Roomba is back!
My Roomba had been out of commission for a while, and the apartment showed it.
The Roomba worked great for a few days, and then I noticed that its spinning side brush didn't spin. I didn't think anything of it, imagining that anything smart enough to vacuum my apartment unsupervised knew when it did and didn't need to use its spinning side brush. Wrong. But my real concern was that the battery life was getting very short. I didn't link the two issues, but the Roomba tech support did and told me to send the unit back, though without the battery.
I sent it back, expecting a quick turn around, but it took them a week to notice that they had received it (gotta love FedEx's tracking) and then it turns out that they didn't actually have a new one to send me, and they don't repair them either. It would be a few weeks before they got a new shipment from China.
In the mean time, dust bunnies reproduced like, well, bunnies. And then came their bigger cousins, sock bunnies. And like a creeping fungus, the recyclables started to spread out. Seems that one of the greatest cleaning jobs the Roomba does is training its owner to keep the floor tidy.
A couple of weeks later, to my great surprise, they sent me a whole new retail package, plus an additional virtual wall unit! I don't know how that happened, but I imagine that since it's the oldest unit they sell, that they're trying to clear them out, and the second virtual wall unit was a purchase incentive.
That would have been great news, except in the mean time, I had ordered one of their new longer lasting batteries and second virtual wall unit. I now have three batteries (though one is questionable) and four virtual wall units! Well, if and when I move, I'm sure the extra virtual wall units will come in handy. But now I think I need to get a battery charger to keep all my batteries charged up (the Roomba will charge them, but it takes 12+ hours to charge one, and only an hour to empty one).
I took it in to work to show the guys (wow, our floor is dirty), and they were suitably impressed. Then, as engineers do, we talked about how we'd write the algorithm to clean your floor (and the simple algorithms that bugs seem to have to move their legs), wondered about edge conditions -- literally, like stairs and balconies, and stopped just short of totally taking it apart. In general we marveled over the possibly greatest ever accoutrement to bachelor living.
Roomba is back home and has whipped it's master into straightening up and has done a good job at thinning the heard of the accumulated bunnies. Much better.
The Roomba worked great for a few days, and then I noticed that its spinning side brush didn't spin. I didn't think anything of it, imagining that anything smart enough to vacuum my apartment unsupervised knew when it did and didn't need to use its spinning side brush. Wrong. But my real concern was that the battery life was getting very short. I didn't link the two issues, but the Roomba tech support did and told me to send the unit back, though without the battery.
I sent it back, expecting a quick turn around, but it took them a week to notice that they had received it (gotta love FedEx's tracking) and then it turns out that they didn't actually have a new one to send me, and they don't repair them either. It would be a few weeks before they got a new shipment from China.
In the mean time, dust bunnies reproduced like, well, bunnies. And then came their bigger cousins, sock bunnies. And like a creeping fungus, the recyclables started to spread out. Seems that one of the greatest cleaning jobs the Roomba does is training its owner to keep the floor tidy.
A couple of weeks later, to my great surprise, they sent me a whole new retail package, plus an additional virtual wall unit! I don't know how that happened, but I imagine that since it's the oldest unit they sell, that they're trying to clear them out, and the second virtual wall unit was a purchase incentive.
That would have been great news, except in the mean time, I had ordered one of their new longer lasting batteries and second virtual wall unit. I now have three batteries (though one is questionable) and four virtual wall units! Well, if and when I move, I'm sure the extra virtual wall units will come in handy. But now I think I need to get a battery charger to keep all my batteries charged up (the Roomba will charge them, but it takes 12+ hours to charge one, and only an hour to empty one).
I took it in to work to show the guys (wow, our floor is dirty), and they were suitably impressed. Then, as engineers do, we talked about how we'd write the algorithm to clean your floor (and the simple algorithms that bugs seem to have to move their legs), wondered about edge conditions -- literally, like stairs and balconies, and stopped just short of totally taking it apart. In general we marveled over the possibly greatest ever accoutrement to bachelor living.
Roomba is back home and has whipped it's master into straightening up and has done a good job at thinning the heard of the accumulated bunnies. Much better.
posted by Mark at 8:49 AM
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