Roombas came out in the early 2000s and still can't vacume a floor half as good in 2 hours as a human can in 10 minutes. If the floor has carpet it doesn't even begin to do 10% of the job.
And don't misunderstand this at all, I absolutely love my Dyson.
Can't say how they work on carpet, but for wood flooring, they are most excellent!
A dyson handheld does a better job cleaning under your bed, and you can clean the couches fairly easily with it.
Your $1000 is better spent on a miele canister and a dyson v7.
We use it for a large kitchen and it's okay. Run it before leaving the house and the floor is clean when you get back. Who cares how long it takes or that it is noisy or whatever. It does like 75% as good as a human would and that's good enough most of the time.
But it's true that a part of the time you save is spent on maintenance instead.
There's a quote I always remember while taking 30 seconds to clean the dishwasher:
"The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders." -- Isaac Asimov, 1964
Ours handles cat toys and random junk fairly well, usually doesn't eat cables and does surprisingly well on our hardwood floors. It also gets the lip under the cabinets that usually requires me to get the hand vac, which is nice.
Even calculated at only 10 minutes of time savings, that's 1040 minutes a year at 2x a week; giving me back an entire waking day of time a year (17/hours).
They're great at keeping pet fur and "everyday dust" at bay, though. It's easier to clean your house when the baseline is already taken care of.
Downside: Haven't met a robot able to detect cat poo/barf yet. Gotta be careful...
> Downside: Haven't met a robot able to detect cat poo/barf yet.
That's why I leave some dirt inside when emptying the container. By pure coincidence last time there was enough of this residue to mix with the cat barf and form a neat, dry, cigar-shaped... thing. I had to clean the brush area and the brushes themselves though.