I Like Ike!
Like most people, I really like having a clean and tidy house but I can’t stand doing housework. And now that we have started putting in light-colored hardwood floors throughout the house it is much easier to see the dust and hair build-up than it was with carpet. And Justin brings home his fair share of dirt, Pigpen-style, from day care, although less so now that he mostly walks rather than crawls. So our nice new clean bedroom had started looking very lived-in very quickly.
Enter Ike. Ike is our new Roomba. A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner developed by a company call iRobot, after the Isaac Asimov novel, hence the name Ike. (And there was much groaning.) Roombas are like Tivos: until you own one you just can’t appreciate what a paradigm shift they represent, whether in TV watching or vacuuming. You are an ideal Tivo customer if you have limited free time and you enjoy watching TV. You are an ideal Roomba customer if you have limited free time and you’d rather be watching TV than vacuuming. If this is you, I highly recommend that you buy one. Full disclosure: Colevault.com does not own any shares of iRobot … but my Dad does.
Rewind to last Christmas. The three of us visited my Dad and his family in San Antonio. My Dad has a very big house, 2 Welsh Corgis, and 2 teenagers. Their floors used to be coated with a fine layer of dog hair and the detritus of teenaged boys, but then they got Robby. Robby is also a Roomba, possibly Ike’s 2nd cousin. They liked it so much that they bought another one for the upstairs. (The iRobot guys are pretty good but they haven’t yet perfected the jet-powered levitating Roomba.)
My Dad is an interesting character. When he discovers a product that he really likes he invariably buys stock in that company, and then supports that company unequivocally for as long as he is a shareholder, which is usually forever. (And he’ll go out of his way to avoid products made by competing companies.) For example, he invested heavily in Gillette, probably back in the Carter administration, and has bought nothing but Gillette razors and Duracell batteries ever since. So once he discovered iRobot it was inevitable that he would buy some stock, and though it doesn’t look like it’s done much in the last few quarters I think that the concept can and should catch on.
The model we got is the Roomba Scheduler, which we got for $264 at Bed Bath and Beyond ($330 - $66 with a 20% coupon), and there’s also a $50 rebate from BBB right now. If you’re going to get one of these, getting one without the scheduling option doesn’t make much sense. With this you are able to program the Roomba to run on a set schedule so you can come home to a clean room or area of your house. We’ve got ours set to run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon. It’s nice to come home from work to find the bedroom and bathroom floors freshly vacuumed.
Now, you do have to do one thing before you can let Roomba loose in a room, and that’s coil up or somehow conceal power cords, speaker cables, extension cords, phone cables, etc., so that the Roomba doesn’t get tangled up. If that’s not possible Roomba comes with two “virtual walls” which transmit infrared beams that will prevent Roomba from crossing into areas with cables, or falling down stairs. We elected to use this as impetus to force us to keep the floors tidy, clothes and shoes in the closet, and cords nicely organized, otherwise we might come home to a find Ike buried in pile of dirty laundry, spinning its wheels, with an overheated radiator. The biggest change that needed to be made was for Susan to stop using the area under her side of the bed as a file cabinet, so if Ike can accomplish that then the vacuuming is gravy. 
So on his first run Ike sucked up a pretty scary amount of dust and hair. Now, the room hadn’t exactly been swept regularly prior to that, so we expected the next run to yield a lot less dirt. Well, 48 hours later, after his next run, the dust chamber was nearly full again - just as much dirt as the first time. Each cleaning cycle takes an hour, though there’s a “Max” setting that goes longer. It covers every inch of the room, gently working around furniture guided by its front bumper/sensor. And it gets to places you’d never get to with a normal vacuum: all the way under the bed, under the nightstands, and under the dresser. It goes on and off rugs with ease and crosses the threshold onto the tile floor in the bathroom, though we had to pick up the rugs in there. When it’s done it finds its way back to its “garage”, the charging station which we’ve installed out of sight under the dresser. The entire concept, design, and execution of this thing is flawless, and they’ve even copied Apple’s slick packaging. Last but not least, I was also able to hack it, install Linux, and program it to fetch the newspaper, bring me beers, and babysit Justin. There’s isn’t much not to like about Ike.
