I love my Roombas. A better job then manual sweeping and they get under the bed.
Can't say how they work on carpet, but for wood flooring, they are most excellent!
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