iRobot Roomba j7+ (7550) Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum –Identifies and avoids obstacles like pet waste & cords, Empties itself for 60 days, Smart Mapping, Works with Alexa, Ideal for Pet Hair, Roomba J7+

This robot is great but it doesn’t support Apple HomeKit.

I bought this after poopaggeden happened in my home. You know, every pet and roomba owners worst nightmare? When I tried to clean my old one out, I realized I couldnt get all of the poo without ruining the circuitry. I decided I needed the camera one just in case I miss a little present somewhere and also decide I dont want to sweep. So, the camera DOES work, but when it turns on, it misses so much of the dirt. I have that feature turned off and would only turn it back on if I werent home. There are a ton of great things about it. The app is phenomenal. I love being able to set up rooms. I love that I can enable it with Alexa. I love that I can clean the floors while I am away. It takes a little bit to charge, but unless you are cleaning a large space, it is unnoticeable. This generally makes my life so much easier. I purchased this item back in late Feb, and I still have not had to change out the bags. I am mostly happy with this, but again, I would recommend just buying the Roomba without the camera.

So far so good. It is still learning how to map the house and I had to manually empty the robot on the fifth time because the bag was full.

Finally, a robot vacuum that rarely gets stuck. However it does on rare occasions get stuck when trying to go under my bedroom furniture which is slightly too low for it to fit under. It gets wedged and I have to free it. Im not sure why its obstacle avoidance feature doesnt prevent that, but it doesnt. Otherwise, its great! I can essentially set the schedule and forget it, until its time to change the bag in the base unit, which has been about once every ten days or so. - I have it set to vacuum the whole house daily at 3:00PM. Very happy with it!

For the money I thought itd be better than it is. I often catch it going around a room the ring way so that the dust brush is on the opposite side of the wall which is pretty pointless. Often after a few weeks of flawless operation itll suddenly not be able to dock or find its way home or get stuck on obstacles inside of a keep out zone. Obstacle avoidance could be better, I often find the cats mouse toy sucked up in the main rollers. We have a cat and even though the rollers dont get bound up, they do get clogged full of hair so it requires pretty regularly cleaning and disassembly. A really good robot for $300 but a pretty lackluster experience at this price point.

Weve owned an older Roomba, a Neato XV21 and now this Roomba J7+. Review sites adore this J7+ but I dont get it. Weve had connectivity and setup issues with it, the app is a tick above mediocre and we dont like it requiring cloud storage of photos it takes in your home to get its reviewed performance. Here are the numbers (higher is better) of the latest runs after it has had over a week to map out the house: Noise: 5 Battery Life: 9 Avoids Getting Stuck: 7 Brush Maintenance: 10 Self Emptying: 10 Smarts: 3 (if you dont care about pet poop that is, higher if you do) Cleaning Efficiency: 3 Edge / Corner Cleaning: 2 Finds Home / Self Charges: 7 Obstacle Avoidance: 5 (does avoid obstacles but is overly cautious) This robot is really blind and inefficient. It is constantly stopping short of where it should clean, only to turn around and then come back and revisit the same place over and over again. It bumps into objects hard which is antiquated at this stage of robot vacuum evolution. Ive watched this Roomba J7+ attempt to clean areas it has mapped out and it attempts to row clean areas from memory but the control systems for the wheel motors arent super precise for any of these floor robots. As a result, it will clean at an angle with respect to a toe kick / wall / edge where it should be driving parallel to it. This results in it having to have to re-clean the same areas more than once. The room mapping would be far more useful if you could set priorities for the rooms. For instance, the kitchen and hallways are more important, in our case, than the bedrooms, but the J7+ often cleans the bedrooms before more important areas. I think this is a decent robot for people that arent home when the robot is cleaning. The brushes dont appear to require any maintenance, its pretty good at finding its base and the self-emptying works well. Our base is near a gate-leg dining table and it gives this robot all kinds of trouble. It has a very hard time with the mine field of table and chair legs. Unfortunately, with a lot of people working at home, this one falls short in that scenario. It does have a good run time but its on the noisy side and is so inefficient in how it covers the floor area, that it runs and makes noise far longer than it should have to. For reference, our $300 Costco Neato was quieter and far more efficient in its cleaning patterns. It was also better at edge and corner cleaning. The review sites state that the roomba has better suction than older bots but we didnt notice any difference in cleaning. In the end, none of them are going to deep clean carpets like an upright and they all seem to clean hard floors well in our experience. Our Neato lasted maybe 6 years or so and then began intermittently failing with my vision is blocked. This evidently is due to the lidar motor / belt system wearing out so this is a vulnerability the roomba doesnt have. That said, having a robot that can see makes it so much more efficient in how it traverses the house, I can deal with replacing it every 6 years. We really dislike watching and listening to the Roomba j7+ bump into everything (and hard) after having the Neato with lidar where it can actually see where its going. Although use of a camera based, machine learning, convolutional neural network to see where its going does seem like the inevitable future of these robots (as its a big part of self-driving car tech), the Roomba J7+ evidently has a very weak system (camera, computational, ML model, etc). I think I can objectively say it uses its camera system for obstacle avoidance only and not navigation. The obstacle avoidance is overly cautious and causes the robot to miss areas it needs to clean.

