I would never do it Eat off my floors. There’s always that person you meet and your friends declare, “Their house is so clean you could eat off the floor.” I am not that person.
I have a dog, a cat, and a five-year-old boy whose only mission in life seems to be to walk in as much dirt and debris as possible on the hardwood floors of our small ranch-style home. Since moving there a year ago, only once has anyone bothered to wash the floors. Because? Because there is a lot of that. And honestly, now that I’m 8 months pregnant, the thought of fighting with a nasty mop and bucket all over the house really isn’t something I like, even if it means cleaning things up.
So when I was asked to test the iRobot Scooba 390, from the great people who brought us the Roomba (we have an old Roomba Red that we call “Tony Blair”), I was pretty excited. Look, it’s not that I don’t want clean floors. It’s just that I work full time and I have a certain distaste for doing work that will never be justified in the long term. Honestly, how long can those floors stay clean in this house?
The iRobot Scooba 390 (whom we’ve nicknamed “David Cameron”) is sleek and simple, a look that has defined these little automatic cleaners since they first appeared on the market. In fact, at first glance I wondered if it was possible that such a simple-looking machine could do one of my most hated jobs, and not just on hardwood floors, but linoleum as well. It doesn’t hurt that the gray-blue styles make it look like something out of Portal, I might add.
One feature I liked from the beginning was the “no need to sweep” angle. However, my husband Michael and I did a quick pass with the vacuum, since it had been some time since we had done a thorough cleaning (and with a long-haired cat and a dog that continually shed, we didn’t want to start with an unfair disadvantage). We followed the rest of the instructions, which are quite simple: add the enzymatic cleaner and water to the tank, replace the tank, position the robot and release it (after removing chairs and things, as usual, although it is quite clever). surround them).
Both Michael and I stood and watched for ten minutes as the Scooba proceeded to make little circles and swirls, sweeping, wiping and washing our kitchen/living room/dining room (it’s an entire contiguous floor space). It was impressive and I joked that it reached corners I could never reach with a mop. And it never uses dirty water: while the tank is small, which is good for saving water, it still eliminates up to 98% of household bacteria. He even mops the floor with a squeegee once finished, a step I never bother to take when washing floors by myself.