Roomba Cleaning Distance from Dock

[sezrah]

I havent seen this mentioned anywhere else on the web but does the Roomba have a 'cleaning range', that is, the maximum distance it can be away from its dock?

I recently purchased the Roomba 780 and noticed from its first use that it cleans the two closest rooms, then travels a certain distance along the hallway and returns back. It repeated the pattern 3-4 more times and always stopping at the one point along the hallway. So it made me think: does it not want to be too far away from the dock OR was it trying to just really really thoroughly clean the first section before moving on?

Note: it stops approx. 10 metres away from the dock

[vic7767]

There are many 780 Owners that don't even use a dock when running a cleaning mission. The Roomba has no sensors for detecting the distance from a dock.

[viper001]

I have my Neato charging dock at one end of my 2nd floor and it doesn't have any problems with the robot making it back to the dock. This the main reason I sold my Roombas and went with the Neato. Even with the IRobot lighthouses everywhere it was much more of a "crap shoot" if those robots would actually: a) clean everywhere, and then b) make it back consistently for charging. There are aspects of the Roomba that I prefer but their navigation approach to finding their way back for charging convinced me to try something else.

There is nothing cooler than hearing the Neato shut down it's vacuum motor at the far end of the house and then carefully traverse it's way all the way back to the dock and hook back up. Much nicer than seeing a battery-starved Roomba desperately searching for an IR beam that it may or may not find before it's battery is dead.

[vic7767]

This is a Roomba question thread, what's a Neato comment doing here ? I have every Roomba model and every Neato model made and I make comments about both but normally reserve my comments to the forum I'm posting in and answer a original posters question with a helpful answer about their model not another vendor.

[viper001]

Sorry Vic, I didn't notice which forum I was in as I jumped in from a link on the home page.

To actually provide an answer to the original poster, I also owned a 780 in the past and noticed the same behavior he described as far as the distance from base the robot would go out to. You can *somewhat* increase the range the robot will go with the use of lighthouses, but overall in a large floorplan I found if the 780 did manage to make it to the far side of the house, away from the dock, it was in that vicinity that i would usually find it with a dead battery.

With no lighthouses used at all the robot would make it a lot further, but this seemed to greatly increase the chances that it would die from battery starvation as it couldn't find it's way back from the far side of the house.

Since I was interested in a robot being able to clean my entire floorplan (and not just the couple of rooms near the charging base) I looked to a competitor for my cleaning needs.

[vic7767]

A lot of the 780s cleaning ability and the number of rooms that are cleaned are very dependent upon the capacity of the installed battery. The higher the mAH rating, more area will be covered.

[viper001]

My comments were about a new 780 with the factory battery. I did everything the manual said to condition the battery when I got it. I don't have the unit anymore as I sold it on CL but from my observations it would have needed about 2X more capacity on the battery to have a chance of passing over all the areas on my second floor. From what I saw it would maybe do 1/3 of my area on the successful missions where it made it back to the dock.

[sezrah]

thanks Vic, that explains why nothing has been said about the cleaning range.

I'm new to all this robotic vacuum cleaning things so its interesting to hear about how it compares to other similar products. I guess they all still have flaws but I won't doubt that there would be significant improvements for the upcoming models (hopefully not too soon because I just bought my 780)