Roomba does not have LIDAR navigation. I do have another robot that is LIDAR so I can give a rough pros and cons of the two type of navigation system. Roomba relies more on bumping into things and its map to navigate. Theres good and bad. The bad is that it will often go around the house as if its a drunk bumping into furniture and objects. The robot needs to learn your floorplan and that can take a long time since its bumping into everything. It took me about 5 runs of my whole house. Each run took about 3 -4 hours since my house is 2500 sq ft. Prior to it learning my house, its navigation looked like it was non existent. I thought I had just bought the dumbest robot especially compared to my inexpensive $300 LIDAR robot. However, once the robot declared that it had learned my floorplan everything changed and I began to see the benefits of the iRobot navigation system. Even after learning my floorplan, the iRobot still takes forever navigating around table and chair legs. Bumping and taking multiple attempts to escape the forest of chair legs, but surprisingly, it has never gotten stuck in my house. I have set it to vacuum my entire house several times and in total it has vacuumed about 20,000 sq ft in its lifetime so far and it has never gotten stuck. We have kids so theres a lot of toys and miscellaneous items everywhere so thats amazing to me. My LIDAR robot on the other hand navigates beautifully around furniture but it cant see cords or other lower to the ground objects and it constantly gets stuck on these objects. Also because LIDAR isnt bumping into things to navigate it gets stuck under my couch because the fabric under my couch sags and the LIDAR robot will travel underneath the couch but then think its blocked in by the fabric when it tries to leave the couch area. The iRobot doesnt have this problems because whenever its in doubt it just goes barreling through and utilizes the bump sensor to feel around. The other problem with my $300 LIDAR unit was that it would sometimes do a cleaning run but mistakenly think that there is a new floorplan and erase the old one. Its more sensitive to changes because its LIDAR hardware can detect small changes. This is probably more a software issue. The iRobot on the other hand, is very hesitant to change its map. That is good in that it has never erased my current floorplan or made incorrect modifications, however, the initial learning of the floorplan is a bit harder if it doesnt discover all your rooms. Getting it to discover new rooms is more difficult since the floor plan is locked in. Ive found the best way to get it to discover new rooms after it has learned the floorplan is to do an area clean and just draw a box where to new room should be. Once I did that, it would explore that area and declare it found a new space and then it was added to the floorplan. A few other more minor issues is that the Roomba software is polished but also very limited on options as compared to my inexpensive LIDAR unit. For example, I cant set how often the Roomba should self empty or the quiet times (they removed the beta feature for quiet times). These are important features since the self empty dock is very loud. Much louder then my LIDAR robots self empty dock. Im not that sensitive to noise. The noise level is just a design flaw. I cant imagine going forward they will keep this design. If you live in a small apartment then you should definitely be aware that you will be disturbing your neighbors or yourself when it self empties. Its louder than my large shop vac.

I’ve purchased 4 Roomba sweepers & a mop so far because I’m apparently stupid & don’t like to clean. Initially, this thing is a dream come true & you’ll love that it sweeps while you’re doing something else. I don’t use the programming app because I find that to be a bit much, I just hit the button & it goes. I can tell a huge difference with different types of dog hair. Longer dog hair gets trapped in the wheels & underneath and clogs the machine so I’m pretty good at disassembling the unit & cleaning/replacing parts by now. This newest j7 purchased 10/3/22 - 6 mos. ago - is already spouting multiple errors at me. I had 3 just today & cleaned it out completely. It still doesn’t work. I have 2 of the j7 self emptying & a 980 currently. The I7 Wi-Fi connected self emptying machine was thrown in the trash 2 years after I purchased it due to multiple issues, not limited to the fact that the design of the emptying dock was bad & they’ve since changed it but it was a complete loss for me. I can say that the most reliable machine so far is the 980 that you have to empty by hand. I’ve had it since 2017 and it still works well. The dust bins are larger on the non-emptying types and they hold a lot and pack the bin full. I purchased an extra basic dock for this machine & move it around. I think this is the best bet due to the fact that the more tech on the machines, the quicker they break down. I have mostly hardwood floors & some low pile carpet/area rugs so I’m not beating this thing up. Really disappointing longevity on the self-emptying styles.

We absolutely love our J9! We own several Roombas but this one is by far our favorite. The suction is spot on and with 2 dogs, we dont see one iota of fur anywhere!

It is continually remapping my house every time I turn it on. I have 2 carpeted rooms & laminate in the kitchen. The map shows the tile in front of the fireplace and shows the rug in front of the kitchen sink. It weaves itself back & forth under the large dining room table & 6 chairs. I run Hazel(Roomba) twice a week and my large upright vacuum once a month. I wish Hazel had a little more sucking power. Even with that slight negative, she goes home & empties herself well.