iRobot Roomba 880 Vacuum Cleaning Robot For Pets and Allergies

We've had Hazel now for about 4 days, and we are impressed. Having been in high tech all of my career, and the last two in motion robotics, I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised how effective the product is in its tasks.Our setting: Our household consists of two people, one cat, and any number of family and friends hanging out. Our home is a 5000+ single level with an open concept kitchen, living and eating area; other rooms are more traditionally separated rooms. For the most part we are generally fastidious about keeping the house dust free, so I was a bit dubious about the value of spending $600 on another vacuum system (a high tech thing).Enter Hazel, the iRobot 880. In the course of four days I have emptied the dust bin numerous times. I have no idea where she is finding all of this stuff, but it IS ending up in her vacuum bin. She leaves the dock at 1:00am and runs about 3 hours on a single charge (I know because I woke up at 4:00am the second morning and she was still working.) She easily cleans three large rooms on a single charge. We move her in the afternoon, on occasion, to the master bedroom and bath for a general clean for about an hour. That seems to do the trick.PROs:- HEPA filter is a BIG plus in not allowing vacuumed particulates to be blown back into the room.- Noise is about half the decibel level of an in-wall system. You know she is there, but she isn't intrusive with the noise level.- Picks up pretty much everything in her path.- Excellent maneuverability around objects in her path (chair legs, bar stools, table legs, etc.). She works herself under the table in spite of the chair legs!- The roller system (wheels) works very well on hardwood floors without worry of scratches, and the side brush seems to clean fairly effectively against baseboards, without scratching them.- Setup and scheduling took me all of 4-5 minutes. Very intuitive and straightforward. (Not sure why others state they have had problems with this.)- Lights and buttons on the top of the vacuum are easy to read and address.- Vacuum suction works very well on hardwood floors, sturdy throw rugs that are less that ¾" in height and have gradually inclined edges. Hazel just seems to run right up on the carpet and do her work.- The handle on the top of the robot is handy for moving Hazel around to another area, and automatically shuts off the vacuum when lifted.- Intuitive software returns Hazel to her docking station when she is in need of a recharge or finished.- 3 ½" height gets her underneath a great number of our furniture pieces, cleaning where most dust bunnies hide.- Low pile carpet cleaning seems to be a solid feature. Hazel cleaned our media room carpet with the same ease as the hardwood floors, although there seems to be a greater drag on the daily battery charge.- The laser light towers work well to contain Hazel into a specific area.IMPROVEMENTS:- The remote is kind of useless. Not sure what it is intended to do other than eliminate the need to bend down once in a while. I'd like to see the money spent on another useful feature.- I'm not convinced that the zig-zag motion is the best cleaning cycle. It would appear to me that a more energy-efficient path cycle could be an improvement here.- Dust bin could be a bit larger, although cleaning it after every cycle is not difficult or an issue.- Price is an obstacle to greater market penetration for the 880 and 980 versions.- I haven't seen any baseboard or table and chair leg damage, but some of the "bumping into" sounds are loud. My be nice to have a softer rubber bumper on the vacuum, or a felt bumper to eliminate any possible damage.- Would have liked 1-2 more laser light towers for the price.On balance, this is a crazy, cool device that has value in our home cleaning activities, particularly in the sense that Hazel can run automatically in the off hours without human supervision. Given that we have had it less than a week, I am very impressed with the product and at this point would highly recommend it to anyone who has an animal or wife that sheds hair or fur. I'll be back in a month to update this review after we've had a bit more time with Hazel.

We've had the Roomba 880 for a few days now, and I have to admit that I really, really like it. If I could, I'd give it 4 1/2 stars! It came somewhat charged and because I was dying to see what it's really like, we set it up and let it run around the house for awhile before it was clear that it needed to charge.Setup: General setup was easy. Take Roomba out of the box, pull out the cardboard from the underside, set up day and time, plug in base and it's pretty much ready to clean.Cleaning: It's fairly impressive how this little robot runs around the house in such a completely random way and yet does actually catch most of the dirt and debris on the floors. We just let it do it's thing, and within 20 minutes or so I could tell that the floor was actually looking CLEAN. Awesome!Scheduling: We placed the Roomba base where the kitchen and living room meet, and set it up to run daily at 10am while we are at work. I unfortunately can't speak to whether or not this process works as when I came home yesterday, Roomba was stuck on our area rug.Cliff Sensors: Being stuck on the rug brings me to the only downside of Roomba that I have identified so far. Our living room area rug has a black border and then geometric black, brown and white squares throughout. Roomba has these fancy "cliff sensors" that identify when it's too close to a ledge (ie stairs, landing, etc) so that it will stop and not fall off. Well, Roomba thinks black lines or splashes of color are cliffs, and will automatically shut off and give you an error 6. At first, I was actually really upset because I'm thinking "I just spent almost $600 and this robot won't clean my rug!?!" But, I found a workaround, and now Roomba happily cleans the entire living room, including the rug. Solution: I cut little pieces of white copy paper and taped the paper over the sensors. Our house is one level, so stairs or landings are not an issue, so the cliff sensors aren't needed anyway. Now that Roomba doesn't think it's going to fall to it's death, it does it's job -- quite well. Today will be the test to see if Roomba sucessfully cleaned the house while we were gone and made it back to it's base.The Base: Roomba is smart enough (if in the same room and has enough battery charge) to go back to it's base when the battery depletes. You just need to make sure that the base is sitting in a position that the Roomba can easily dock to, or it will keep turning around and trying to dock unsuccessfully. We put the back of the base flush with the wall and it's been fine so far.The Lighthouses/Virtual Walls: They are awesome, but the manual does a terrible job of explaining these. Essentially, the virtual wall keeps Roomba from crossing a virtual line. So, for example, I only want Roomba to clean my kitchen, living and dining rooms, but not go down the hall to the bedrooms each day. I put one of the virtual wall/lighthouses on virtual wall mode and set it with it's back against the wall to the entrance of the hall, with the logo facing towards the other side of the hall way. This essentially creates a perfect "wall" across the entrance to the hallway, and Roomba will not cross it. The Lighthouse took me longer to figure out. The rays come out in a kind of 3 way direction from the front of the little box thing -- directly to the front and then rays diagonally from the left and the right of the box. I want Roomba to go down the hallway (when I put it in the hallway) and into each bedroom. So I place the box in Lighthouse mode in the doorway of each bedroom, with the back of the box flush with one side of the doorway, and the logo would be facing the other side of the doorway. As Roomba comes down the hallway, it talks to the lighthouse and the lighthouse gives it permission to come into the room. When Roomba is done, it leaves the room and moves onto the next lighthouse.Overall: I really like it. Totally worth the money. A few hiccups, but the reality is this thing is a man-made robot, not a human, so it's obviously going to have some issues that will require workarounds. For us, a little paper taped to the bottom of Roomba was reasonable because I can now enjoy dinner with my family while Roomba is happily cleaning our house!