Robot vacuum usage

Anyone out there using a robot vacuum (Roomba, etc) in the church? As I vacuumed the chapel recently and noted all the damage to the pews from years of vacuums bumping here and there, it made me wonder. Would like to hear success or failure stories. Those vacuums are meant for houses afaik, so I'm not even sure they'd know what to do in a room as big as a chapel. But imagine the glory of it driving under all the pews!

Our Roomba never did a great job at home, primarily due to the depth of our carpet, but it would do fine on the commercial carpet used in meetinghouses. Roomba has poor suction and a very small storage container. So it would probably be full before the battery ran out. When my Roomba battery lost the ability to take a charge, I just gave it to Goodwill.

I've often wondered why the Church hasn't commissioned a Roomba army for every unit and leave all classroom doors open to allow them to quietly do their jobs at night...they could return to their bases and drop their contents as many times as necessary if needed...

bruderbell wrote: Sat Jan 09, 2021 9:07 am Anyone out there using a robot vacuum (Roomba, etc) in the church? As I vacuumed the chapel recently and noted all the damage to the pews from years of vacuums bumping here and there, it made me wonder. Would like to hear success or failure stories. Those vacuums are meant for houses afaik, so I'm not even sure they'd know what to do in a room as big as a chapel. But imagine the glory of it driving under all the pews!

I've always been curious about that, too, so I tried it the other day. I took mine over and set it loose. Left it a couple of hours, but not long enough. It did a great job! The map it made is attached, if you're interested.

A unit in our Stake has a Roomba their Ward Council decided to buy a few years ago, and we recently inquired about it's utility. They are quite pleased with how it works for them, they have what I'd consider a regular sized chapel (if that concept even exists), and have had no issues. I don't know enough to know if they got a basic version, or something more expensive, or what kind of options Roomba or other vendors offer that might make a difference. We are in the process of determining if we want to use funds to buy a unit for our building (ours is what I'd call a phase 1 chapel, so we shouldn't have to worry about battery issues!).

I don't have a lot of experience with automatic vacuums, but from what I've seen, it seems like when it gets to an obstacle, it "bounces" away in a different direction. This is a good system when there are few obstacles – it will eventually cover the full surface. But when there are a lot of obstacles – 100 bench legs – is it able to get everywhere it needs to without constantly bouncing back to places it's already been?

That's a fair question. My vacuum is a relatively cheap one, maybe $150. If you can see the .PNG file I posted with my reply yesterday, it shows the lines the vacuum took in vacuuming the chapel. First it divided the chapel into sections, then it went in straight lines. When it hit one of the Pew legs, it worked it worked its way around the leg, and then resumed on the line that it had been taking. It ended up doing a very thorough job. I'm skeptical the church will ever want to do this, but there's nothing about the technology that prevents it. The robot vacuum did a very good job in the chapel. In fact, it did a far better job and got in far more spaces than humans do with the vacuums we use. The classrooms would be harder, because the fire code requires the doors to be closed, at least in my state. But for the chapel and the hallways, it seems like it would be a great solution.

In my experience, the chapel usually gets less attention than the classrooms (at least the floor under all the pews). I think better robotic vacuums have LiDAR which uses an onboard laser to map out the walls and obstacles (and memory to remember them from one cleaning to another). It's much better than the original design that just randomly moved until it bumped into something and then went another direction. LiDAR is also better then other technologies when vacuuming in a lights out situation. My parents have one that has a tank at the charging station so the vacuum can empty at the tank when full and then go back to work. I don't see the church investing in this technology (at least not in the near future), but it is a cool idea for this application. It could be set to vacuum early Monday morning so if a need came up for the chapel during the week that part of the cleaning would already be done.

While I think the robot vacuum is a neat thing, we need to remember to only be using church provided vacuums and equipment in these buildings.
As someone who is involved quite heavily in the maintenance and repair of the vacuums in these meetinghouses I can pass along some helpful info from what I put together in a separate forum. [moderator: Use the link below to see the information.]

[moderator: Content removed since it is duplicated in the Regarding Church Meetinginghouse Vacuums post/thread. Please follow the Code of Conduct and avoid duplicating posts.]

Roombas do not get the steps or top landing where the pew is. Also around the organ or piano. You need a member to vacuum. There is also other cleaning that needs to be done in the chapel besides vacuuming.

Roombas do not get.....

I'm sure we're all in agreement on that. The two areas in the chapel that I feel generally have the most need but get the least amount of love, are the pews themselves with the crumbs and such, and the carpet underneath the pews. I've found that the under-pew area cleaning varies widely from place to place, and ideally a robot vacuum could address that -- but obviously could not clean the actual pew, or steps to the stand, or unique features of a particular chapel. So it's definitely a supplemental option, with manual labor still required for all these additional items needing cleaning.