Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was a pretty hard purchase for me. The reasons were 1) It was a pretty expensive item and 2) The reviews for this product were very extreme--from high praise to the pits. (See previous review about the person who returned *four* of them. Hard to believe, actually.) But the promise of an automated robot that would do the daily vacuuming was too much to turn down and I decided to take a chance on the Roomba Discovery. The odds were in my favor as the store I purchased it from offered a 60-day money back guarantee. If it didn't work, no problem. I unpacked the Roomba Discovery and found these items packed with it: the Roomba, battery pack, charger, two infra-red "wall" devices, a cleaning utility brush, a couple of extra air filters, a wall mount kit, the home charging base, a remote control and associated manuals, advertisements and offers. The Roomba Discovery and all its contents were fimrly and snuggly packed inside their foam enclosures. After reading the manual, (yes, its a good idea to read the manual), I plugged the Roomba into its home base charger and took it for its first test run around the house the next day. An insert note says that the Roomba needs a 16 hour uninterupted charging cycle the first time around, so if you are in a hurry to clean your house, you'll have to wait at least a day before you can. The Roomba is easy to use and uncomplicated even for a non-techie to use. There are four control buttons on the top of the unit which allows you to turn it on, set it to "clean" mode, another to "max" mode, and one other button to "spot" mode. Each one of these commands tells the Roomba how to clean. Clean is the generic command that allows the robot to freely roam, while the max mode tells the device to clean till it runs out of power. The spot mode allows for the cleaning of a small area. Alright, how does it do? My first test was to set the Roomba Discovery to "clean" mode. It promtly made a few musical notes to let me know it was ok, and started on its mission to clean my house. To be perfectly frank, I did not have very high expectations for the machine. But as the unit bumped and moved along, I was quite amazed at the cleaning power of the Roomba. It was able to pick up a ton of dog hair, debris, and dirt that would challenge most uprights. The onboard computer was able to get the Roomba out of small corners and various other traps around the house and proved to be a very intelligent little robot. The Roomba was able to work continuously for about an hour and a half before it started its run for the self charging station. The power button alerts you to the status of charge of the Roomba--green means full charge, yellow means less than half, and red means almost empty. The Roomba determines if it needs to dock with its station, depending on the state of charge it is in. As the unit started to go down in charge, it started towards the docking-charging station, and out of a scene from NASA, the Roomba homed in on the power station, docked succesfully and started to charge itself. Amazing. The Roomba Discovery does a fantastic job of picking up dog hair, which was one of the primary reasons for us getting an automated vaccum robot. The daily chore of doing this was pretty time consuming and the Roomba scores an A+ for its ability to reach areas that an upright couldn't possiblty reach. We were all surprised and quite pleased with how the Roomba works. The reason why the Roomba Discovery didnt garner a perfect "5" (I'll give it a 4.5) was due to a few minor issues. First, while the Roomba does a great job of picking up dirt, debris and dog hair, the brushes on the Roomba need to be cleaned of all the wrapped animal hair and fibers occassionally. The second issue revolves around the battery life. While you can get up to 120 minutes on a flat hard surface, if you have lots of carpets,(like we do), the Roomba will run out of gas in about an hour and a half. The third issue is price point. The Roomba will cost you as much as some uprights, if not more. This issue may be one of the primary reasons why many, and until recently, myself, have held off on purchasing the unit. The Roomba Discovery is easy to use, highly efficient in its vacuuming chores and will save you untold hours of time. If you save up for one and decide to make the leap, just make sure you buy it from a dealer which offers you a money back guarentee. As for the person who had to return four Roomba units, the cause is probably user error, more than anything else. Most probably, the person had thick shag carpets which got caught in the Roomba's brushes. As with any product, it pays to read the manual first.