My most precious iRobot Roomba 780

In Feb 2013, my husband replaced our current heavy & complicated 3.5k Kirby vacuum cleaner to a much lighter & simple $200 Philips vacuum machine. I vacuum about once or twice a week but every times after I vacuum, I will be so tired and sweaty which I dislike. I started to research online and came across a forum topic on "life without maid" on kiasuparents.com. I was impressed by this lady, Pamela Lim who is an ex-entrepreneur, educator and a mother to five young kids who stays at a three-storey house when her two maids left! She 'inspired' me to make use of technology to simplify my life without maid! She highly recommended iRobot Roomba which she has a few for all her rooms that she bought directly from US a few years back. (Note: from my understanding, you need to get a transformer if you buy electrical products from US as Singapore is using a different voltage from US and warranty will be an issue and with the shipping costs, I think now with a few parallel importers in Singapore that import directly from the US, the price difference is not too significant to warrant the risk on warranty and getting the transformer and shipping in ourselves).

Finally after much research online on iRobot, we finally bought our iRobot Roomba 780 & iRobot Scooba 380 (with upgraded software to 390 version) in March 2013! I really love my iRobot Roomba! We schedule it to vacuum daily in the morning and I cannot imagine our house without the iRobot Roomba now! You will really be amazed at the amount of tiny little dust particles that it can pick up as it is extremely good with picking up tiny dust particles and hair (I have long hair and I lose a lot of hair daily)! My husband and my son both have sensitive nose, both of their condition improve after we have iRobot Roomba with us!  I would highly recommend it to families with young children (especially babies) and furry pets!  Roomba is good with areas under the sofa and beds too (must ensure that there is at least two inches gap underneath these furniture).

When the iRobot Roomba is doing its cleaning, we can be sleeping or out somewhere. After about 1 hour to 1.5 hours of cleaning, it will return back to its home based docking station to recharge! I only need to empty the bin and tap the filters clean once a week and take out the brush to clear away any hair that might have been trapped on the brush.

As for my iRobot Scooba, it has become a white elephant. It actually does its wet cleaning job well, but because my iRobot Roomba has done such a fantastic job and I have a nice part-time domestic helper that comes in once a week to mop the floor etc, I'm lazy to get iRobot Scooba to work.  iRobot Scooba is not as 'independent' as iRobot Roomba. I must be physically be there with him. First, must fill it up with water and cleaning solution. The water will be used up in 45 mins and if the room is big, you need to pour out the dirty water and refill it with water and cleaning solution and let it continue to wet clean or move it to another room.

I must say that iRobot Roomba is one of the best investment that we have made as it does not only save me time and energy, it perform its vacuuming functions so well that my husband said that the floor is so clean everyday now as compared to the times when we have maids! Maids have mood and someday they skip certain areas. And definitely the maids (and even myself) cannot vacuum under the beds so well! A neighbour visited me yesterday and she said that my floor is so clean even though I do not have a maid (and the part-time auntie was supposed to come over that afternoon which mean that the floor has not been mopped for a week!) I told her with iRobot Roomba, our floor is clean even without mopping for a week or longer!