Review on 🤖 iRobot Roomba 690 Robot Vacuum with Wi-Fi Connectivity, Alexa Compatibility, Ideal for Pet Hair, Carpets, Hard Floors, Self-Charging by Charles Collier

*updated after 3 weeks of use* We bought Ruby after weeks of discussion, research and reading reviews. i am cheap I hate spending money. For the record, we are two working adults living in a wooded area with a German shepherd and a pit bull. The German shepherd sheds its skin as if its skin is constantly on fire and its fur running after their collective life. I'm talking about serious hair loss. The pit bull loves mud, dirt and anything rough and will happily pick up as much as it can carry. My husband and I like to be outside and bring our dirt with us. Once the floors showed signs of needing a thorough cleaning/mopping, it typically took around 2.5 hours to complete the job from start to finish. This does not include the time we both spent getting the other person to do floors for us. Inevitably, after all this slavery, a dog hair or two will crawl out from under the sofa just to make sure we know we're not in charge here. Ruby appears. Oh ruby. How I love you. I ordered Ruby on a Sunday, coincidentally the same day I talked my husband into sweeping and scrubbing the floors without my help. On Thursday, when Ruby arrived, the tumbleweed and dog hair mud began to take over the house again. Ruby was easy to set up, and while she was charging for her first flight, my husband and I decided to reconfigure some areas in our house where we had things on the floor, under beds, or cables that got in the way. etc. While we were at it, we went ahead and swept the dirt out of the awkward corners onto the main floor to see how it held up. Our home is single storey, 2,400 square feet, mostly hardwood and tile with carpet only in the bedrooms. We have no carpets except for a bath rug in 2 bathrooms. Our house is older and has been remodeled so there are a few awkward corners. On the first day, Ruby struggled. Oh bless her poor drunken little soul. She jumped, trotted, missed, spat things out and finally died lost in the back bedroom. We charged it and started again. From the second time it was fine, but again it got stuck somewhere with a dead battery. (I emptied her bin 5 times that day, and each time it was incredibly full. Shame!) I'll bring her back and fight again and tie on the floors and make excuses for people not coming. After 6 days I can honestly say I'm in love with Ruby. In the six days we didn't touch the broom (aside from sweeping dirt out of an awkward corner onto its path on day one), there wasn't a single canine tumbleweed on our floors. My feet are pretty clean if I walk barefoot all day. I no longer feel embarrassed or panicked when someone says they're coming to the house. Also under the beds and sofas is clean! $324.73 and WORTH EVERY PENNY! These are the questions I really wanted answered before buying, so I'll try to answer them for you. 1. No, it doesn't follow a straight grid. Let her go every day, and today she will get what she missed yesterday. Give her time, she really gets better every day! *After the first week I watched her work and noticed that she now looks more like a trellis. It's not a perfect grid, but it's obvious there's a method to his madness*2. The Wi-Fi feature is great for scheduling and locating her if she sometimes can't find her way home when her battery is low and for chasing her away from home when needed. I think we could probably live without this feature, but I don't regret having it.3. My white baseboards and all furniture legs are in perfect order4. The same dogs who are deaf to my upright Kirby and my upright Shampoo Bissel don't pay any attention to Ruby unless she crosses their path. Watching TV or going about your normal life while it's running is no problem. Working from home means she has to be in another part of the house because of the noise6. Yes, she doesn't always find her way home when her battery is dead. My husband and I decided that we were perfectly willing to follow her and bring her to the base in exchange for not having to manually mop the floors. *Ruby now invests every day except week 1. Guess she just had to learn the floor plan in the first week* *She always docks in the 3rd week now*7. It didn't scratch our original hardwood floors.8. It transitions easily from one floor to another, even through small things with connecting strips (all my floors are light)9. give her a week On the first day, when I was clearing things off the floor and under the beds, I left her some treasures (dog hair woven around the bedposts and other hard-to-reach places). I checked today (6 days later) and she has her hair wrapped around furniture legs all over the house10. Mop: I originally planned to buy a robot mop shortly after I got Ruby. As the weeks went by I realized that it was 3 weeks before the floors needed mopping again and honestly then I got by with a mop. What we used to spend like 20 minutes once a week became 20 minutes every 3 weeks. So all in all we traded an average of 2.5 hours of our floor cleaning time per week for a new average of around 10-15 minutes per week between Ruby reset and the occasional mopping. Thank you Ruby!