Gadgetory

so we've reviewed a couple of light-duty robot floor cleaners here at CNN appliances but we haven't taken a look at the heavy duty robot cleaners that take it up a notch I'm Megan Willerton for CNET appliances and this is the iRobot Scooba 450 so one thing that separates this floor cleaner from the others we've seen is that it doesn't have reusable or disposable pads this one also comes with a water reservoir but not just one water reservoir it has one for dirty water and one for clean water so you don't get them mixed together and then recycled back onto your floors one thing I really love about this robot mop is that it does everything for you from sweeping to drying first it sweeps the floors and puts down a layer of cleaning solution then it scrubs the floors and then it dries them for you one thing that's handy is that you can program the space that you want to clean so it can do a 150 square foot space takes about 20 minutes or a 300 square foot space it takes about 40 minutes but that's also kind of limiting it's not a very large space another limitation is that the battery only lasts for 40 minutes so you can only do one 40 minute 300 square foot cycle before it needs to be charged again so if you had a thousand square foot space of hardwood floors that you needed to clean before company came over later that night you might want to just do it yourself it would probably take less time I tested this on hardwood vinyl and tile floors and it did a very good job overall it did struggle however on corners the rounded shape and the lack of a side brush really gave it a bit of a problem one thing that I thought was impressive is that it cleaned up mud that had been sitting on the hardwood floor for about 24 hours it also handled the marinara sauce and the canola oil very well it did struggle a little bit with the marinara on vinyl floor because it stained it a little bit so while it did better overall than a lot of the other mopping robots they aren't really designed for the same purpose the other ones are more for light maintenance cleaning and this one is for more heavy-duty scrubbing so it may not seem like a fair comparison but if I were choosing between the two I would probably pick this one because it can handle everything from light maintenance work on up to more heavy duty stains and spills so while I really like the six hundred dollar robot floor cleaner I think there's some room for improvement I really wish it could automatically return to a dock I really wish that you could program schedule so that it could run while you're at work or sleeping and I really wish the battery lasted longer thanks for watching I'm Megan Willerton for C net and this has been a review of the iRobot Scooba 450