iRobot Roomba 580 Vacuuming Robot | Wally, my busy little bot...

iRobot Roomba 580 Vacuuming Robot | Pricing wrong???

kitchen:

IRobot Roomba 580 ...

	iRobot Roomba 580 Vacuuming Robot iRobot iRobot average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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Wally, my busy little bot...

I received my Roomba through iRobot rather than Amazon due to the misconceptions of the accessory kit to be involved.

When I received it I wanted to try it out right away but thought it might be too loud (there's a rule that at my apt complex you may not vacuum past 10pm). Well I ran it anyway a bit just because I was curious and was surprised. It is not loud at all and no one can tell its vacuuming!

It has picked up so much of my hair from the carpet that I've had to cut it off the rollers. However, the more you clean routinely with this vacuum the less I've had to take it apart to get my hair out (I've got 15in plus hair in length). It even has picked up unseen gravel from the title floors which my regular sweeping has missed.

Pros:

Wireless scheduling and remote to push it on, off, and dock. Picks up the smallest amount of dust you can see in the filter, but not in your carpet. Picks up hair well, but remember clean regularly. It doesn't ruin furniture, walls, etc when it "bumps" off of them. Very quiet and efficient!

Cons:

Just like with the regular vacuums, make sure you pick up any cords or rugs with fringes as it gets tangled on them. Otherwise it goes all around, even under furniture. Another con is the side brush has come off at least once every three vacuuming times because it drives onto the bottom of my lamp stands and when it gets around them, the turning motion with the help of the stand has unscrew itself. To get by with it, before vacuuming take your Philips screw driver and tighten it up and it won't fall off. The battery life does proved to last as they say for only a max of 4 rooms and then it must charge again which takes times. It will only dock by itself if it can find the sensor on the charger, so you need your fourth room to be your final room with the docking station in.

I highly recommend this for those with busy schedules!

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Pricing wrong???

I don't know why Amazon is charging so much more for a product that you can get WITH all the accessories actually SHIPPED WITH the unit, directly from the manufacturer. Amazon had better check their pricing.

My second Roomba - quite happy so far, customer service not so good

We had a 560 for about a year now and, because we have a relatively large house, we recently decided to go for a second. The 2 are quite similar. In fact, they are very much the same product, the 580 being the 560 plus the 'command center'.

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Operation:

The robot itself does a pretty good job at fully covering the area and removing the dust. It is VERY good in a fully carpeted room or a bare-floor room. However, many times, it finds it difficult to climb from the floor onto the carpet. The side brush goes under the carpet and, eventually, the robot backs off and tries again later. It is usually successful, following several attempts but this may result in it over-cleaning one area and not spending too much on elsewhere. Our 560 actually ended up breaking the rotating brush following numerous under-the-rug incidents and we had to get a new rotating brush kit from Roomba.

Another, somewhat weird behavior has to do with dark objects that it should be avoiding. The Roomba seems to detect bright walls and objects and slows down and only touches them gently at the end of the approach, it usually slams into a dark wall or whatever dark object might be in its way. It seems unable to detect darker objects.

On the 580 you can schedule future jobs either on the main unit or from the control center. We did not find this capability very useful because we have more rooms than Roombas and we decided that we did not want to run our lives around the Roomba's cleaning schedule and move it around as expected. Whenever we want to clean a room, we take the Roomba there, set the virtual walls/lighthouses and push the 'clean' button.

The Command Center duplicates the buttons you find on the back on the main unit and it adds the ability to drive the robot through 3 'arrow' controls. We found that we don't use this capability. The Roomba seems smart enough to drive itself and the kids have their own remote-control toys. After a couple of 'gee-whiz' runs, we ended up not using the Command Center at all so, basically, we have 2 560's now.

The virtual walls/lighthouses are VERY useful. Each Roomba comes with 2. You would sometimes need more. While we were a one-Roomba household we manage to keep the robot within its designated area in our 'open floor' first floor by blocking it with various objects. Now that we have 2 units, we have 4 of these so all is perfect and easy downstairs.

While it's noted in the product description, I should mention that the 'going back to base' feature works VERY WELL. The Roombas almost always manage to find their base and go into the recharger when their batteries go low.

We had no problem with the battery life. Our one-year-old 560 seems to have as much stamina today as it had on day-one.

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Maintenance:

After every other cleaning run, you will have to empty the dust bins, clean the filter and clean the brushes.

Taking out the dust is easy. And so is the cleaning of the filter. Cleaning the brushes is another story and problem is 'hair'. It's not terribly difficult but... you will be dealing with 'dirt'. I found that with the help of a pair of scissors or a small (sharp) knife you can clean the brushes in a couple of minutes.

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Customer support:

As I mentioned before, the little 'helicopter' brush unit had to be replaced. I did not find Roomba's off-shore based support team to be very helpful. It happened a long time ago so I don't recall of the details but I remember them first being unable to understand the nature of the problem. Then, some unfriendly foreigner told me that they are not obligated to send me a replacement immediately, given that there was some '5 business days' or '10 business days' in the warranty. Anyways, I eventually got my part but it happened after a relatively long wait and too many calls and too much time spent with these lovely people. The funny thing was that, as soon as I placed my first phone call, I received an email asking that I rate the quality of the 'service' provided. MANY such surveys followed.

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My rating: 4 stars

We are actually using these and they do a good job for us. The fact that we now have 2 of these, shows that we find them worth the expense. The Roombas do what we expect them to do - which is clean the room without us having to watch them doing it. They are well-built, durable and efficient. For all of the above, they get a 5-STAR PLUS rating. I am taking out 2 stars for the not so good customer support and for the little problems the Roomba seems to have climbing on carpets. Therefore, the fair rating is a 4-STAR.

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Hairy problem

Used our 580 for approx 2 weeks and very, very satisfied except for major hair buildup on sides of both beater and brush. (Two shorthair cats and a longhaired doxie allow us to live with them, in case you wonder.) Ran unit everyday most of time and it worked perfectly - much improved pickup over our old Discovery unit including better obstacle avoidance and, especially, its ability to maneuver over throw rugs, etc.

BUT even though there would be very little hair on the brush itself, it would stop at least once during each cleaning and ask to have ts "brushes cleaned." I soon realized this only meant hair had wound tightly around both sides of the beater/brush assemblies. This continued for the entire two weeks and was a problem for which iRobot customer service offered no advice nor the possibility of a fix in the near future.

Anyway, if you have NO pets (with hair) you'll probably love this thing. I would have gladly kept ours but returned it simply because of what I feel is a show stopping design problem. (FYI, our Discovery "Pet Edition" ran fine for well over two years without this problem.) I would gladly purchase again if they fix this "kink" maybe with another pet edition? For now the old Discovery comes back downstairs. Let me know iRobot...

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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