iRobot Roomba 532 Pet Series

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jomotopia
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iRobot Roomba 532 Pet Series

Post by jomotopia »

http://store.irobot.com/product/index.j ... age=family

This thing is pretty sweet. Our black Lab sheds like crazy, and we always have little tumbleweeds of his hair all over the house. Using this on a semi-daily basis keeps the floor nice and clean (relatively anyway).

It does a very good job at sweeping hardwood floors and at vacuuming carpet. It is nice to just let it loose and come back to a clean floor.

There are a few problems with this model, and the overall design.

This model in particular does not come with "Lighthouses", only "Virtual Walls". The Lighthouses can be bought separately, but that is an added cost. The Lighthouse allows the Roomba to clean one room, and then move on to the next. This would help it get better coverage in our house and have an easier time calculating when it is done cleaning. We have an open kitchen, foyer, dining room, living room floor plan. It is supposed to be able to do that much area on one charge, and I think it could with the Lighthouses, but without them it spends a lot of time roaming around in one of the rooms which is already mostly clean until it finds the doorway, or it goes through the doorway first and never makes it back through before running out of battery.

Getting stuck... it is supposed to be able to keep itself from getting stuck, or get itself unstuck if it does. It does a pretty good job at this with things like wires, rugs, etc. Where it keeps getting stuck in our house is on the fireplace hearth. It is a slab of marble, about 1/2 inch thick on top of the hardwood. Sometimes it will roll up on it fine, sometimes it will hit it sideways, having one wheel on the hearth and one on the floor, and this is usually when it gets stuck. It also gets stuck under the entertainment center sometimes, but there is a huge mess of wires and furniture feet under there, so that's pretty understandable.

Not falling off of stairs... Well, it doesn't fall off. But it is supposed to detect the drop off and turn around. On our hardwood stair noses, it detects the drop off and doesn't fall, but it seems to read it as the sensors being dirty, and it just stops.

Can't clean shaggy rugs. It's supposed to be able to transition smoothly from hard to carpeted surfaces, and this works fine for normal carpet or flat rugs. But we have a shaggy rug and it will not even climb up onto it. If you put it directly on the rug, it just moves back and forth real fast and quits. I think it is reading the space between the threads of the rug as drop offs and thinks it has nowhere safe to go.

The thing that bothers me about it the most is that it has really scratched up our hardwood floors. Granted, the dogs scratch them up pretty well on their own, and most of the scratches are not that noticeable, and are easily fixed. But this thing has a caster wheel on the front. You have to clean it after every time you use it or it will not spin and rotate freely, leaving lots of arc scratches every time the Roomba turns. This might not be such an issue in a house without lots of dog hair, since it is the hair that gunks up the wheel. Keeping the caster wheel clean will prevent most scratches.

Overall my wife and I are very happy with it and feel it was worth the money. It's also very entertaining to watch, especially when the dogs are around.

Value: 3/5 - It's pretty expensive
Ease of Use: 5/5 - Couldn't be simpler
Cleaning Ability: 4/5 - It gets the carpet very clean, has trouble getting all the dog hair off the hardwood, but does well.
Durability: 5/5 - This thing is tough. It senses when it is going to bump something and slows down, but it can't always sense really dark or really thing objects, so it bangs into things fairly hard some times. My dog has flipped it on its back a couple of times. It is pretty scratched up, but nothing has broken.
Feasibility of Sexual Encounters: 1/5 - Maybe for a girl that thinks robots are cool and appreciates a clean house, or really loves the fact that she won't need to vacuum. But in general you will probably come of as a nerd who wastes large sums of money.
OVERALL: 4/5
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Evicatos
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Re: iRobot Roomba 532 Pet Series

Post by Evicatos »

jomotopia wrote:Feasibility of Sexual Encounters: 1/5 - Maybe for a girl that thinks robots are cool and appreciates a clean house, or really loves the fact that she won't need to vacuum. But in general you will probably come of as a nerd who wastes large sums of money.
I think you're approaching this part the wrong way. What kind of suction does this bad boy have?
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Re: iRobot Roomba 532 Pet Series

Post by RITmusic2k »

I love Roomba products. Those damn things are seriously entertaining to watch the first time you bring one into your home. Ours is the 560, non-pet version, and it does a good job of handling my house's two-dogs-worth of hair, though sometimes it just catches a clump and drags it around the house, growing as more hair attaches.
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Re: iRobot Roomba 532 Pet Series

Post by fa22raptorf22 »

Evicatos wrote:
jomotopia wrote:Feasibility of Sexual Encounters: 1/5 - Maybe for a girl that thinks robots are cool and appreciates a clean house, or really loves the fact that she won't need to vacuum. But in general you will probably come of as a nerd who wastes large sums of money.
I think you're approaching this part the wrong way. What kind of suction does this bad boy have?
MUAHHHAAAA

I LOLed at that. I bet that thing sucks realll hard lol
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