Why I absolutely hate my Roomba E5

in #rant3 years ago (edited)

This has been a rant long in the making. In short, I often visualise destroying my Roomba E5 device in a way similar to the classic scene from the cult movie "Office Space" where the group absolutely destroys the awful printer. It's that bad (in my case).

Here's my list of grievances:

  • It finishes successfully in about 25% of runs.
  • It gets tied in with every USB cable dangling on the ground where they slide from my couch.
  • It gets tied in and stops working with absolutely any kind of obstacle touching the ground, including: couch covers, thin slippers, shoelaces attached to actual shoes, pieces of strings laying about from crafts projects, power cables... just about anything which is thin enough to go into its rotors will get it tangled up, and if it's hard enough, it will chew up the rubberized surface(s).
  • It's often absolutely confused when it tries to clean the conical stands of barstools in the dining area, and often stops there.
  • Every time it starts, it goes into the direction of my work desk, where I'm working and don't want to get bothered. No randomness there.
  • Since it doesn't have a proper radar/lidar and memory, I can't tell it where NOT to go, and barriers need new batteries too often.
  • My coffee table has a weakened wooden leg from all the banging it got from the Roomba as one of the non-random things it always does is to ram into it at full speed.

I have flat, laminate floors without carpets (it got much worse when I've tried it in a house which has thick carpets), have no pets, and the whole experience is just crazy bad. Would not recommend. Not a time saving device in this setup.

This is a rant. Please do not recommend better products to me here.