Bro Taguchi asks: “Does the Roomba work well on the hardwood floors?”

Let me tell you about the Roomba. When I first heard about a robotic vacuum cleaner, I was pretty skeptical. It seemed too gimmicky, too stupid or too weak. It is true that my roommate and I do not like to do chores, although we stay on top of them–most of the time, anyway. Our place is not a disaster. However, we are technology geeks, and my roommate found a “mid-range” Roomba (version 2.1?) online for around $150. So he bought it.

I will say that our hardwood floors look pretty awesome. Dust bunnies do suck, and the Roomba gets rid of those little bastards easily. It looks to me like it does a fairly good job of cleaning up surface dirt on carpet, but I have no idea how well it’s doing with deep cleaning. You could always run the regular vacuum periodically to get that deep-down dirt.

I don’t completely know how to run it, as I haven’t looked at the manual, yet. It’s supposed to be able to learn the layout of your place and work more efficiently. Dunno.
Extra perks: seeing the damn thing bump into shit and then go another direction is mildly amusing, because it looks like it’s drunk.

Extra downside: it can go and bump into shit for a while. I haven’t timed it, but it will go for over an hour. That means you should make sure you’re out of the house when it runs.

Yeah, yeah. The Roomba has been out for a while, and I’m sure that there are a million reviews of it out there. Well, here’s another.

-Spanks