This would be a minor issue except that the Roomba cleans that room at about 2:00 AM.

If you are thinking "Oh, shit!" you'd be right. My little pet-mess carpet cleaner got more use than I'd anticipated when I bought it.

I found a youtube video on cleaning crap out of a Roomba. It seems I'm not the first person to experience this. In fact, the newest Roomba has a turd-avoidance system.

Step one in cleaning the Roomba was to take it outside and wipe it down with a cloth you're willing to throw away.

Years ago, my sister showed me the trick of wiping your windshield with snow. It's damp and a little abrasive, and does a good job of cleaning the salt and muddy sand away.

If there's one thing I've got plenty of right now, it's crusty snow, so wiping the Roomba's bottom with snow was the first step.

I won't go into details about the rest of the process, but it involved a lot of hot water and profanities.

The end result was a roomba that would back up and then stop with a "vaccum failure: error 11".

This means the vacuum isn't working.

With some more pulling apart, I determined that the vacuum is generated by a little turbine run by a little motor, and that little motor wouldn't turn any more.

Yeah, it all died when the shit hit the fan.

I disassembled the vacuum assembly and applied a lot of hot water followed by a lot of sucking air (shop vac), and finally a rest on top of the furnace vent to finish drying the motor windings.

The roomba ran for about an hour before it stopped again. The turbine seems to still be sticky.

So I went to the iRobot home page and navigated to the page where you can buy new parts and hit a 404. "We're reworking these pages and some links don't exist yet."

So I found the "Help!" page and sent a message to the support desk explaining my issue and my need for a new turbine assembly.

A day later, I got a nice note from iRobot support explaining that they needed a photo of the roomba (showing the damage), serial number, proof-of-purchase, fingerprints of the dog in question, etc.

I sent back a note with a photo of the cleaned roomba, explanation that I'd already cleaned it, no proof of purchase, but an guess that it was well out of warrantee, etc.

On Tuesday, I'd heard nothing, so I found the part I needed on EBay and ordered that.

On Wednesday, I got email that iRobot was sending me an entire new roomba and charging station.

So, when the dust settles, I'll have two functional roombas and a new roomba-lookalike.