It's super solid logic, let's all spend way way more time at home, cook a lot more meals at home, still go outside because we still need food and stuff, but at the same time clean our homes less.
We exclusively run ours when someone is home. It often gets stuck in certain areas and near specific furniture. We try to prevent it as much as we can but we just don't trust it enough to let it run without a little supervision.
Edit: I am not looking for solutions. Running the roomba when we are home works fine for us and we do not intend to change the way we live or get a more expensive roomba to accommodate it. This is a perfectly fine workaround that suits our situation well. I only made this comment to point out that not everyone runs the roomba when the house is empty.
Absolutely this. Roombas are like stupid puppies; you think you have the house roomba proof, only to come home to find it stuck in some obscure corner, whining pathetically.
Exactly! There's been a lot of times that our roomba has surprised us, getting stuck in areas that we never thought would be a problem. It just happened to approach it from just the right angle that time
I have a couch that's like 1mm too low. The Roomba goes under it, but can't get back out. 3d printing a small "hat" for the Roomba prevents it from going under.
3d printing is not an option for us. Also one of the places that the roomba gets stuck is underneath a lazyboy chair, which needs to rock. We can't just permanently put something underneath it without sacrificing a main function of the chair. There's a lot of things around the house like this, where a temporary solution exists but a permanent one either wouldn't be appropriate, or just isn't worth doing.
I prefer having my living area comfortably set up for myself more than making it roomba-proof. I'm sure it's worth it for some people, but we don't share the same priorities.
You run it at night, right? That's when we run ours. And we got a robot vacuum during the pandemic because suddenly we were on those floors so much more that we got them dirty more and noticed the dirt more.
Mine runs Friday mornings at 430 am in case I have people over Friday night and again Monday morning at 430am to clean up after the weekend. The 3/4 day schedule works well for me. And 430 is perfect because I'm usually asleep when it runs and it's never worked me up so it never bothers me.
The noise really bothered me on our old model, but it broke recently and we replaced it with a different brand. I cannot believe how quiet the new one is. I think it's less powerful but it's worth it just for the noise. It's not just the suction that's quieter either, it also runs into walls/obstacles much less aggressively.
Might be something to look into when/if you decide to replace yours! There's probably a model out there that won't bug your wife as much.