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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service).

If you were happy with your Roomba you could keep it running for many many years. You only needed to buy a new Roomba if you wanted new features.

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Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.

I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though.

In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.

My Roomba has many years by now, and I've swapped a few parts.

But I've bought parts from China, because my local dealer sells the parts at very high prices, if he ever has them in stock.

Same here, AliExpress for the custom parts like brushes etc at 1/5th of the price.

Aside from having parts available, I was unexpectedly impressed that my RoboRock self-emptying dock (c. 2023) was clearly designed for painless serviceability. The ducts are easily accessed via removable panels, and you need only a Phillips screwdriver.

That said, the performance of the robot certainly degraded over time, and I haven't identified the cause to my satisfaction. Obstacle avoidance needs work (especially for charging cables left dangling off the couch), and the map is frustrating to edit and seems to degenerate over a 6 month period.

I’ve repaired a eufy vacuum without issue, pretty easy to find repair parts as others have mentioned. I replaced a wheel assembly that wasn’t working quite right.

Repair shops will refuse to look at them outright; pretty frustrating they wouldn’t take my money and I had to do it myself. But I think that was categorical for all robot vacuums.

In general though, robot vacuums as a category are improving so quickly I doubt repair is the right options many times. A 10-year-old (or even 3-year-old, because they were always so behind) Roomba is almost like running a 10 year old Intel Mac in 2025.

This was the main reason I bought a Roomba last year. It wasn't clear to me that any competitor could match their repairability and availability of parts.

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