Playing with Cleaning Robots
Roomba have been around for a long time. Every time I have the opportunity to experiment and learn from a roomba robot I do. I tell it to start vacuuming and then I watch as it explores room after room, gets jammed on a chair leg, a drying thing or even under certain toilets. I also watch with frustration as it throws a bit of dirt too far, and drives by it over and over, and doesn’t pick it up.
No Micro-managing
If you pick up a roomba to get it to vacuum something specific it will turn around and avoid what you wanted it to clean. Roomba love to be independent. If you micromanage them they will rebel and not clean where you want them to clean, until much later.
The best strategy when using a Roomba is to allow it to clean a room in it’s own time. I tried two or three experiments in apartments of varying sizes and I found that even in a studio flat it can take an absurdly long amount of time. I don’t know how long it would take to clean a Geneva studio flat because I told it to go home before it finished.
Very Slow
In two other apartments I found that it could take one and a half to two hours for parts of apartments. Roomba are slow. They clean, then drive away to clean somewhere else, before driving back, to clean a little more, before driving away, before coming back.
It took 18 minutes for a Roomba to clean a small hallway. It took 54 minutes to clean a bedroom and it took one hour and fourty three minutes to clean another room that I would take minutes to vacuum.
The Filter Hour Meter
I am confused about the filter hour meter. I play with a conga vacuum cleaner, for small vacuuming jobs and I use it until the container is full, and then I brush the filter clean, before reassembling everything.
With another vacuum cleaner I use it until the dirt reservoir is full, and then I clean the sponge under water and leave it to dry for 24 hours, before reassembling the vacuum. The result is that I haven’t had to change the filters on two vacuums, because I just brush them clean and use them again.
With my experimentation I started one vacuuming job and it went from sixteen hours down to fourteen, and when I brushed the filter it still gave me 14 hours.
Since I don’t own a roomba I don’t know what the MTBF (mean time between filters) is but I would have expected it to go from 14 hours for example, to twenty, or fourty.
I conclude that the hours meter is just a timer, rather than an airflow sensor to detect when the time to change filters comes.
Dealing with Windows that Slide Open
There is a ledge where a window slides back and forth. To clean it I need to use a smaller vacuum cleaner because the standard one cannot reach. With a Roomba the side brushes will sweep into and throw the dirt to a location where the Roomba can reach it more easily
Under Furniture
Roomba like to go hunting for dirt, even underneath furniture which is great. There is a sittee where I cannot reach with a normal vacuum cleaner. If I want to clean underneath it I need a mop to get all the dust from underneath. With a Roomba it will dive in and spend several minutes, and several passes, to pick up all the dust.
Price
My main reason for not getting my own Roomba or other brand robot vacuum cleaner is price. It costs from 70 CHF to 1000 CHF to get a machine that will hoover an apartment slowly, over a few hours, when getting a manual one is 50 CHF or more, depending on how much you want to spend.
Plenty of manual vacuum cleaners are in the same range as robot vacuums, so from this point of view the decision is simpler.
And Finally
What takes Roomba an hour to do, I do within five minutes or less. A Roomba creates a lot of noise for tens of minutes at a time, when a human would make the same noise for five minutes at a time. The more I play with Robot vacuum cleaners, the less I see the need for them.
