Roomba Dying before it Docks

blakrapter · Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 2

Hello everyone,

I am new to this forum. I found it after fighting iRobot tech support for ~1 month via email with no help whatsoever. My schedule has been super crazy, so I have not had a chance to call them. Hopefully some of you can give me some ideas of how to fix this issue.

I purchased a 570 from iRobot that was delivered on somewhere around April 10, 2008. I began using it somwhere around April 15th or so. I purchased the robot to clean two rooms; my bedroom and my bathroom. Well, I never got around to roombarizing the bedroom to get all of the power cords and movable objects up, so, I was driving the roomba into the bathroom each morning it was scheduled to run prior to going to work. When I would come home, I would drive the roomba back to close to the dock using the remote. I would then tell it to dock and it would so so with no problem.

Well, a little over a month ago the problems started. I would come home from work and it would have cleaned the bathroom, but the battery would be dead. Because of this, I could not drive it back to the dock. I would have to pick it up (actually, I would have to get someone else to pick it up because I cannot lift it) and manually dock it.

I assume what is happening is it finishes cleaning the room, then tries to dock as it should. Well, since the docking station is not in that room, it cannot find it of course. So, it drives around trying to find it until it dies. I was under the impression that it is supposed to do like it did origionally and shut down prior to dying if it could not find its dock.

Tech support informed me that roomba could not find its dock and that was the problem. Well, I know that.... It should be shutting down prior to killing the battery if it cannot find its dock.

Any ideas?

eqwalker · Joined: 19 Sep 2006 Posts: 274 Location: Arkansas

I was never aware that a Roomba would shut itself down before running the battery down when it was looking for the dock. I always believed it would run the battery down looking for the dock. Anyone else know differently?

blakrapter · Joined: 15 Jun 2008 Posts: 2

eqwalker,

I thought I read somewhere that it should shut down, but may I was mistakened. I am 100% positive that when I first got it, I would come home from work and open the bathroom door and it would be there waiting. I would turn on the "wireless command center" and it would do whatever I told it to. The battery was fine. After 2-3 weeks of using it, the problem arose. At first, I thought it was a fluke so I ignored it for a week or two. I run it 3 times a week and it went from not dying at all (when I first got it), to dying once a week, and then 2-3 times a week. Now it never works when I get home...

I can think of only 2 things that could cause this:
1. Software glitch that is preventing it from shutting down
2. It is supposed to run for a fairly long period of time in an attempt to find the dock before shutting down. Now that the battery is ~2 months old, that search time + clean time is longer than the battery will last.

Regardless though, it used to be fine when I got home. I need it back that way or I need to return it for a refund because I am unable to pick it up to manually take it back to the dock. I have to get help, which is a royal pain because it usually dies right in the middle of the room and I have to wait until someone is around to move it and make the room useable.

fancyfreewv · Posted: June 15, 2008, 5:01 pm Post subject:

Why not put the dock in the room where you want it to clean so it can find it when it is finished?

IRobot is correct I believe in that it will continue to look for it's dock until it has no battery left. Without the dock or LH to look for, the robot has no other smart technology to tell it to just stop after a certain time and wait for you to drive it back to the dock. It needs to be able to find the dock as it's not smart enough to know that the floor is clean.

RoombaRules · Posted: June 15, 2008, 9:35 pm Post subject:

blakrapter,

I believe the problem here is not your Roomba itself, rather one of it's components....the battery.

my explanation:

the roomba is not programmed to shut down much long before it's battery is dead. The key word here is much. Because essentialy every electronic battery-powered device will shut down a little before it's battery is COMPLETEY dead....and it will turn on a few times (mabye many times depending on the battery and the device it's for), even while it continues to insist that the battery is drained and shuts down time after time.....try this with your cell phone.

In the old days this was important because it was not good for batteries to be drained of energy completely....some will argue that it is still good practice to not drain rechargable batteries completely. I could get a whole group of electrical engineers going about this lol but anyway.....

This little bit of charge left in your device is called a capacitance charge, you will find it in all devices (like I said) and that includes Roomba. This is the reason that you were able to turn Roomba on again after you came home from work, not because Roomba is programmed to shut down and save it's battery long before it dies.

now for the reason that you can't do this anymore....

As batteries age (doesn't matter whether you use them or not), they lose their capacity....the total amount of energy it can store. Normaly 1 month is not enough time to make much difference (perhaps the battery was manufactured a long time ago and had been sitting on a shelf for a while)....but the way you use Roomba can affect it too. So when the battery begins to lose capacity, the Roomba doesn't have enough charge left to turn on and drive back to the base.

I liken this to apples....let's give that capacitance charge I talked about a figure of 2% of the battery (it's usualy less than that, but bear with me here)....if I have 100 apples and I offer you 2% of them (2 apples), would you prefer I have big apples or small apples? Now, assuming you love apples as much as you love electricity :D , I would think you would want me to have big apples, because you'd get a lot more to eat. But as the battery loses it's capacity, those apples get smaller. And if Roomba doesn't have atleast 1 BIG apple it may not even decide to turn on at all. If you could pick Roomba up I'd say flip it over, take the battery out, press and hold the Power button for a little while, put the battery back in, and turn Roomba on....that will actualy solve that problem believe it or not until Roomba is completely drained. But that's a story for another day. Although, if you could do that, why not just bring it back to the charger while you're at it? :lol:

anyway I agree with fancyfreevw, you should move your charger to a more convenient location for Roomba to find it, that will solve your problem.

ignoring my rambling, I hope this helps

~Seth

fancyfreewv · Posted: June 16, 2008, 6:09 am Post subject:

Seth the battery would have had to have been defective out of the box. She bought it on 4/10 this year. Of course mention was not made of the conditioning charge or not on this item.