iRobot Roomba Plus 405 Combo Robot Vacuum & Mop with AutoWash Dock, White

This is my first time trying a robot vacuum, so I have to say that it has been kind of fun, so far. I don't know if you have to do this with other ones, but with this one, you do need to download an app & then hook it up to your Wi-Fi, which was fairly easy to do. The app then walks you thru what you need to do to get set up & then to actually run the robot. The first thing it has you do is clear the area that you are wanting to clean of objects that could get in the way & then have it create a map of the area to be cleaned, which does take a little while. Once the map is created, you can have the robot do a dry sweep or a wet sweep. I chose the dry sweep since I was having it run thru on tile, carpet & wood flooring on the map I created & wasn't sure I wanted to deal with water on all those surfaces. The robot actually did quite a thorough job of sweeping my mapped area, going back & forth, along with moving around things. I watched it the entire time & was quite impressed at how good it was at following the mapped route, removing pet hair & cat sand litter as it moved around. It easily moved from & adjusted itself to clean each of the surfaces it encountered. It does take a lot of time to vacuum & I personally felt that I could have vacuumed the same area with my upright vacuum in about a third of the time, but since it is supposed to be a personal time saver, the timing is not really relevant. You can set it up to run automatically at a designated time but since I have cats, with multiple toys laying all around, I decided not to do this since before it runs, the floor needs to be cleared of small items to prevent damage to the machine. It is a fairly large & heavy machine, with the base & the robot, so it does create an eyesore if you don't have a discreet spot to set it up, close to an electrical outlet. I may try to do some rearranging to create a more discreet place to store it but right now, it's not in the most attractive of spots. It is pretty noisy, too, which I found rather disappointing. Maybe a little quieter than my upright but still too noisy to sit & watch TV while it is running. It's probably best to run it while you are doing other cleaning, so it isn't so distracting. Overall, it does do a good job of cleaning my floors & should help reduce the need to use my upright for a more thorough cleaning as often.

I love love love my Roomba. Does all the work for me