dtobias's Full Review: iRobot 5900 Scooba Robotic Wet/Dry Vacuum
Since I'm a gadget geek, and I hate cleaning floors, I bought the Scooba last year in the hopes this would help in both of these things. Scooba, by the makers of the vacuuming robot Roomba (but, despite what Saturday Night Live said, not a feminine hygiene robot called Woomba!), is supposed to replace all of those old-fashioned mops and buckets for tile-floor cleaning, going all by itself around your floor putting down cleaning solution from its clean tank and sucking up dirt into its dirty tank; it's got two tanks so that the clean solution always stays clean, unlike the stuff in the bucket when you're mopping the archaic way.
Unfortunately, though some others (including here on Epinions) seem to have gotten good use out of their Scoobas, mine has been nothing but trouble. From the outset, it didn't look that great for my situation. It deals best with decent-size rooms that are entirely contiguous and simple in shape; I don't have any. My condominium has a large area that's covered with tiles, but it stretches from the breakfast nook in the front through the kitchen and hallway to the dining and living area to the back, with walls and counters and hard-to-move furniture all over the place in between. If this thing were a bit smarter, maybe it could navigate through all of this and clean everything at once; now, that would be something to see. As it is, they recommend that I do each room separately, laboriously getting the furniture out of the way and setting up the "electronic fence" that comes with the Scooba to send out a beam telling it not to leave through the open doorway so it stays where it belongs.
Then, since you're doing small areas one at a time, you've got to figure out for yourself just how much of the cleaning solution to put in, since the full load (that they give you a measuring cup to measure out; actually, it's a concentrated solution you've got to mix with the appropriate amount of water) is more than you need for such a small piece of floor. All in all, it's enough fuss and bother that you don't really gain that much over mopping the floor by hand. Maybe somebody with a large ballroom would be in a different situation in this regard... but not ''too'' large, or the thing will run out of solution and battery power before it finishes.
OK, I managed to figure out what areas of my condo to consider a "room", and set the thing loose in one of them. That's when I discovered that my relationship with Scooba would be distinctly high-maintenance. The thing constantly had something to complain about, whether it was the clean tank not full enough, the dirty tank too full, the tank unit not seated properly, the battery running out of power, or sometimes just some inscrutable combination of sounds and flashing lights that were apparently trying to communicate something of which I had no clue. It sometimes required attending to it several times before finally completing the cleaning of the floor.
All of this was while the thing was still new. I then mostly let it sit on the shelf for months on end, as it was so much bother to use it. Meanwhile, I kept the battery in the charging base they provided, so that it would be ready for the next use whenever I got up the nerve to try it again.
Eventually, I was ready to give it another try, so I put the battery in it, mixed up some cleaning solution, and set it loose. It started running, but about a minute later it stopped with another of its cryptic whines. Looking in the manual, I determined that its problem this time was that the battery was dead. This was odd, since I'd just taken it off the charger, where the light indicated a complete charge. But I charged it overnight again before making another attempt, but this time it sputtered to a stop even sooner.
This led me to the iRobot Web site, where they discussed the problem with battery life that I was experiencing. It seems that if you do what I did, leave the battery in the charger all the time, that actually caused the battery to wear out sooner, so they now don't recommend that you do this. It's OK to leave the battery inside the Scooba and plug that in to the AC cord to keep the battery charged, but if you use the external charger you should remove the battery once it's charged. Anyway, since I didn't heed this advice (which they didn't start giving, apparently, until after I already had the unit and they started getting problem reports from other customers), my battery needed replacement, and fortunately the 1-year warranty was still valid at that time. So I went through the rigamarole of going through their Web-based customer service, which required answering a whole series of rounds of questions (some of whose answers were already given in earlier rounds of the correspondence, but I had to repeat them again). My last message in the series, where I gave the address to ship the replacement battery, seemed to get lost and I had to ask them "what's up?" a few weeks later to get back on track, but finally I got a new battery and the unit once again worked as well (or poorly) as it used to do.
OK... it's now a few months later, and my floors are getting pretty grungy, so I finally get around to attempting to use Scooba again. The battery's OK, but as the unit whirs around the room, it stays entirely dry, never spitting out the cleaning fluid from its tank. So, I go once again to their Web site to look for troubleshooting tips, and find a page of suggestions of what to do if this happens (right up there on the first page of tech tips, so it's apparently a common problem). Unfortunately, none of this seems to help; the thing stays dry.
In the end, I put Scooba back on the shelf, and cleaned my floor with the Swiffer WetJet instead.
After all of this, I'm still somewhat impressed with the clever engineering of this gadget, which manages to get to all corners of a room by a weird series of maneuvers starting with a spiral from the center and continuing by sensing the walls and following them. If, as is likely with future models, they get the bugs out of it, it could prove very useful. And, if they increase the room-mapping intelligence to deal with a complex floorplan of multiple connected rooms all in one pass, it would be even more useful for people in my situation. Heck, maybe a future model some day will be able to "live" at a docking station where it can fill itself with cleaning fluid, dump out its dirty water, recharge its batteries, self-clean itself, and wake up and start cleaning the house on its own when it's time for it. But we're still a long way from that, and right now all I've got is an expensive paperweight.
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