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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

As a Roomba owner, I have to say that I'm not really impressed with their decision to make another product when their first one barely even works.

> "Some 15 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and they’re doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people keep on buying them"

It is absolutely not "reliable". It's barely better than cleaning the floor myself. Some days, cleaning the floor myself would actually be easier, or ends up being what I have to do anyway. The number of issues I've run into with the damned thing is absurd and I feel like they should be fixing those before making a new product.

I think people are for the most part getting tricked into buying these. They're not that great.

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I’ve had a Roomba 780 cleaning my apartment daily since 2013. Issues I’ve encountered so far:

1. It occasionally doesn’t properly return to the home base, because it’s hard to find a good place for the home base where it can’t be moved/knocked over accidentally. This happens maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, and is just a mild annoyance: you just need to carry the Roomba to its home base yourself.

2. After 3 years of usage, the battery died in such a way that it emptied rapidly enough for the Roomba to not be able to return to the home base. This was easily fixed by installing a new battery.

I recently upgraded to the Roomba 980, and it seems to work better than the 780 — it cleans more quickly and returns to its home base more reliably. Also, less cleaning required due to a different brush design.

Overall, I feel that I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of the product, and it’s doing a great job at vacuuming. YMMV, but for me, it’s great.

3x the value of a non-robotic vacuum?

Minus the time to do it yourself? 20 minutes @ $40/hour * 52 weeks ~ $700 year.

Better to compare it to a cleaning service. Say $30 an hour, and the roomba does the rough equivalent of an hour a week when you let it run daily. 4 years (208 weeks) of $30 is over $6000, ten times the price of the 780. Even if the roomba does the equivalent of 6 minutes of maid-time each week, that's not bad.

Not even close - cleaning lady can do a lot more than just vacuum the floor.

>Say $30 an hour

Depends on where you live. Around here (CE Europe) I get cleaning service for ~5$/h (~15$ for 3 hours of work once a week).

Youd have to pay for extra time for services besides vacuuming. Even if your price is 6x lower, the roomba is still cheaper.

But the cleaning lady doesn't take nearly as much time vacuuming as a roomba I just don't think it's a comparable service at any level or that it can replace a cleaning service - it can supplement it by vacuuming more often.

A roomba simply cannot get in tight corners, behind tv stands, etc where dust and dirt collect.

I like my Roomba, as the way I like my dishwasher.

Can I personally clean the foors better? Yes. Can I personally clean my dishes better? Yes. Dishwasher sometimes turns things upside down, doesn't clean properly etc.

But the main reason is that it saves me a lot of time, and it's good enough for me. Maybe not for you.

I've been thinking of what a more efficient and effective dishwasher would look like, and I think it would be something like: 1) you put dishes in it continuously and it cleans continuously, no start/stop cycle, such that when one is done eating, one puts the dirty dish directly into an opening that then slowly swallows it up (leaving dishes in the sink to dry out is what makes them so hard to clean). 2) a more effective filtering system that empties out automatically at a more frequent rate, so you can put very dirty dishes in and it can handle them without recycling dirty water and 3) ideally, robotic graspers that can hold each dish, conceptualize the shape, and actually scrub the dish.

That has sooooo many more moving parts than a traditional dishwasher with one moving part powered by water pressure. And traditional dishwashers are unreliable enough as it is.

Efficiency with power and water and a low level of noise are what I looked for when buying a dishwasher. It's hard to get these with the above requirements.

First of all, it's not the same company as roomba (irobot). Sounds like you had issues with your roomba (you don't say what they were), but I don't see how that is related to being "tricked."

My anecdata: we've had three since 2009, the earlier ones cleaned well but got dirt inside and eventually stopped working after 2 years. Our latest one bought 3 years ago seems better designed and more reliable, zero problems so far. Ours runs 2-3 times a week, mostly on wood and linoleum floors, and fills up with pet hair and dirt each time. We don't fiddle with the IR barriers, we just put a box in a doorway if we don't want it to roam, and we don't worry about docking, we just pick it up wherever it stops, empty it and dock it manually. Overall, it does a good job of getting most of the dirt in an area, but there is still the need to do a deeper clean once a month. Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.

I think you are missing the point -- The Roomba barely works better than YOU cleaning floors. And this weeding robot does a crappy job compared to ME weeding my garden.

But our Roomba was a miracle worker when my wife was laid up in bed for 6 months with a shattered pelvis and I was also extremely sick. And while I know how, and have time, to weed my garden, this robot could help people who don't have the time or energy to keep up with such thing. And the stories don't even have to be that dramatic - in a family with 5 kids, there are better ways to spend time than vacuuming carpets.

Sometimes having devices like this isn't about the quality of the work - it is just about the work getting done at all, so your time can be spent on more important things.

This is not Roomba creating a new product. Same inventor but different company.

I agree. Companies and consumers alike need to step back and ask themselves "How much time does it take to complete this task without this product? How much time on average will it take me to complete the task with this product?" Those are the hard numbers you should look at when buying a home automation product. I wouldn't be surprised at all if for Roomba, the numbers are 1 hour and 45 minutes, respectively.

The Roomba doesn't clean as good as I could, doesn't clean as fast as I could, and doesn't clean as cheaply as other products could. But I live in a house with laminate floors, two dogs, and a cat. Trying to keep up with their fur is a losing battle, so I'm more than happy to spend $300 once and have something that will run every day and keep the fur off the floor.

It's not replacing a normal vacuum, anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. It's to keep your house cleaner in between normal deep cleans.

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