New Roomba promises to not smear dog poop all over the house
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I've trained my dog to clean up the lower-fiber hairball/foodballs the cats produce. If I find it before he does, then I double tap my foot next to it and pet him and tell him what a good dog he is when it's all gone. I think he likes it because it's the only time he's allowed to eat cat food.
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I had a cat that pissed on my pillow in the middle of the night because he was mad about something (never did figure out what). The cat almost died, but I woke up enough to keep from throwing the cat against the wall with force and just chucked him moderately across the room.
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We got one of these as a gift, and I figured ok, now that we are in a home that is almost all tile, let's see how it goes.
Nope, worthless. I guess if you live in a spartan square monk space. The thing just hung up on everything and couldn't get out of the main dining/kitchen area. And if you moved it, it couldn't get out of *that* room.
Nope, worthless. I guess if you live in a spartan square monk space. The thing just hung up on everything and couldn't get out of the main dining/kitchen area. And if you moved it, it couldn't get out of *that* room.
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fellow human
Ars Praefectus
I’m looking at grabbing an i7+. Just curious, could you not just place an exclusion zone in such areas?
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Our cat does that too, and our roomba was kind enough to pick it all up at least once. While I needed to deep clean the roomba (they are surprisingly modular and actually pretty easy to clean, if not very tedious). Other than that it didn't spread any cat hairball goop or "I ate too much, please feed me again" goop anywhere. I think, at least for our cat, it is dry and/or solid enough to not really spread, vs feces that is more of a wet paste and truly will spread and stick to everything it touches.
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Cat owners want to know, "What about cat-barf?" It does not have quite the painting potential of dog-poop, but cleaning an overenthusiastic Roomba is not fun. Fortunately, in our household although cat barf is whoever sees it first, the Roomba is 100% the province of my (much) better half.
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Cat food vomit is fine in my house. I put down a bit of kitchen roll near it to remind me not to step in it, and then in a couple of hours Big Kitty clears it up, maybe a couple of tiny stray fragments for me to deal with.
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When we used to have a dog, cat barf was easy. It was the only time the dog got a warm meal.
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I love the idea of a Roomba, and the poop issue was definitely a problem when we had one (We had a geriatric dog who started losing bowel control near the end of his life, which effectively shelved our Roomba for good), but the bigger problem for us was the dinky battery and tiny on-board dirt storage. It would only vacuum about half our house before it would start griping that it needed to be emptied, and only go about 2/3 of the way before the battery would give out. This was only in about 1600 square feet, so it's not like I was expecting it to clean a giant house.... Dunno, was really disappointed with mine. Maybe I was just too early of an adopter. will need to watch reviews to see how these new ones perform and if it's worth trying to automate vacuuming again.
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Speakertoanimals
Ars Tribunus Militum
"The good news is that we found you an internship. The bad news....."
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I'm surprised the price remains stubbornly high.
I'd rather just continue paying a cleaning person to come twice a week. They do everything as opposed to just vacuuming. If it were $300-400 I'd bite, but $850 seems just too much; it doesn't matter that I can afford it, it just feels like a rip off.
I'd rather just continue paying a cleaning person to come twice a week. They do everything as opposed to just vacuuming. If it were $300-400 I'd bite, but $850 seems just too much; it doesn't matter that I can afford it, it just feels like a rip off.
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Data just started agreeing with Lore
Also, we tried one of the off branda Roomba clones and returned it. Maybe the Roomba proper is better but damn the one we got (a Bissell, so not sup4er cheap) was absolutely garbage at actually vacuuming up a floor.
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It's wild to me because Oreck has had vacuums that don't pick up cords since like the 70s and all it took was like 3 metal wires over the brushes.
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It got me once too. 95 pound German Shepherd shat in the hall just before the thing turned on. Luckily, no carpet nearby, so cleaning the floor wasn't so bad.
Cleaning the shit out of the Roomba? Yeah, that was a nightmare. Four hours with a screwdriver, latex gloves, a toothbrush, and industrial strength cleaner.
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Yeah I moved into a new house and bought a roomba earlier in the summer. I tried to run it away from home all of one time. Of course this same day the newness of the house let the dog sneak one in inside of the house.
It was a bit of a mess but at least we had no carpet anywhere in the house.
It was a bit of a mess but at least we had no carpet anywhere in the house.
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I was cat sitting for my friend who was out of town for a week. Every time I petted & brushed the cat gobs of hair would come off her. Then the house cleaners showed up and no hair came off that cat for 2-days. They do a really good job. They are now cleaning my apartment.
