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I feel like the major consideration is: do you have kids or pets? Then get one. Otherwise, probably not worth it.

If you have small-ish kids, you end up vacuuming everyday one way or the other. A Roomba's a decent stand-in for that. When my kids aren't at home, I mostly get by with my stick vacuum. (There the battery-driven ones really are nice.) With the stick vacuum it doesn't tend to leave my cables and rugs in random places, which makes the daily non-kid-time vacuuming similar levels of effort.

I assume pets are a similar deal, though I'm not a pet person.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before getting the Roomba is that it vacuums a lot of places I wouldn't regularly get to on my own (e.g. under the sofa), and there's some benefit of having a cleaning session frequently that gets to a lot of those places that are otherwise hard to reach. But again, with kids not at home, I run it about once a week.

I'm genuinely curious about the mopping ones since I don't mop often, and always like it when I do. ;-)




Regarding pets: I decided to give a cheaper Eufy RoboVac model a try a couple years ago to help keep things under control with a dog in the house. The maintenance on it to remove entangled dog hair was just too much in the end. Sure, manual vacuums have a similar problem but seem easier to maintain. The RoboVac had no computer vision (local or cloud) to help with obstacles, but that wasn't really as much as an issue as mechanical failures.

Also, my dog wanted to kill it.


Doesnt a Roomba eat lego bricks and other small toys?


Yes, this is why my Roomba doesn't get much use anymore in our house. There's always a loose toy somewhere. We have to have the kids pick up all the toys first before we can vacuum. At that point we end up using a Miele canister vac instead. We can see what we're about to vacuum up. It ended up being the better purchase over the Roomba.


I don't usually let it go in the kids room unless it's right after they've cleaned. The main problem areas in the apartment are right in front of the door, where they take off their shoes (so much sand, always!) and under the kitchen table. And from my messes: in the kitchen, from cooking. Those are the areas I was vacuuming most days by hand before. Again, the main problematic things for me are dragging around cables (from my stereo) and moving rugs, but those aren't more than a few seconds to put back. It gets stuck on something else maybe every 2-3 runs.




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