Reviews for iRobot Roomba 560 Vacuum

By member: iSalon - May 28, 2008

Great robot to keep my living room clean!

Strengths: easy to setup and use, works hard (as hard as myself), do clean the floor and carpet

Weakness: brush breaks really easy, sometimes will stuck, light house is confusing

I am a super busy guy, and always want to buy a Roomba to keep my living room clean, and I did.

This baby works hard to keep my living room really clean, and every time when I clean it's gabage bag, I was supprised how much dust it collected,

it's very easy to set up, and it runs pretty much on its own.

Two things are not pleasing: sometimes I'll have to look around to find it, since it will stuck in corners
And 3 out of 6 side brushes broke after 10 days, but iRobot will send me a new set, so the service is good.

Oh, forgot to mention, it does NOT work on black carpets, don't be fooled by the picture here, the cliff sensor doesn't work on dark surfaces. I have to place my area rug to make it work.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Excellent Product!

Strengths: Great improvement compared to previous models. Much less noises and does not get tangled or stuck easily.

Weakness: The part that bumps at walls or furnitures gets scratched easily and affects the appearance. I think it can be improved by replacing plastics with steeless materials.

This is one of the great product that really helps in your house. It does all the work for you and frees you to do other things. It has greatly improved compared to previous versions. Moves around much easily. The virtual wall works fantastically. The price is my main concern so shop around for better deals.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Keeps our house clean

Strengths: Makes vacuuming fun! Does a decent job Can be scheduled to start itself, up to once every day of the week Handles most obstacles well Notifies you of any problems Navigates back to its charging base

Weakness: Needs minor maintenance after every run Sometimes mistakenly thinks it's stuck Can't handle black flooring If you watch it expecting a normal cleaning pattern, you'll get frustrated

I bought this for my house because we're generally too busy or lack the motivation to vacuum ourselves. The house can take two hours to vacuum by hand. I scheduled this Roomba (currently unnamed) to clean the main part of our house daily when no one is home and it has been keeping the house much cleaner than we ever could ourselves.

Our house layout is complicated, with many transitions between area rugs, hardwood, and linoleum. Many of the room entrances also have a 1/2" high wood lip across them. There are also some steps. The Roomba handles the carpet transitions perfectly (even the throw rugs with tassels, though it pushes around one of these) and very rarely gets stuck on the wood lips. It will pretty reliably detect drop-offs in time to back up without getting stuck, but it's not 100% accurate. Sometimes it will drive too far and stop itself until one of us puts it back on solid ground. It's never driven over the edge of a drop-off and fallen down, though. The Roomba sees black carpeting as a drop-off and won't clean it, but it handles just fine one of our carpets that has dark purple and dark blue areas.

The vacuuming system is interesting: it's brushes are completely separate from it's vacuum. The brushes sweep large debris and hair into one section of the sweeper bin while the vacuum collects dust on a filter in another section. Since the Roomba is so short, it uses the force of the rotating brushes to pick up large debris rather than pure vacuuming force, so it doesn't need a very powerful vacuum. Since we first ran the Roomba, the brush bin has been getting more and more empty after each run, but we're still picking up a lot of dust.

Because of the fairly small size of the robot, the sweeper bin is much smaller than that of most bagless vacuums. It is necessary to clean the bin after every cleaning run (which means daily for us). Also, the brushes tend to collect dust and hair, especially wrapped around the brush shafts at the two ends of the brushes. You will need to clean these regularly as well to keep the brushes in working order. This is a small price to pay for the extra cleaning and reduced hands-on time, though, and can actually be satisfying to see how much has been removed from the floors.

I strongly recommend to keep your patience and let the robot work if you're watching it after you first buy it. It vacuums in an extremely irregular pattern and, if you watch it for only 15 minutes or something, it will seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in one area and hardly venture into other areas. The robot WILL eventually cover the whole area multiple times. It takes much longer to cover a room than a human, so you'd have to watch for at least half an hour for a normal sized room or an hour or more for a multi-room area to see that it covers everything. DON'T move it around while it's running to try to manually get it to vacuum a certain area. I'm guessing that this messes up its internally-generated floor map.

Overall, I highly recommend this for people who can't or don't want to vacuum regularly, but still appreciate a clean house. It will take a while to work down the dirt in a dirty house, but it can run every day. It handles obstacles well (though you'll generally get better results with clear floors). I would recommend against getting it if you have small children (e.g. 2-6 years old) as they are FASCINATED by it and will probably treat it as a toy.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Roomba 560 Vacuum

Strengths: It cleans everywhere in my house.

Weakness: It can't clean the corner.

I am satisfying this product. It does clean my entire house. However, it does have a problem to clean the corner. Its sharp is a circle and really hard for it to run to the corner. So, your corner may still dirty.

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Love my Roomba 560

Strengths: More powerful, longer charge, adjusts to clean tile, hardwood floors and carpet with ease.

Weakness: Haven't found any!

I recently upgraded my Roomba, I have to say this one tops the charts. I love that you can schedule any day or time of the week or even everyday of the week to automatically start vacuuming, it also tells you when to clean the brushes. I'm really happy with this new model. I would recommend this product to anyone looking for a vaccum to do all the work so you don't have too...

92% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Roomba 560 Vacuum (Robotic, Bagless)

Strengths: Scheduling, virtual walls/lighthouses.

Weakness: Small trash bin, weak battery, high price, can't walk on stairs :).

It cannot replace regular vacuum, but it does increases intervals between regular vacuuming keeping floor clean of the dust and small trash, making floor look clean what in turn makes my wife a lot happier. It returns to charging base automatically and with scheduling feature is great for one story houses.

86% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

Roomba 560 Vacuum (robotic bagless) experience

Strengths: Automatic, programmable, self charging and docking.

Weakness: Slow, trap in low clearance furniture, small collection container.

I tried out the Roomba vacuum this week and find it to be quite useful. The robot initially moves in what looks like random direction. But a longer observation reveils the it does cover the entire reachable floor surface. Although it take a long time (20 min per room).
I have a dinning room set with chairs that has a low clearance. The robot tend to get stuck between the chair legs. After just 1 cleaning, I removed the dust collection box and found it to be full. This means that the robot IS doing it's job vaccuming. But the collection container is small and it gets fill up with dirt and dog hair fast. I have to empty the container after each vacuum session.

Otherwise it is a good unit for those that don't get much time cleaning at home.

85% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful or unhelpful?

iRobot Roomba 560

Testseek.com has collected 12 expert reviews for iRobot Roomba 560 and the average expert rating is 75 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

Read Full Review

Best Robotic Vacuum Overall

For those too busy (or lazy) to spend time vacuuming, this is the perfect alternative to an upright vacuum. The Roomba 560 quickly learns the dimensions of your room and avoids being caught on...

Read Full Review