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| Roomba docked in the kitchen |
Today my new home helper arrive in the form of a Roomba J5+. I have been toying with the idea of buying a robot vacuum for a while. We have three cats and a small boy so there is always a lot of fluff and muck to clean up.
The package was simple enough take out the roomba and stand, site the stand then insert the roomba. There is an app for the iPhone I downloaded. The first run roomba wanders around the house mapping the floor plan. After which a map appears which you can subdivide into different rooms.
The mapping took quite a while around one hour and forty five minutes. It did produce a pretty good representation of the ground floor.
Once finished with the mapping (and a recharge) we set roomba going vacuuming round. It was did a good job clearing up dust and pet fluff and was small enough go go underneath our sofa and armchair. Even cleaned up the pine needles from the Christmas tree.
It is able to empty its dust collection into the dock which is nice, and should mean it only needs infrequent emptying.
I was able to pair roomba with my existing google home assistant and after naming the areas on the smart map I am able to say "Hey google ask roomba to clean the hall" and google will trigger roomba to go to that area and start a clean.
The unit also came with a mop function attachment. This requires more manual effort, first have to attach a cloth the unit then swap out the normal collection bin with the split mop and vacuum one. The downside to this is that it cannot empty the contents into the dock you need to fill the water prior to use then empty manually once roomba is finished. I would say the it did an adequate but not impressive job mopping, it wasn't able to get out mucky hallway clean from mudstains. It was able to clean the more lightly soiled kitchen floor.
Overall its a great bit of kit, especially as a vacuum. It cleaned up my house nicely and I can schedule it to run. It takes longer than vacuuming yourself however you are not putting in the work.
