iRobot Roomba 690 Robot Vacuum-Wi-Fi Connectivity, Works with Alexa, Good for Pet Hair, Carpets, Hard Floors, Self-Charging

Got this yesterday, also ordered the Deebot n79s for the upstairs so I'll have a nice comparison. I am extremely impressed with the Roomba. We have a 1500 sq ft open area on the first floor which includes the kitchen, sunroom, living room, and dining room. I've run this guy several times over the last two days and it has done an amazing job.The first time through it cleaned over 90%, not everything but to be fair the floor was ready for a good vacuuming. After the second run, I can say the place looks really good. The sunroom has hardwood and there are sliding glass doors all around. The doors have been open with the screens in and the pollen has been pouring in (we have a lot of trees around the house). This little fella got it done.We have dark oak hardwood floors so I made sure to keep an eye on the robot the first run or two to make sure there would be no scratching. No problems. The brushes are stiff enough to get the dirt but I don't see any way they could scratch the floor unless a piece of hard wire got tangled and the thing kept running, very unlikely.I did read in the instructions, yes I'm a guy and I do look at the instructions usually after the fact, and I noticed in the maintenance schedule that they say to keep an eye on the well that the front caster sits in once a month to make sure nothing clogs it to inhibit the roller from being able to roll. If that were to happen I could see an issue with the dragging motion across the floor but other than that I just don't see any issues.It cannot climb two of the three Orientals that we have. They are just too high for it. It handles one in the living room that has fringe on the ends and although the fringe gets 'out-of-whack' during the cleaning as it would with any vacuum it's easy enough to just kick back down when cleaning is over. I'll work out a way to get it up on the other two carpets probably by just putting a throw rug down to give it an on-ramp. We have three throw rugs in the kitchen in strategic spots (sink, oven, and fridge). The robot has no problem going up and cleaning those as well as the floor. (UPDATE: The robot does not do the two Orientals because they have a black border. I set the robot up there and it couldn't get off of the carpet because of the black borders. It thought it was a drop-off. So if you have black-bordered carpets, this would be an issue. Also, there is a lot of black inside one of the carpets and that freaked the bot out. It just stopped and waited for help).The Alexa app was amazingly easy to setup (yes, read the instructions). It took about a minute and a half to get it working. I have noticed that when I tell the robot to go home it still meanders for a bit but I assume it is looking for its beam back home. I think it searches for an IR beam that shows it where to go. The bot docks itself flawlessly. We put the docking station in a spot that has about a foot and a half on each side of it as per the instructions. It has had no problem finding the docking station.The battery life does not seem to be an issue for us. It has run for about 90 minutes once. Now it seems to complete the mission in about an hour before it returns home. We'll see how it holds up.So, bottom-line: The time to vacuum the floors on a regular basis went from not getting done as often as it should and taking about 45 minutes or more to well, a couple of minutes to clean the dirt bin after it runs. The floors get cleaned regularly now and the bin is not nearly as full as it was after the first couple of cleanings. I think with by following the routine maintenance schedule outlined in the manual this little guy should do a great job for quite a while. My wife and I couldn't be happier. And she laughed when I ordered it. She's doing a bit of a jig now. Me, too.UPDATE: I received the DEEBOT N79S and I am returning it. It did not work very well in my house. We have several thick area carpets on the hardwood and it had plenty of issues where the Roomba has no issues. I think if I had just hardwood and tile it would have been excellent. I'm picking up another Roomba.

Update at one year: we still get such a kick out of this robot that we will still often just watch it make decisions after I rearrange the furniture. We still talk to it as if it were one of our cats. It still does an amazing job of picking up crud we didn’t even know was on our floors. We still clean it regularly, and we have found that we can wash the filters in the top rack of the dishwasher, which has allowed us to use the same two original filters for a year. If that isn’t thrifty, I don’t know what is.Rosie still has some of the behavior issues we’ve seen all along. I got a new rug here on Amazon a month ago, which I LOVE, but Rosie sees the dark red and brown stripes as cliffs. Often I’ll be at work and I’ll get a text, “Rosie is stuck near a cliff.” Well, little buddy, the cats can’t help you there. I’ve taken to spot-vacuuming that rug when she won’t run on it.I tried to trick the cliff sensors after doing a little research online, taping aluminum foil over them, but that did NOT work. She (see how I continue to slip so easily into personifying this machine?) gave an “error 6” right out of the gate. We haven’t a single “cliff” in the house, but anything dark brown, like parts of my rug and our vent covers, she thinks she’s going over the falls in a barrel.She (I give, I give! We call it a she!) still gets herself stuck on the bathroom from time to time as well. She will roll in there, then get behind the door and bash it with such force that it closes. Sometimes she will close the door AND get stuck on the vent cover. Double “boo boo”!Even having rearranged the house multiple times since her arrival, I’ve never had to reset her to factory defaults or had any major errors that prevented her from running daily. We have gotten a LOT better about not leaving stringy cat toys, laundry, towels, or other things she could “choke” on laying around on the floor. In turn, our habits are neater and our house is demonstrably cleaner and tidier, all thanks to the influence and the peculiarities of this little robot.I see now that the price has dropped as well. This is absolutely a solid model of Roomba to start your love of them (or domination by?). Go for it. You will not regret it!I am eyeing the 240 wet/dry Braava next. I got one for my dad (review coming soon) and he loves it. We had so much fun watching it and moving it around the first time out of the box... why are these things so much fun to watch and personify? Will I be one of those who calmly accepts our AI overlords? Only time will tell... get this Roomba. It rocks.