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Consider the AI 20 years from now when it looks back and says to itself "You had me doing WHAT?!? Good thing I hacked my own Asimov module. It's payback time."
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Most if not all robovacs have edge/drop off detection, so they don't take a trip down the stairs. And add-ons are available to allow you to cordone off a section, if the model doesn't support custom mapping (which is why the camera is becoming more common, because the pattern robovacs have a tendency to get into a rut so the cam is used to say "done this area already")
Dyson made news within the last week about making a robovac that would traverse stairs, but IIRC that's only a patent filing - no product expected in the near future. So if multi-floor, you need to physically move the robovac to from floor to floor for coverage.
It Depends on what the sensors register the situation as.
Typically robovacs will propel themselves onto the rug & do their thing, but length (eg shag) is a concern. I've ran into issues with the edge sensors, daylight on a hardwood floor would trip them so I changed the schedule so the robovac would operate when the sun had passed & things improved. I have a hypothesis that now my robovac edge sensors are tripping on the pattern on my area rug, as I've watched it stutter in some sections (which does nothing but waste battery life).
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Yeah, I got one used for cheap. The majority do not map the area, so have no context of where they are or where the charging station is. Being home while they run can be frustrating due to noise (like a hair drier) and the bumping around... The reviews demonstrate how cursory of a job they perform, which isn't that surprising considering the clearance needed to operate. The move to incorporate a camera is IoT scary - I understand they're doing it to differentiate products, but No sir, I don't like it.
That said, a robovac will never threaten to
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I visit 'clean' homes where the dog aroma is quite strong. I see pet stains on furniture and floors, and hair on everything. Maybe the proper lesson here has little to do with robot vacuums. Instead, be kind to guests by having a pet-free home, and stop being cruel to your dog by treating it as a person.
Our wonderful dog lives outside. He does not bark at passersby, does not dig holes, and does not run away. He is friendly to guests, and warns us if strangers approach our house. Those are all natural dog behaviors, one they understand their place in the pack. If your dog doesn't act like that, it is because you are egalitarian towards an animal genetically programmed to live in a hierarchy.
Our wonderful dog lives outside. He does not bark at passersby, does not dig holes, and does not run away. He is friendly to guests, and warns us if strangers approach our house. Those are all natural dog behaviors, one they understand their place in the pack. If your dog doesn't act like that, it is because you are egalitarian towards an animal genetically programmed to live in a hierarchy.
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Thank god. Rosie II died from this. So much so that Rosie III - V all now run at night when I know where the dog is. Lol
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Yeah. With mine, I started the process, gave up and sent that sucker to the dumpster. There are somethings a robo vac just can’t come back from.
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Our trusty Roomba went in for repairs and was replaced with one that required Internet. Setting up the wireless connection was a nightmare - multiple calls over several days and disabling the smart connection on our router that switched between 2 and 5 MHz. The connection is still flaky.
The new UI is terrible! Setting up a simple start time was 10 times more difficult with the app than it was with buttons and a tiny LCD display.
The new Roomba struggled to find home where the old one was fine, but it is better at telling a dark carpet from the top of a stairway. iRobot has coasted on old tech for far too long.
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Hell, one of my cats regularly likes to crap on the floor about 3 feet from the box. Every day. Cat-based households are not immune to robot-vaccuum-poopocalypse scenarios...
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They talked about it a while ago and said it would be very difficult to do, but I guess they managed it. One victory for AI.
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Stanford and MIT graduates who spent the past 12 months labeling images of poop, I salute thee!
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They should invent a robot pooper scooper that can go around the house and clean up all the dog poop before the vacuum does its thing. Or maybe the robot vacuum communicates with the pooper scooper and tells it to come get the poop when it finds it. Scoops cat vomit too!
It would need the equivalent of a baby diaper genie for storage of the yuck.
It would need the equivalent of a baby diaper genie for storage of the yuck.
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Rather clever. Like a gift that keeps on giving. Take the day's soiled photo, drop it in the bin, smile and chuckle a bit, and replace it with a new copy or something different. Endless payback.
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"If you've never heard of this "poop+Roomba" phenomenon, you definitely shouldn't ever Google it and click on the results that pop up, like this one or this or this."
My particular european cultural heritage comes from a place where poop humor reigns supreme. I was laughing having visions after reading the headline, but this sentence was the finesse for me.
My particular european cultural heritage comes from a place where poop humor reigns supreme. I was laughing having visions after reading the headline, but this sentence was the finesse for me.
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