iRobot Roomba 555 Vacuum Cleaning Robot

If you think this is going to be the end of all vacuuming forever more then I am afraid you are likely to be disappointed. It's not just the price tag that marks this out as a toy for rich people, it is also the fact that it most likes to deal with large open rooms with minimalist furniture. If you live in a poky wee flat with lots of odds and ends of corners then you are still going to need to take the manual vacuum round to catch anywhere that is smaller than the diameter of the Roomba. Which is a lot of spaces! It also asks you to place the docking base against an open wall where it can "see" it from anywhere in the room. I don't have any walls like that, I have these things called furniture!

But then again it does do an awful lot of work for you. You just trap it in a room and let it do as it will. It's a bit of an idiot if you want it to vacuum somewhere specific, you will find yourself yelling "go forward you idiot" but if you leave it alone it will eventually give the room good coverage. It genuinely doesn't fall off the top of the stairs, though it certainly gives you a good scare.

If, like me, you are considering this because you are disabled then it's fantastic. You can poke the buttons with a long reacher and off it goes on its own while you have a lie down. It is not overly heavy and it will sit on the footplate of a stairlift so you can get it all around the house. If you line it up right with the top of the stairs you can even encourage it to get on the lift by itself!

But because of this obvious elderly and disabled marketplace there are a few important alterations I would make to it. First of all I'd include the remote rather than have it an optional accessory, but even if you buy the accessory it's missing a "follow me" button. You don't always want to clean every room in the house just to get a tiny bit, and not all of us can pick it up and haul it to the room that needs work, so a button that you could press down by RF connection (i.e. through walls, not line of sight like the current remote) to bring it from where it is to where you are would be so useful, or a line of sight button you can press and hold and it will just keep coming with you like a puppy on a lead. I'd also make the dust compartment less awkward to empty, if you have trouble with strength in your hands then by the time you get this off you will deposit the contents right back on the floor again! You have to squeeze with your hands and then pull, a motion not easy for those with arthritis.

The side spinning brush is a mixed blessing. If you have long hair then you might spend a lot of time disentangling it from this brush. It also agitates little dust piles on a hard floor and blows them around so it's much harder for them to end up inside the vacuum cleaner.

It could be made to fully replace other vacuum cleaners if there were a button to make it stay still and a small pull-out or push-on attachment to clean into the nooks and crannies, but until then you still need two vacuums, and at this price that's not so easy to maintain.

I've owned the Roomba 555 for over four months now. I delayed writing a review because I wanted to see how reliable it was.
I bought the Roomba when I was recovered from a bad bout of flu and hadn't been well enough to vacuum for six weeks. I was desperate. With a lot of small rooms, fairly crowded with furniture, I didn't expect it to do much other than clean the centre of the rooms. In fact, the cunning side brush meant it was surprisingly good along skirting boards and around furniture. I move the odd item, like wastepaper baskets on to settees, and just let it loose. There are only a couple of spots it can't reach, like behind the toilet, and of course it can't do the stairs.
Initially, it needed its brushes cleaning a lot, but that stopped after it caught up with the cleaning backlog. It's pretty reliable at tracking down its docking station to plug itself in to recharge power,even when working its way round several rooms. Since I'm paranoid, I normally pop something across the top of the stairs when it vacuums upstairs rather than trusting the sensor, but the couple of times I forget it didn't plummet over the edge. I haven't bothered trying the timer since I usually run it when I'm in.
It cleans well on ceramic floor tiles, thin carpet tiles, and thick pile carpet, and seems to have cheered up the rather flattened pile of the hall carpet. It takes its time doing several circuits of a room before declaring it clean, but time is no issue when you don't have to stay and watch it except for entertainment value. It's quite amusing when it spots a dirty spot, the blue light flashes, and it does an extra circle to clean up.
I empty it every time I use it, because it only takes two seconds to tip out the dust. That's very quick and easy, which is important because house dust isn't good for me. I've bought spare filters and side brushes but haven't needed to use them yet.
I always make sure it's fully charged after use. If its two weeks since it was last used it seems to have lost a little of the charge, but a week seems to be fine.
If anything, the carpet is cleaner than when I used a conventional vacuum cleaner. I've given up using the old vacuum cleaners, and just bought a small handheld vacuum cleaner to do the stairs and behind the toilet.

A quick update on this. I've now been using it for about ten months. Still fine. Only changed the filter once.

Was a little sceptical at first but now completely won over by the Roomba. We live in a 3 storey house and the Dyson hasn't come out of the cupboard once since this purchase - you can sit for hours watching it work its way through the room. Practically speaking you do need to prepare the room as with any vacuum cleaner, i.e. remove smaller items from the floor, get cables out of harms way. The Roomba is quite powerful working from surface to surface, can easily scale a couple of centimeters, a little like a minature dune buggy which very occasionally gets it into trouble but have been pleasantly surprised about how seldomly it gets stuck - it is great to return home after leaving it to run around and coming home to find it retired safely to the docking station. The cleaning quality is really impressive - carpets look almost like new when done, much improved on a regular cleaner - maybe that was just my laziness with the Dyson but that's kind of the point with this! Only concern would be around the technical support. The warranty documentation that comes with the product is provided by a company that is no longer trading and apparently the unit needs to be returned to Sweden for repair if it does break down - very much hoping that never happens.