****************************Updated after a couple of weeks: We are still in awe of how much crud this little machine picks up in our house. We have her on a daily schedule and sometimes run her twice in one day. We are keeping up on maintaining her bin daily and her rollers regularly, and find it quite satisfying to "clean the robot" so she will keep doing such a good job.She has gotten stuck a couple of times where we got an error text from her and had to come rescue her. Once, she jammed herself under a low crossbar of the gate-legged dining room table; once, she thought an extension cord was a cliff after she fought it for a while; and once, she put herself in a tight area behind a chair and couldn't figure out how to escape. I also ran her battery down completely once. Oops. This is why we always run her when we know we will be home.Rosie faces some real challenges in our house, and not just because of the cat and rabbit fur. Furniture and other things are constantly changing places slightly -- the ottoman here, the coffee table there, kitchen chairs, yoga balls, water jugs, rat playpen, shoes, cat toys, etc. It's clear that she knows where the really immovable obstacles are -- walls, corners, sofa -- because she just taps those lightly to confirm their continued existence. When something has moved, though, she gives it a good ole bash to figure out where it is. She has moved cat toys considerable distances! Honestly, it's rather fun to watch her learn. I put her in a completely new room today that I usually keep closed off and it was neat to watch how she mapped it. Even though I always keep animals out of there, she found tons of pet hair, too. Yikes!We have had success using the invisible barrier when it's in a straight line. We tried the half-round setting around the cats' food and water bowls, but because that is near the slight drop off to the living room, she seemed to get confused and just did an extra-thorough job of the kitchen that day. So we aren't using the barrier much. She taps the food and water bowls now anyway rather than ramming them, which is better behavior that doesn't spill water. So that's good.Some cleaning tips: you will need a small, Phillips screwdriver to take the round yellow cap off the triple brush in the front, and we have found that a pair of large tweezers work well for removing string and hair wrapped around any axles. Doing a few minutes of daily and bi-weekly maintenance on this robot is a fair trade for all the unseen crud she picks up. :)*****************We have five animals -- including a house rabbit -- and while we thought we were fairly good about sweeping up with a regular broom, I had NO idea what CLEAN floors actually felt and looked like until we added Rosie to our family of crawling critters.I cleaned, or thought I cleaned, while we were charging her the first day we got her (her "birthday" -- adorable). She filled her bin the first run and we were so tickled that we ran her again later the same day. Second time the bin was half full! Six days in, I can say we are still obsessed with observing her performance and making sure we clean her bin and check her wheels and brushes for obstructions regularly.The second or third day we had her, I was worried she was not mapping the whole house. We were in serious Helicopter Parent mode on those days. But she persevered and started doing an excellent job of covering all the rooms by about day four without any further intervention on our part. We did also buy a cord protector for her because as I said before, we do have a house rabbit.We have a single-level home with a combo of wood, tile, and carpet, with scattered throw rugs and the occasional yoga mat. I did have to move a rug to help Rosie navigate the wooden strip between the lower wood floor and the higher tile floor. She was getting caught up on some of our rough, hand-woven cotton rugs, so I had to move those, too. Besides that, she can lift herself fairly well over low obstacles. So far. She even tried to climb a lamp base this evening!We love that we can use the app to start or stop a cleaning and that we get notifications about what she has done. We enjoy the sounds she makes and the songs she sings, and that if she gets stuck somewhere, she lets us know. The cats don't mind her; one thinks she is a toy and one sleeps through her cleaning cycle.Making a habit of cleaning the bin and using the tools that are included with the robot to clean the rollers and brushes looks like it will be key to prolonging the life of this machine. We are pretty good about maintaining our tech, and I can tell you that even though I love the regular vacuum I have (a Shark), having Rosie do a daily run in the house has made my life much easier and my bare feet much, much happier. I had no idea how much crud on the floor I was enduring!I still sweep out corners and under things where Rosie can't reach, but I am way more motivated to do so knowing I have a cool little helper who will do a major portion of the job for me. Maybe it's still the honeymoon phase, but we love our little floor sweeping robot. She was the right compromise for us between the more expensive models with more bells and whistles and the cheaper ones that didn't have the app.If she explodes or creates a wormhole and disappears, or she eats one of the cats, I'll come back and update. For now, five stars for sure.