Don't think there is any such thing.....those of us who love hand made orientals just will have to rely on hand held vacuums and maybe a swiffer for the bare floors so as not to catch the fringe.

Unless physically compromised, rendering vacuuming impossible? Get a an upright vacuum that goes from bare floor to rug at the flip of a switch. Skip Dyson, which is very hard on rugs and carpet. Skip robots. : )

Geez, how long have these things been around now? I thought for sure by this time somebody would have figured out how to program them to cope with rugs that need a light touch or tassels & fringe that should be avoided.

I had a roomba ten years ago and hated it. the time it took to put up dining chairs, ottomans, set up barriers for stairs, and then to put it all back when it was done? I could have vacuumed my entire home in 1/2 the time. I feel like they're only worth it if you have a cavernous single story home with the flattest rugs and extremely spartan furniture.

I have a cordless dyson stick vacuum now and I'm able to do my 1,600 sf home (mostly hardwoods, with some area rugs) in about 20 minutes or less, using only about 1/2 the battery. it's super light and corners extremely well, so I can skirt around or under furniture really easily.

DH wants to try this approach to keeping our floors clean, so I had a long chat with the roomba/irobot people yesterday.

While the rep seemed unaware of the issues with handmade oriental carpets, he/she did seem intrigued, so it was a useful conversation. Unfortunately, in spite of the many models available with lots of features, none have the long brushes made with the "light touch" that would be appropriate for our vulnerable carpets.

I came to the conclusion that the way to make this work is to get the rugs off the floor somehow when the robot vacuum is deployed. Fortunately, most of our rugs are small enough that it's practical enough to do this.

DH ordered the 675 model from Best Buy yesterday, so we'll see how it goes, and I will report back if anyone is interested. As I understand it, we have at least 30 days to return it if we aren't satisfied.

Oh that should be so FUN! Moving every rug to a pile of roll ups before you can set a robot on its way. Good LORD. I can't think of anything worse. when you could simply have a vacuum that goes from carpet to bare floor. And someone to "push" it, which on any decent vacuum is nearly effortless.

Yeah......put Mr. Clean Floors DH in charge of this maneuver every few days. LMAO.

following

Robot update -- we are on our way to clean floors and marital harmony now.

After deploying the robot maybe three or four times now, I find it does a better job when it can just ping pong around in one room at a time, in its own bizarre way, rather than trying to cover a larger space, which seemed to exhaust the thing. On the first day, we left it to do the entire first floor of the house. and came back to find it under an end table in the living room, with a depleted battery.

This room-at-a-time approach is OK with me since different areas of this place need cleaning at different times, at different frequencies.

For example, after I trim the dog on the work table in the laundry room, I can just lock the robot up in that room until no shreds of clippings remain on the floor. Ha! (And I am pleased to report that the dog seems to be taking the robot in stride, not displaying any fear, aggression, etc.)

DH did shake out one of the larger oriental rugs before putting it back in place.

I think I am honing in on a strategy so I don't have to roll up and remove the 13 foot runner every time. Work in progress!

If you can tuck the fringed ends about a foot under the rug, the robovac will probably skip that section after bumping into it a bit. If you want to keep it off the rug entirely, I guess you can tuck the unfringed parts under too (that won't work on a runner of course).

If your rugs are delicate enough to not want them robovacced, you might not want to scrunch up their ends though!

Edit.

I always think of these things as glorified brooms, not really vacuums. Used one in an antique shop where I worked, but it was always stuck somewhere and beeping. Couldn't leave it to do the job at night because it would be stuck and dead and the floors still not clean by morning. I would like to hear from those who are happy they their Roomba.

As a fully 50% Armenian who grew up with these rugs, had a grandfather, and his brother, and three uncles in this business of fine rugs, and as one who as a youngster, declared I would "never have them, why can't we have plain like everyone else?!" ....................

