I don't think there are tens of millions still in use.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.
> The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house.
Hard disagree, because vacuuming is something you often need to do daily. Spending 10 min/day becomes over an hour a week. That's a significant chunk. If you have smooth floors, running a Roomba kind of becomes a no-brainer.
On the other hand, I only need to dust once a week, and that takes all of 10 minutes. Cleaning the bathroom is similarly once a week (assuming you wipe/brush the sink and toilet bowl as necessary after use).
Reducing vacuuming time, to me, is the #1 thing you can do to save cleaning time, if you live in a Roomba-compatible space.
I agree with this take, it has been my experience as well. The robot vacuum isn't there so you never need to vacuum, the robot vacuum is there so you can have decently clean floors daily and only need to do the deeper cleaning once a week or so.
But I also get the difficulty when you have a space with lots of larger debris around. The robot vacuum was excellent before kids. Now with little kids that will leave toys and other obstacles all over the place, it requires diligence to pick up after them (and work to teach them to clean up their toys and socks) to ensure the vacuum can be effective.
Easy counter: people with children. We vacuum the dining area daily because of the kid.
We also have building ventilation that is sadly unfiltered, so we have more dust than normal coming in.
We don't vacuum everything daily but a robot would really help us, we just won't buy an internet connected one or something that's very pricey. Our existing vacuum is crazy efficient and quiet.
I also vacuum my dining/kitchen area daily, I actually sweep de re vacuuming, and it only takes me a couple of minutes to do it and this is part of the many things I wouldn't even want to get rid of as it is one among many other things thay allows my body to be active.
Some people install domotic, always choose escalators and elevators over stairs, do everything they need to not move their ass during the day only to pay for a gym pass and spend more time at the gym than they have provably saved avoiding "living".
If you get a robot that automated it you'll feel the difference. Floors get a lot of dust. Especially if you have pets but even without.
I would not personally vacuum daily but having completely automated, vacuuming and mopping, every day has produced wonderful floors. Less work than what we did before too.
There's no germs involved here. Dustin on the floor is dirty socks, and you can peel crumbs and other things under foot under foot. It all goes away if floors are cleaned daily.
>Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them
With furnishing optimized for dust generation (less materials where the dust-shitting microbes live, like material curtains) and daily Roomba runs (plus eventual air filter running in the background) there is very little to dust off of surfaces. If there's little dust on the floor, it doesn't get kicked up and doesn't land on things. Ergo - Roomba makes dusting easier.
Keeping a basic air purifier (i.e. fan strapped to HEPA filter) at low power but constantly on would also help with the dust problem, I believe. There's not going to be much dust on things if it gets sucked out of the air before landing on things.
A lot of people probably bought them for the novelty and then decided they weren't really all that useful for their homes and lifestyles. At least that's what a number of friends have told me. Cordless stick vacs also came in and made a lot of vacuuming jobs quicker and easier.
I am one of those weirdos! I bought a roomba in 2015 and it's still going. Second battery, sixth set of rollers and brush, god knows how many filters. Mine's also a dumb one: no wifi or pathfinding, just boring old "drives around until it smacks into shit" navigation.
I gave it googly eyes in 2017 and named it Harold.
I used to have a similar dumb one (Roomba 860 if memory serves) and it would take the same path over and over again in certain corners of my house, which meant my carpet ended up with unsightly wheel tracks on it from the repetition. I don't think it did a very good job vacuuming either, no matter how much it ran, a normal vacuum would always pull a boatload more crud up.
It's an interesting idea but it just didn't work for me and I wouldn't consider buying another.
It's not for hardcore use for sure, not a replacement for a proper vacuuming. I use it in my office/part of my basement, it gets the vast majority of stuff up and keeps the cat hair under control.
I don't know that I'd buy another, especially because the new ones creep me out with all the cameras and such, but as long as I can keep this one running, it does a good enough job.
Yeah - they don't work well at all. And work from home is definitely incompatible with roombas. Those things are loud and run for a long time. Both ours are in the storage room collecting dust.
Unless you design your house and buy your furnitures taking these roomba into account, they get stuck nearly every where or at the first sock left on the ground by someone in your household. They have a number of wearable most owner will not even want to replace and will start being inefficient rather quickly. Add to that some battery wear and I don't think there is a lot of +5y old devices in the wild.
I and most people I know went back to regular vacuum cleaners. The thing is, those robots really don't solve a real problem as vacuuming and mopping are the easiest and quickest job when it comes to cleaning the house. Dusting all the furnitures + objects on top of them and cleaning the bathroom and toilets correctly are both much more time consuming and annoying jobs.