Originally Posted by
Mitsu3000gt
I tried so hard to like my Roomba but I eventually sold it. The dream of never having to vacuum was very appealing to me.
Emptying the dust bin and cleaning the brushes was a chore, and had to be done often enough that it was faster for me to just pull out a "real" vacuum. The dust bin is super tiny. If you live with someone with long hair like I do, prepare to be cutting hair out of the brushes every few days which is super annoying and time consuming. The Roomba took 2 hours to do ~5 minutes of vacuuming with a regular vacuum, and yeah you're not doing any work at the time, but the work comes later when you have to clean it. It couldn't get under my chairs, and bumped certain pieces of furniture hard enough to move them. A "proper" clean with a real vacuum was still needed every now and then because the Roomba has so little power, but it was good for daily dust bunnies. It got stuck on my hardwood transitions and I would have to take any rugs or random items off the floor before running it. If you have a primarily hard-floor zero-clutter environment with no chairs/stools I think they would work better than they did for me. It was so easy to just pull out the canister vac for 5 mins and get a proper clean to boot that I eventually abandoned my Roomba.
The new Roombas have auto-emptying dust bins which is pretty sweet, but I have no clue how well they work.