It depends the level of "clean" you want. Given most of these will hide a multitude of sins, the amount of dirt that will descend THROUGH a handwoven rug to the hard floor beneath over time is fairly incredible. We use to haul smaller rugs to the yard in the frozen , blinding, white snow of February. "Dry" snow. A broom. Toss snow on rug......sweep vigorously in all directions. Repeat.... where my mom would declare them "brightened!" . Once a year, one uncle would come to the house and clean the larger rugs. All the furniture would move, and beneath? The visual proof of the hand woven. Dirt a plenty. This in a house where the mom spent half her life with a vacuum attached to a hand. A broom or a dust mop and wet mop in another.

Today, when a client wants an oriental cleaned, out that rug goes, to my Iranian source who owns the shop that imports, sells, and also WASHES these fine rugs. Kiss it goodbye for a week or more- returning when fully cleaned and dried. He'll laugh and tell you what a great job a Roomba is doing .

When I first had oriental rugs, I was shocked at the amount of dirt under them. I was vacuuming the rugs regularly and I'm very good at house maintenance. That's one of the reason I won't have wall-to-wall carpet. Same thing happens, but there's no way to clean under the carpet. Nasty. My single, brief foray into having house cleaners was for the sole purpose of lifting the rugs, vacuuming their backs, vacuuming and washing the floors beneath once a month. They thought I was nuts. They also didn't do a good job.

Since I have to lift the rugs to get the backs clean, a robot wouldn't help a lot. Now if there were a robot that could move the furniture and wrestle a 10' x 14' rug, I'd get one. And, yes, the rugs need to have a bath at one of the local rug laundries (Turkish or Iranian - both are excellent) periodically.

I just got a Roomba i7+, hoping to be able to use it on a three floor house, including one floor with hardwood and multiple oriental rugs. I'm trying it on another floor first.

My first experiment was to remove the beater rollers, the green ones in the original poster's photo. It does run and picks up some dirt using only suction. So there is the option to use that on the oriental rugs. There are no other parts to catch the fringes, but I still have to see that in action.

How much dirt does it pick up without beaters? With them, it filled its bin yesterday on the same floor, which hadn't been vacuumed in over a month. Then today without the beaters it got maybe 15% to 20% of a bin full from the same floor. I'll try it again with beaters after it charges and see what happens.

But the fact that it picked up anything means that I can do some cleaning of the oriental rugs with suction only. I don't think that will hurt them but am reluctant to use any kind of beaters. Any advice on this?

This Roomba has a mapping function. I'm hoping that I can create two separate maps for the floor with the rugs, one for suction only and another one that blocks off the rugs so I can use the beaters to clean the rest of the floor.

I've got 60 days of a free return policy, so I plan to learn what's possible and then decide whether to keep this i7+ or try another model. Others might have adjustments that will help; the i7+ disappointingly has none.

Any advice or suggestions would be more than welcome.

Don't bother running it without the beaters (which are very soft btw). It relies heavily on them to do its job.

IMO never would use those on an expensive carpet the best is just a regular vacuum no beater noanything that pulls at the fabric. You can map off the roomba but it will look pretty awful to have all the sensors stuck all over . IMo use a proper vacuum and save the roomba for spaces without expensive oriental rugs . I use my roomba in my walk out basement where we have no rugs and 3 big dogs in and out of a dog run .

^the single best thing you can do for any rug any floor is to get the dang dirt off and out on a regular basis. If you think any ROOMBA will do that, ...............i will be laughing.

"Oriental" rugs vary greatly depending country of origin and knots. There is no one for all answer.

I have a close to 15 foot almost square Sarourk...circa 1940 in my family room. I wish there were a way I could vacuum the back and lift it even to turn it. And I wish there were an Iranian "laundry" fairly near by....last person I contacted about another rug was going to dry clean it....whatever that means!

I tested the Roomba i7 on my sturdiest rug, relatively new, wool with silk highlights, about 400 kpi.

The fringes on the left are the way it looked after running over them several times with the brushes removed. Messed them up a little but didn't seem to bother them.

