I have just joined the ranks of Roomba owners! iRobot Roomba 530 Robotic Vacuum
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I’ve been interested in the Roomba since it first came out, but back then, I felt like it was probably a good idea to wait and see how it did for a while before buying one. I’m glad I waited, because this 5th. generation Roomba 530 seems to have ironed out just about all the complaints and issues I heard voiced about earlier models.
(I haven’t seen this one get stuck under furniture it wasn’t able to get out from under, or get caught trying to go over an area rug - and so far, it has always successfully found its charging base when it was finished.)
Apparently, the 535 model gives you a wireless remote control you can use to duplicate the functions on buttons on the top of the unit - but I see limited value in that option. (Is it really that hard to walk over to the Roomba and press a button on top of it to start it cleaning?)
Even higher upgrade models like the 560 do have the arguably very nice feature of being able to set a clock on them, and program them to clean automatically on a schedule. Now that I’ve used my new Roomba 530 a little wihile though, I suspect that feature isn’t going to work as well for people as they initially believe, either. The Roomba seems to be so good at picking up hair and lint, it quickly winds gobs of it around its rollers, and winds up shutting down in the middle of cleaning, asking you to please remove and clean them. The dust bin fills quickly, as well - so you’d have to remember to check and empty it between every vacuuming job you had programmed.
As for overall operation though? I found Roomba to be quite good at vacuuming. The 530 will detect extra dirty spots on the carpet while it’s running, and goes into a deeper cleaning mode, running in small circles around the dirty area, until it deems it clean enough to move on. (A blue light comes on to tell you when it’s doing this.) The owners’ manual claimed it would need about 16 hours to charge its battery before initial use - but mine said it was fully charged and ready to go after more like 8. (Maybe the battery shipped with a partial charge though?) It included 2 “lighthouses” which run on 2 “D” batteries each. (This was another owners’ manual discrepancy; the book said they took “C” batteries!) They have a power button on the front of them so you can turn them on only when you need them, and a 3 position switch that controls the brightness of the infra-red beam they shoot out to create a virtual wall for Roomba not to cross. The brighter the setting, the further the beam will go, up to about 8 feet from the lighthouse. To conserve the batteries, it’s best to select the shortest beam distance that will still serve your purpose though.
A couple of spare parts were included in the box with my Roomba. One appears to be a yellow plastic replacement “end cap” for one of the spinning rollers in the unit. The other was a spare filter. (In addition to emptying the Roomba’s dust bin and cleaning its roller brushes, it has a slide-out filter that seems to need cleaning off after each vacuuming session too.) You can see how dirty the filter is getting through a transparent plastic portion of the bottom of the Roomba…. a nice touch.
With all the comments I’ve seen about the spinning “bristle wheel” type brush the Roomba has sticking out of one side to clean baseboards and corners, I’m really surprised a spare one of them wasn’t included. (Surely it needs replacement far more often than an end-cap for the roller brush inside the Roomba?)
Lastly, there was one more odd piece in my box; a long rubber strip with an adhesive back along one side of it. It looks like a bumper of some sort that you’re supposed to stick to the Roomba and wrap around one portion of it. But the instruction manual makes no mention of it, nor do the photos on the box seem to illustrate it as being on the units shown. So for now, I left it off. I can’t see why it would be necessary, really.
All in all, I’d highly recommend the Roomba 530 to anyone who doesn’t have much free time to keep up with vacuuming, or who is in the market for a new vacuum cleaner anyway. You’ll still have to make sure your cords and small parts to kids’ toys and the like are off the floor first, and Roomba needs a little care and cleaning between operations - but it’ll save you a lot of work!
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