Scooba is a robotic household cleaner designed and manufactured by iRobot. It uses AWARE - robotic intelligence system to clean your entire floor efficiently, automatically and without missing a spot. It has been carefully designed to use on all sealed hard floor surfaces such as tile, linoleum, vinyl, marble, slate or wood. Its cleaning process consists of five steps: vacuum, soak, spread, scrub and dry.
It vacuums up loose particles, sprays water and cleaning fluid to soak up dirt, spreads the fluids to absorb dirt, scrubs with brushes and finally sucks the dirty water and dries the floor. Scooba robot uses fresh water and cleaning solution, so it never spreads dirty water on the floor.
It has 13 inches of diameter, is 4 inches high and contains two tanks, one for water mixed with cleaning fluid developed by Clorox Co., the other for dirty water.
Because soap is slippery, iRobot worked with the Clorox Co. to create a special cleaning solution with enough traction to allow Scooba's wheels to scoot around.
Can you do better with your hands? Probably yes, but if you do not like to make your hands dirty then Scooba might be a good solution for you.
Unfortunately you will need to manually empty and refill these tanks, once they are empty. It will not recharge itself either. In my opinion one of the fundamental requirements for any household robot is that it should not require any manual intervention (maybe except the setup process) and the Scooba does not meet it. Maybe next release.
To see how well the Scooba gets up spills, a tester put down ketchup, mustard, grape juice and used tea bags. Once the food dried, Scooba went to work. The robot didn't hone in on the spills. Even when it headed right over one, it didn't necessarily clean the mess on the first pass and it couldn't clean some spills at all. Scooba does do a decent job of cleaning lightly soiled floors. It will take about 45 minutes for a midsize kitchen. When it's done, you do have to clean the Scooba brush, filter, and tank.
I hate mopping. Scooba loves it.
(Target)
rating: 4.5
(Cnet)
rating: 4.0
(PcMag)
rating: 4.5
(epinions)
rating: 4.5