The rug hadn't been vacuumed in months. The Roomba did two "spot" cleaning runs, each over a different one meter circular area, with the brushes removed. Then the runs were repeated with the brushes in place. The brushes and wheels left no visible trace on the rug.

The dirt on the left is from the brushless runs, suction only. On the right, what it got going over the same area again with brushes, including a rubber band and a pebble that the suction couldn't lift, a lot of what I guess is fiber from the rug, and probably more dirt mixed in with the fiber.

Is it good for these rugs to get all that fiber up? The consensus seems to be not to use brushes on them.

And the big question: Is it worthwhile to go over them with suction only? What do you think?

I think Roombas are fairly delicate in comparison to your Sharks and Dysons. They also greatly rely on their brushrolls to get dirt up since they have anemic suction motors on them. I run my robotic vacuums over my area rugs without worry. I'm more careful when it comes to actual vacuuming. I tend to avoid the heavy duty brushrolls on my upright/central vac. I think you're fine to keep the brushes on your Roomba.

Thanks, M H. The other issue is the fringes. I expect the rollers would snag them. My hope is to make two maps for this floor, one full map for use without the rollers, and one with the rugs blocked out for use with the rollers.

But it might be tricky or impossible to fool the Roomba into having two maps for the same floor.

Another possibility is to fold the fringes under and tape them with low residue masking tape. But I'd rather have them out, and it'd be a pain to tape them every time I vacuum.

I have now vacuumed the floor with the oriental rugs using the Roomba i7. I agree with MH that the beaters are pretty soft so was willing to use them on the rugs.

I taped the fringes to the backs with low residue blue masking tape - this is Scotch 2080 "for delicate surfaces".

Then to make sure the tape wouldn't get sucked up, I taped the end on the front of the rugs with regular blue tape. But I think it would have been good enough just to end the low residue tape on the back of the rug.

Despite my best efforts, as the Roomba patrolled it pulled an occasional strand of fringe out from under. I saw a few sticking out, and it's possible that others got pulled off entirely. But I saw no signs of damage and it never got stuck with fringe wrapped around a roller.

I had sent it on training runs without vacuuming, and at one point the side brush snagged a strand of weft from a fringe and pulled it loose. I think the rug is fine without it, but I should have taped the fringes before even doing a non-vacuum pass.

The i7 made a map of the floor, and I can make keep-out zones in order to clean the floor without doing the rugs. Tech support says I can make a second map of the same floor by doing a "training run", so one possibility is to have a map with the rugs excluded, and then clean the full floor occasionally using the map with the rugs included. Or I might just leave the fringes taped under, although it does look better with them out.

I don't think it got a huge amount of dirt and fibers out of the rugs, but I figure anything it gets is better than nothing, as long as the rugs aren't harmed. And it did clean the floors well.

BTW Costco just started selling the i7+ renumbered as the i8+, for $100 less and with more accessories.

I had a roomba ten years ago and hated it

I have the Roomba i3. I have several very expensive oriental rugs. First day I used it I noticed the three prong side beeter was tangling the fringes and then it eventually got stuck in the fringes. I removed the side beater and problem solved. Without the side beater it works perfect and climbs over the fringes without damaging or tangling them. The other nice thing about the i3 is that it has less suction than the i7 and i9 so more gentle on the rug fringe.

I have the Roomba 980 and the i7+. Both are perfectly gentle on my wool area rugs though the 980 seems to actually clean them better than the i7+ but that could be my imagination. My previous Neato D7 did a fine job as well but was very unreliable.

My Oriental rugs are mostly OK with heavy use of Roomba 960. However, one rug in particular has significant damage on one corner before I realized this was happening. This rug has fringe (as do the others rugs) but has a THICKER pile plus I think the damage has occurred after replacing the pad underneath which may be thicker than the previous pad. Thus, there is a more significant VARIANCE IN HEIGHT around the rug perimeter from floor surface to top of rug. The damage is on the corners, one corner much more than others. I may try taping the fringe. I expect it will be a nightmare to get the rug repaired. But I love using the Roomba otherwise minus other issues we are having with it after several years of frequent use.