Day 0

Hi, welcome to an engineer's eye view of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner.

First, I'm not an expert writer, so please forgive my writing style. This is my first blog. Of course I've read many other blogs over the past few years, so I have a pretty good idea how they go...

My intention is to try to document some the experiences my family and I have with the Roomba Discovery I bought last night at BBB.

I've known about the Roomba for several years now, but have resisted buying one for several reasons. The primary one being that my wife does 95% of the vacuuming and I'm generally busy with other things, so I just maintained a moderate level of interest without doing anything about it.

The one thing I really dislike about the vacuuming is the noise it makes. We have a Panasonic upright, and while it's a bit quieter than some other uprights, it still makes a lot of racket. When I do the vacuuming, I like to wear hearing protection (over-the-ear muffs) to reduce the noise level. In reading the user reviews on Amazon.com about the Roomba Discovery I noticed a lot of people commented about the tolerable noise level of the Roomba, and how they were able to talk on the phone or watch TV while it operated. It didn't really register with me at that time, but now that we've tried the Roomba I can say that the low noise level is a major feature.

Anyway, after spending a couple of days searching USENET and the web for people's experiences with their Roombas, and consulting with the "boss" and the kids, I went down to our neighborhood BBB (Bed, Bath & Beyond) to see what they had in stock. The only model they carried was the Roomba Discovery, which I knew from going to the irobot site (makers of the Roomba) , is close to to the top-of-the-line Scheduler model.

The price was $280 - 56 (20% discount coupon) = $224 + sales tax

More later...