been, etc.. In other words, it looks drunk trying to clean your room, with all the random zig zags; however, if you let it do its job, and just come back and see the finished product, you’ll realize that even though the patterns seem strange, it is getting the coverage it needs 🙂 (speaking from experience…)
Hope you enjoyed reading this review, and if you have any questions, please let me know.
Matt
iRobot Roomba 770 Vacuum Cleaning Robot for Pets and Allergies
Hey Matt, I’ve got an earlier model that we use occasionally. My only beef with it is that it needs to be emptied too often and it leaves permanent imprints on the carpeting in the corners…Aside from that, I have to agree that it’s a good little bot