I don’t have a lot of experience with robots, but I can tell you that Alice, my new iRobot Roomba 870, is my favorite.
Before Alice, I used a complicated system to sweep our hardwood floors. I pushed around a wide dry mop, then cleaned the mop off with a handheld vacuum. It involved a lot tedious work and awkward bending over. In the carpeted basement, I used a traditional vacuum - again, a lot of work.
Alice makes the whole process so much easier. Now when I want to clean our hardwood or carpet floors, I just turn her on and get out of her way. Like magic, I return to find the entire floor clean. It’s amazing! I wish I had gotten a Roomba sooner. I got a discount on Alice as through BzzAgent, and wrote a review there as well.
We named our iRobot Roomba 870 Alice, after Alice the maid from The Brady Bunch. My 2-year-old daughter was a bit scared of Alice at first, but she has gotten used to her. Now she chases her around the room saying “where’s Alice going?” The thing is, you can’t tell where she is going to go next, but somehow, Alice gets the entire floor clean. It gets around all your furniture, but we move the smaller stuff out of the way if we can, for a more thorough job. The Roomba is only about 4 inches tall, so it also fits under the couch - somewhere I NEVER bother cleaning myself!
The iRobot Roomba 870 comes with two virtual walls, which prevent the robot from going where you don’t want her (or him) to go. Those worked very well for us, though the Roomba turned around a few inches sooner than I expected when using them.
The “cliff-detection” system, which prevents the Roomba from falling down stairs, did not really work for us. Alice comes to top of our stairs, stops, and says “error, please reposition Roomba and start again.” But that’s ok, because I just use the virtual walls at the top of the stairs.
The bin of the Roomba does get full more quickly than regular vacuums, but that doesn’t bother me. Obviously, the entire thing is much smaller than a regular vacuum. I have Alice clean our entire carpeted basement, which is about 700 square feet, and I only have to empty the bin once in the middle.
As I said, I wish I had gotten a Roomba a lot sooner - it has saved me lots of time and effort. I will not be vacuuming our floors anymore. I love Alice the Roomba, and I would recommend the iRobot Roomba 870 to anyone.
