I am mesmerized by our new robotic vacuum (2019)

my wife showed up with one she found on clearance and then with some additional discounts. I was skeptical but every time it runs the little dustbin is completely full. I figure if it didn't run, all that dirt, dust, pet hair would still be on the floor. I wonder if all the roombas gossip about how dirty our floors are to other roombas over wifi..

Same here - we got a Neato one and I'd end up just standing there watching it. Totally fascinating - more than once I even got it out to show to people visiting! n:)

The Neato ones are a bit more methodical - they have a simple time-of-flight rotating laser sensor that does some SLAM-style stuff to map out the room which means it can do long continuous back-and-forth paths across the room (random image I found that explains it nicely: https://www.generationrobots.com/img/cms/Navigation-Algorith...) It has a charging base thing - it has a special pattern of stripes (kinda like a barcode I guess) behind a human-opaque panel that it uses to locate the charger.

While it was nice to just set the thing off and leave it to do its thing, it is not without problems though:

- it would very happily suck-up and chew cables or errant socks etc, and/or push low stuff around in front of it (e.g shoes). You had to spend time picking up phone charging cables and shoes etc before starting.

- it was not very accurate when it came to working around slanted chair/table legs (since its laser beam would only pick a point approx 5cm off of the ground, it would often hit the lower part of the leg that was in its path but that it could not see)

- it would often get stuck "under" things since there was about 1.5cm of extra height above the laser, and it feels like a lot of IKEA furniture is all just high enough for it to drive under and get wedged because it could not see it.

- it would sometimes get stuck in situations where there was a very tight space between two things (e.g. dining chair and a wall)but where in theory it was wide enough for it to drive down - it would end up trying to reverse out, but actually managing to reverse into the wall and jack its self up so the wheels lost traction.

- it does not know if it has "missed" something or done a good job, so often stubborn bits of fluff don't get picked up.

We've now had to retire ours because we got new carpets and it seems to get stuck a lot on the new carpet that is a bit thicker, often doing wheel spins for 30 seconds at a time. This seems to really confuse the SLAM algo since after it regains traction it ends up just driving straight into walls and stuff, despite having a laser sensor to tell it there was a wall there ... I guess it used some sort of encoding from its wheels as input too (perhaps as a effort to ignore "unexpected" laser returns - e.g. perhaps intended to ignore people pets when it has already mapped a room?)

We've replaced it with a dyson cordless stick vacuum thing with a wall-charger-dock thing. It doesn't take that much longer to do it by hand when you factor in the prep-time (picking up cables, moving dining chairs away from the table, moving things far away out from the wall etc etc), rescuing stuck robot time, or manual pick-ups of things it missed required afterwards, and then moving all of your chairs etc back into position. It is also nice to not have to bend down so much to move the robot one around, or empty its dustbin.

I do not trust Eufy brand anymore. We had a Eufy RoboVac and within its warranty period, battery went bust. When attached to its station, it gave some sound errors which is apparently tied to its battery. I contacted support several times, reminded their obligation for warranty period but they did nothing. They asked me to find a "certified technician" to get a report such that this malfunction was present when I made the purchase. I asked what do they want as "certified technician" and where can I get one. They stopped replying. This took a week.

Fortunately I bought the item from Amazon. I issued a dispute and within minutes they created a return label and issued a refund.

I now have a Roomba. I'm pretty happy so far.

When I buy something off another site…

- Will I have to register an account? Will I have to take time unsubscribing from the email lists they sign me up for?

- Will the checkout form work? Will it be secure? Will it be a single page, or will there be separate pages of shipping info, billing info, payment method, confirmation of sale, and receipt?

- Will any of those pages be broken, forcing me to start over?

- When will it show up? I'm not even so impatient that I need the "two day thing" (I usually pick a later date for a $1 Amazon digital credit anyway), but, when? There are nearly never estimates, and about half the remaining MIGHT send a tracking number later.

Other things crop up, but basically there's countless little things that can go wrong and you if you pick Amazon they _all_ go away.

True, but a 5 minute search for a competitor that'll save you $10 is effectively you working at $120/h in regards to your wallet.

Sure, I wish I could claim otherwise, but in my experience, it's almost never worth going for one-stop buys :/