Hardwood floors look beautiful – especially seen from a foot away as you scrub them the night before your mother-in-law arrives for a visit.
It’s just too easy to pretend that sweeping alone is keeping the floor pristine – at least until company is coming and you realize that maple or oak (not to mention tile and linoleum) aren’t supposed to feature subtle gray smears. Then it’s panic time.
Many people deal with this by outsourcing the whole job to cleaning services. But in the 21st century, can’t we outsource the work to machines instead? That’s the thinking behind the Scooba, a floor-washing robot from iRobot Corp. (irobot.com), the Burlington, Mass.-based company that introduced the Roomba robot vacuum four years ago.
Like the Roomba, the Scooba is a low-slung disc (roughly 3 inches high and 14 inches wide) that propels itself across the floor on hidden wheels, finding walls and other obstacles by mindlessly bumping into them.
At $300 or $350 for either of two models – the cheaper, just-released Scooba 5800 runs on a smaller battery than the original Scooba 5900 – the gadget could pay for a lot of mops. It also takes longer to clean a room than a human being and generally makes more noise. And it won’t do better than a motivated human.
Then again, the Scooba doesn’t have to outperform Martha Stewart; it just has to be better than you.
The device belies its computer ancestry with a surprising simplicity. After filling the “clean” half of its removable tank module – it takes about three tablespoons of Scooba’s Clorox-brand, nonbleach solution, plus just under a quart of water – you just slide the tank back in place, place the Scooba on the floor and press “power,” then “clean.” Then stay out of the way. Or not; you won’t have trouble outrunning this thing.
In action, the Scooba whirs and whines loudly as it meanders around a floor, squeaking occasionally as it pirouettes around table legs and disappears under furniture.
It looks lost, charting apparently random diagonal and spiral paths across the room, traversing some spots again and again while crossing others once or twice until it has calculated that every accessible inch of floor has been dealt with.
All the while, it administers the same treatment: vacuuming up debris, spraying cleaning solution on the floor, gently scrubbing off dirt with rotating brushes and slurping up the now-filthy cleaning residue.
On its first test drive in my house, the Scooba took about 45 minutes to tackle 90 square feet or so of kitchen floor. Then it stopped and beeped a fanfare worthy of R2-D2 to inform everyone of its accomplishment.
The floor looked fresher, but I didn’t realize how much so until I dumped foul, dark-gray water from the “dirty” tank into the sink.
The machine worked equally well on new hardwood flooring in the dining room and tile in the bathroom; I even left it alone in the house, barricading it first in one room and then another.
The Scooba, it should be noted, is not for every floor. IRobot says not to use it on Pergo or other laminated products, as well as any other surface that’s not fully sealed – water could be left behind in gaps or seams.
Water and wood don’t mix in general. Is a Scooba safe to use on a prized stretch of vintage hardwood? People at two local flooring firms had not personally tested a Scooba but didn’t foresee any problems.
Provided the Scooba leaves only minimal water behind, “I wouldn’t see any long-term effects,” said C. Christian Nash, vice president of Nash Floor Co. in Rockville, Md.
There are other ways to reduce the drudgery of hand-cleaning a floor. Russ Sterner, an owner of Baltimore-
based Master Care Flooring, for example, said he breezes through his house with a terry-cloth “shoe mop.” “I have hardwoods in my whole first floor, and I could probably do it in about five minutes total.”
But I imagine a lot of people would rather watch the game, read their e-mail or take a nap while this cybernetic sidekick does the dirty work.
