iRobot Roomba 690 Robot Vacuum-Wi-Fi Connectivity, Works with Alexa, Good for Pet Hair, Carpets, Hard Floors, Self-Charging

*updated after 3rd week of use* We bought Ruby after several weeks of debating, researching and reading reviews. I'm cheap. I hate spending money. For a little background, we are two working adults living in a wooded area, with a German Shepherd and a Pitbull. The German Shepherd sheds as if his skin is constantly on fire and his fur is running for its collective lives. I'm talking some serious shedding here. The pitbull loves dirt and mud and anything gross and will gladly collect as much as she can possibly manage to bring back inside with her. My husband and I both enjoy the outdoors and bring in our own dirt on top of all this. Typically, once the floors started showing signs of needing a good sweep/mop, it took about 2.5 hours to complete the job start to finish. This does not include the time we both spent trying to trick/bribe the other into doing the floors for us. After all the slaving, inevitably a doggie hair tumbleweed or two would sneak its way out from under a sofa just to make sure we knew we were not in control here.Enter Ruby. Oh Ruby... how I love thee. I ordered Ruby on a Sunday, coincidentally the same day I talked my husband into sweeping and mopping the floors without my assistance. By Thursday when Ruby arrived, the Doggie Hair tumbleweeds and dirt were beginning to take over the house again. Ruby was easy to set up, and while she was charging for her maiden voyage, my husband and I set out to reconfigure some areas in our home where we had things stored on the floor, under beds, or cords were left in the way,etc. While we were at it, we went ahead and swept dirt out of the awkward corners into the main floor area to see how she'd do. Our home is one level, 2400sq ft mostly hardwood and tile with carpet in just the bedrooms. We do not have rugs with the exception of a bath mat in 2 of the bathrooms. Our house is older, and has been remodeled so there are a couple of awkward corners.On Day one, Ruby struggled. Oh bless her poor little drunken soul. She bobbed and weaved and missed areas and spit things back out and eventually died lost in a back bedroom. We re-charged her and ran her again. She did ok the second time, but again got stuck somewhere with a dead battery. (I emptied her dust bin a total of 5 times that day and it was incredibly full each time. For shame!!) We went ahead and set up a schedule for her, and thought If we weren't happy after a week, we'd return her and go back to fighting and slaving over the floors and finding excuses for people to not come over.After 6 days, I can honestly say I'm in love with Ruby. Six whole days of us not touching a broom (aside from sweeping the dirt from an awkward corner into her path the first day), there is not a single doggie hair tumbleweed on our floors. My feet are pretty clean when I run around barefooted all day. I'm no longer embarrassed or panicked when someone says they're going to stop by the house. It's even clean under the beds and couches!!! $324.73 and WORTH EVERY PENNY!!Here are the questions I really wanted answered before I purchased, so I'll try to answer them for you.1. No, she doesn't go in a direct grid pattern. Run her everyday, and she'll get what she missed yesterday today. Give her time, she really does get better each day! *After the first week I watched her work and I've noticed she now follows a more grid like pattern. It's not a perfect grid, but it's obvious there's a method to her madness*2. Wifi function is great for setting a schedule, and for locating her when she occasionally can't find her way home when her battery dies, and for starting her away from home if you need to. I think we probably could have lived without this function, but I'm not sorry we have it.3. My white baseboards and all furniture legs are perfectly fine4. The same dogs that are petrified of my upright Kirby and upright Bissel Shampooer don't pay any attention to Ruby unless she runs into them.5. Watching TV or going about regular life while she's running is no problem. Working from home means she needs to be in a other part of the house due to the noise6. Yea, she can't always find her way home when her battery dies. My husband and I decided we're perfectly willing to go chase her down and put her on her base in exchange for not having to manually clean our floors. *Ruby has now docked herself everyday except for 1. I guess she just needed to learn the floor layout that first week* *Week 3 she now always docks herself*7. She has not scratched our original hardwood floors.8. She transitions easily from one flooring to the next, even over the little connector strip thingies (All of my flooring is light colored)9. Give her a week. While moving things off the floors and out from under beds the first day, I left her a couple of treasures (dog hair that was embedded around the bed posts and other tight areas). I checked today,(6 days later) and she has gotten all the hair that's wrapped itself around furniture legs in the whole house10. Mopping: Originally I had planned to purchase a robotic mop shortly after getting Ruby. As the weeks went by, I noticed it was 3 weeks before the floors needed to be mopped again and frankly , I could have gotten away with a spot mop then. What we had normally spent about 20 minutes on once a week, has turned into 20 minutes every 3 weeks. So overall, we've traded in an average of 2.5 hours a week of our time cleaning floors each week for a new average of roughly 10-15 minutes per week between dumping ruby and occassionally mopping. Thank you Ruby!

