iRobot's Scooba Dives Into Your Floors

Despite a couple flaws—namely, you might mop quicker than the Scooba performs—this product may knock one task from your hate-to-do list

by Aaron Ricadela

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Outsources one of life's more tedious tasks

The Bad: Needs minding to get out of trouble spots, and the scrubbing can take too long

The Bottom Line: Best for big, heavily trafficked kitchens where weekly mopping is a chore

Reader Reviews

How many household chores wrinkle the nose more than the thought of mopping? Very few—at least in my apartment, where the kitchen floor regularly goes to seed, sullying my reputation as a neat guy and bucking the more spotless instincts inculcated in me by an Italian mother. So when home robotics company iRobot (IRBT) updated its Scooba floor scrubber in April, I figured a test run might hold big-time practical benefit.

The Scooba is the first product in my series of reviews on robotic appliances and toys (including Butterscotch, Hasbro's animatronic pony, iRobot's Dirt Dog, and Lego's Mindstorm NXT) that strays from dry land. The machine, a hefty blue and gray disk that's 3.5 inches tall and about 14.5 inches across, uses a series of computer-controlled wash cycles to clean linoleum, tile, and hardwood floors. Fill it with water and cleaning fluid, set it on the floor, touch a couple of buttons, and off it whirrs, vacuuming debris, scrubbing dirt, and sucking up dirty water.

Unlike the off-putting mop and bucket, Scooba only deposits clean water on the floor, holding the gray stuff in a separate tank. It even dries the floor when it's done. That's the pitch. In my test, Scooba expunged an admirable amount of dirt but wasn't as maintenance-free as advertised.

Iterations of Cleanliness

The first version of Scooba came out in late 2005, incorporating improvements gleaned from watching users of the popular Roomba vacuum. For example, it's easier to disassemble the robot to clean its brush and tanks without getting your hands dirty. In April, the company released two new Scooba models that clean more floor on a single battery charge than the original $300 Scooba 5800, which is designed for rooms of up to 250 square feet. The $400 Scooba 350, the one I tested, covers 500 square feet, while the $500 Scooba 380 covers 850 square feet.

I set as its task the scrubbing of my 8-foot by 4-foot kitchen, which had been subjected to the rigors of a Sunday morning pancake breakfast hosted for friends. I also unleashed it on my 6-foot by 5-foot bathroom, littered with the long, blond hairs of my friend Nicole, who'd been crashing on my couch for a few nights. "A lot of people like using it in the bathroom because it's one of the nastiest places to clean," says Nancy Dussault, iRobot's marketing communications director. Amen.

Scooba's disk-shaped body is divided into two layers. The top one contains separate tanks for clean and dirty water. The bottom half houses the vacuum, brush, squeegee, wheels, and electronics. To get started, you fill the tank labeled "Clean" with a mixture of warm water and 2 oz. of a cleaning solution developed with Clorox (CLX) that's designed to keep Scooba's wheels from sliding as it coats the floor. A 32-oz. bottle comes in the box; a three-pack of replacement bottles costs $18. The company says you can also use a vinegar-and-water combo, but no other cleaning products.