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We’ve spent an interesting month with our new Roomba Scheduler. The role it fills is a “between-vacuuming” cleanup.

It works really well on carpets. It gets pretty much every spot that it can reach, and its small, round shape lets it get a lot of spots.

How it works on tile is a different matter altogether. I don’t know if it’s because our kitchen tile is a dark color, but we’ve found that it missed pretty much all the dirt along the edges of the kitchen, and a fair bit in the middle too. I guess the Scooba is designed to excel at this part of the cleaning, but it would be nice if Roomba had better support for cleaning smooth surfaces.

It’s been good at keeping out of trouble so far. You pretty much have to pick up any rugs or mats that Roomba might encounter. I believe they claim that Roomba will just seamlessly transition over these rugs, but most of the time you’ll find it pulling the rugs over themselves and occasionally getting caught. The net result of this is us spending roughly five minutes before each Roomba run picking everything up.

For a “between-vacuuming” device, the Roomba certainly helps out a lot. The carpets look nice and clean after it finishes and there isn’t half as much stuff on them when it comes time to do the real vacuum.

We haven’t used the scheduling functionality yet because between the two of us we are home pretty much all the time. It’s easier to start it as you are heading out or run it while you are home.

For a gadget nut, this is a perfect device!