Update at one year: we still get such a kick out of this robot that we will still often just watch it make decisions after I rearrange the furniture. We still talk to it as if it were one of our cats. It still does an amazing job of picking up crud we didn’t even know was on our floors. We still clean it regularly, and we have found that we can wash the filters in the top rack of the dishwasher, which has allowed us to use the same two original filters for a year. If that isn’t thrifty, I don’t know what is.Rosie still has some of the behavior issues we’ve seen all along. I got a new rug here on Amazon a month ago, which I LOVE, but Rosie sees the dark red and brown stripes as cliffs. Often I’ll be at work and I’ll get a text, “Rosie is stuck near a cliff.” Well, little buddy, the cats can’t help you there. I’ve taken to spot-vacuuming that rug when she won’t run on it.I tried to trick the cliff sensors after doing a little research online, taping aluminum foil over them, but that did NOT work. She (see how I continue to slip so easily into personifying this machine?) gave an “error 6” right out of the gate. We haven’t a single “cliff” in the house, but anything dark brown, like parts of my rug and our vent covers, she thinks she’s going over the falls in a barrel.She (I give, I give! We call it a she!) still gets herself stuck on the bathroom from time to time as well. She will roll in there, then get behind the door and bash it with such force that it closes. Sometimes she will close the door AND get stuck on the vent cover. Double “boo boo”!Even having rearranged the house multiple times since her arrival, I’ve never had to reset her to factory defaults or had any major errors that prevented her from running daily. We have gotten a LOT better about not leaving stringy cat toys, laundry, towels, or other things she could “choke” on laying around on the floor. In turn, our habits are neater and our house is demonstrably cleaner and tidier, all thanks to the influence and the peculiarities of this little robot.I see now that the price has dropped as well. This is absolutely a solid model of Roomba to start your love of them (or domination by?). Go for it. You will not regret it!I am eyeing the 240 wet/dry Braava next. I got one for my dad (review coming soon) and he loves it. We had so much fun watching it and moving it around the first time out of the box... why are these things so much fun to watch and personify? Will I be one of those who calmly accepts our AI overlords? Only time will tell... get this Roomba. It rocks.****************************Updated after a couple of weeks: We are still in awe of how much crud this little machine picks up in our house. We have her on a daily schedule and sometimes run her twice in one day. We are keeping up on maintaining her bin daily and her rollers regularly, and find it quite satisfying to "clean the robot" so she will keep doing such a good job.She has gotten stuck a couple of times where we got an error text from her and had to come rescue her. Once, she jammed herself under a low crossbar of the gate-legged dining room table; once, she thought an extension cord was a cliff after she fought it for a while; and once, she put herself in a tight area behind a chair and couldn't figure out how to escape. I also ran her battery down completely once. Oops. This is why we always run her when we know we will be home.Rosie faces some real challenges in our house, and not just because of the cat and rabbit fur. Furniture and other things are constantly changing places slightly -- the ottoman here, the coffee table there, kitchen chairs, yoga balls, water jugs, rat playpen, shoes, cat toys, etc. It's clear that she knows where the really immovable obstacles are -- walls, corners, sofa -- because she just taps those lightly to confirm their continued existence. When something has moved, though, she gives it a good ole bash to figure out where it is. She has moved cat toys considerable distances! Honestly, it's rather fun to watch her learn. I put her in a completely new room today that I usually keep closed off and it was neat to watch how she mapped it. Even though I always keep animals out of there, she found tons of pet hair, too. Yikes!We have had success using the invisible barrier when it's in a straight line. We tried the half-round setting around the cats' food and water bowls, but because that is near the slight drop off to the living room, she seemed to get confused and just did an extra-thorough job of the kitchen that day. So we aren't using the barrier much. She taps the food and water bowls now anyway rather than ramming them, which is better behavior that doesn't spill water. So that's good.Some cleaning tips: you will need a small, Phillips screwdriver to take the round yellow cap off the triple brush in the front, and we have found that a pair of large tweezers work well for removing string and hair wrapped around any axles. Doing a few minutes of daily and bi-weekly maintenance on this robot is a fair trade for all the unseen crud she picks up. :)*****************We have five animals -- including a house rabbit -- and while we thought we were fairly good about sweeping up with a regular broom, I had NO idea what CLEAN floors actually felt and looked like until we added Rosie to our family of crawling critters.I cleaned, or thought I cleaned, while we were charging her the first day we got her (her "birthday" -- adorable). She filled her bin the first run and we were so tickled that we ran her again later the same day. Second time the bin was half full! Six days in, I can say we are still obsessed with observing her performance and making sure we clean her bin and check her wheels and brushes for obstructions regularly.The second or third day we had her, I was worried she was not mapping the whole house. We were in serious Helicopter Parent mode on those days. But she persevered and started doing an excellent job of covering all the rooms by about day four without any further intervention on our part. We did also buy a cord protector for her because as I said before, we do have a house rabbit.We have a single-level home with a combo of wood, tile, and carpet, with scattered throw rugs and the occasional yoga mat. I did have to move a rug to help Rosie navigate the wooden strip between the lower wood floor and the higher tile floor. She was getting caught up on some of our rough, hand-woven cotton rugs, so I had to move those, too. Besides that, she can lift herself fairly well over low obstacles. So far. She even tried to climb a lamp base this evening!We love that we can use the app to start or stop a cleaning and that we get notifications about what she has done. We enjoy the sounds she makes and the songs she sings, and that if she gets stuck somewhere, she lets us know. The cats don't mind her; one thinks she is a toy and one sleeps through her cleaning cycle.Making a habit of cleaning the bin and using the tools that are included with the robot to clean the rollers and brushes looks like it will be key to prolonging the life of this machine. We are pretty good about maintaining our tech, and I can tell you that even though I love the regular vacuum I have (a Shark), having Rosie do a daily run in the house has made my life much easier and my bare feet much, much happier. I had no idea how much crud on the floor I was enduring!I still sweep out corners and under things where Rosie can't reach, but I am way more motivated to do so knowing I have a cool little helper who will do a major portion of the job for me. Maybe it's still the honeymoon phase, but we love our little floor sweeping robot. She was the right compromise for us between the more expensive models with more bells and whistles and the cheaper ones that didn't have the app.If she explodes or creates a wormhole and disappears, or she eats one of the cats, I'll come back and update. For now, five stars for sure.