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I had to clean house today because my wife decided it was her time to host her family for an Easter dinner. I started programming my PVR to record golf and now I’m upstairs writing this blog. I’m not being irresponsible because right at noon, the Roomba will automatically wake up and vacumn the house. Before you think our live-in is named Roomba, I’d better explain.
Roomba is a self-guided vacumn cleaner that resembles a large frisbee. It has two stubby wheels, a rubber bumper, a heavy-duty rechargeable battery, a motor and a computer onboard. It sounds like a science experiment but it’s not, it is a fully assembled, fully functional vacumn cleaner and it doesn’t a heck of a job. You’ll be amazed at how much dust and debris it picks up.
We’ve had three Roomba’s over the years and we love them. From the very first Roomba, we were impressed with how it detects stairs. It would go around the house, vacumning along the way. Then when it reaches the stairs, it knows not to head straight and fall down. It nudges forward then backs up with precision, turns around and goes the other way. The programming on it is really amazing.
The Roomba is built by iRobot, a company that designs robots that enter the battlefield (eg. Iraq) to disassemble bombs and to offer a second set of eyes for our soldiers. Not as rugged as these battle droids, the house Roomba has rubber bumpers in the front just in case it runs into the wall or furniture. It simply bumps the wall then hugs it to clean the edges. It’s self adjusting too, meaning that it knows the difference between ceramic floors, linoleum and carpet.
The best thing about the newer Roomba’s is the scheduler. You can schedule it to vacumn any day of the week, at any time of the day or night. Once programmed, the Roomba will wake up and vacumn the place. When it gets tired (ie. the battery runs low), it returns home to its docking station where it connects itself to the docking station. The power button glows red when it’s almost out of juice and green when it’s fully charged.
Cleaning the Roomba is easy too. After a week, I remove the dust bin located at the back of the Roomba and empty it. There are filters inside the bin that you can remove and blow off the dust and I’ll replace them every 3-4 months.
The lowest price to buy a Roomba is $97 for the Roomba 400. Be careful what you find out there on the internet. There are at least four generations of Roomba’s out there. The scheduling function is pretty new, so not all Roomba’s can be scheduled to work. Along with the schedulers, there are virtual wall schedulers too which work in unison with the Roomba. The virtual walls can be scheduled to turn on at a scheduled time, saving the dry cell batteries that powers these devices.
If you want the latest Roomba’s, follow the links on this page and you won’t be disappointed.
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