My Roomba 405 is a good domestic helper. I used it every weekend. Put it on the floor and turn it on, Roomba makes a happy noise and starts to clean the floor. It circulates until it bumps into any object, then it makes a random turn until it bumps into next object. Some time, it just makes a random turn in the middle of a straight run. It is fun to watch. But sometime it can be frustrated – Roomba turns away right before it hits the next pieces of trash. Sometime, I just block its way to make it turns back to the trash to suck it up.
With its random turn capability, my little girl and I can play game “get the Roomba to the other side”. It is not easy to do. But we always have a good laugh.
Roomba is excellent to get under couches, beds, chairs, desks and other low profile furniture to clean. A regular vacuums just could not get to such narrow spaces unless you move furniture away. But it also creates a little game for my family with name like “find my bed room slippers”. The Roomba can pushes them deep under the bed. We have to fish them out. Now, we put the bed room slippers along the wall so they stay there.
Roomba loves going into bathrooms. That’s good. Bathrooms always need good cleaning. Roomba bumps around in the bathroom to such up dirt and sweep up hair. I am amazed to see how much hair it picks up every week.
Roomba is well designed. You can empty its trash bin with a single push of a lock. The hair brush, roller brush, brush guard all can be taken out for cleaning. The supplied hair cleaning tool is very handy to cut and pull hair out from the brush.
Only draw back on the 405 is that it does not come with a charge/base station. Without it, the Roomba does not return to its homebase after cleaning. It can stop anywhere in the house. That’s another game in my house – finding the Roomba. Roomba does make a little victory sound once awhile to help you to locate her.
Overall speaking, I am very happy with my Roomba 405.
Follow up after 10 months usage
My Roomba stopped working twice in these past 10 months. The battery just would not charge after 2 months usage. A call to technical support with less than 10 minute hold time showed that I should reset the Roomba. Technical support gave me some special button push sequence to reset it. Roomba charges well after than.
After nine month usage, my Roomba 450 only clean for less than 5 minutes before it stopped even with a fully charged battery. Another technical support call directed me to push the front bumper when it stopped and listen for the beep sequence. A two beeps indicated a trouble side brush. Taking the side brush out, there was a lot of hair on its shaft. Removing the hair returned the Roomba Discovery to full health.
Reference
- Roomba’s Technical Support Telephone: 877-855-8593
- Roomba’s home page on IRobot
- Roomba 400 Beep Code