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+

I usually do not do reviews unless I am impressed or disappointed with an item and when I do so I try to be an asset to someone who is considering a purchase and thus my experience may help, I hope it does. Last October I purchased the Roomba J7+ to use in our home which has mostly wood floors, two fully carpeted rooms and one room with a large rug. I use the j7 if I notice something on the floor such as dust or perhaps a little fur from a fluffy cat so I would estimate the house gets a run about once a week room by room as is required but never all at once since it is not necessary in our home. As this semi-random schedule has become somewhat routine I have never seen the j7+ go into partial completion due to recharge needs, it accomplishes its job in a single charge before going back to base but of course the larger the house that would be different. The wood floors do make a difference as I only had to change out the bag in the base unit once. One thing that I customarily do is the recommended maintenance once a month as lint and such does accumulate at the ends of the rollers and I would recommend doing that routinely as it is easy to do in about 10 minutes. Has the unit failed on a mission? Yes it has on one occasion as it got into a room and closed the door on itself so that it could not get out so it shut down and sent me a notice on my mobile device, it was my fault as the door was left in a position that allowed the unit to get behind it and close the door on itself but not before it totally completed its job. If you connect the j7+ to your wifi system its quite an attention getter when you use a voice command to do a job and in fact, its almost scary how smart this thing is! I hope it doesnt photograph my checkbook one day and notify me its time to balance my account. Last suggestion ... do map your house as per the instructions and remember you have to re-map if you move the base unit but if you map well it does a magnificent job. I hope my review helps and that anyone reading this that purchases one has the same experience.

I really wanted to love the J7+. I researched it for weeks, read countless reviews and everything online was great. Of course there are some negative reviews but in my mind there will always be some. First I have to say I never write negative reviews. But this robot is a big disappointment. I have a dog and two cats and lots of pet fur that needs tending too daily. I’ve had the Roborock S4 max for two years running everyday for upkeep. It does a really good job but it doesn’t have an auto empty station. So, when the J7+ was 25% off. I was happy to upgrade my old robot. Day one: I ran it to create a map of my house. It spent a lot of time banging into everything and got scuffled up on it first run. It didn’t compete the map of my house. The directions say it’ll needs two or three runs to complete a map. So I know what to expect, no problem. Day two: it refuses to clean a 12 square foot area in my kitchen. It’s a a 4 foot wide open area with a single step down into another room. But it stays 3 feet away from the step/cliff. It still doesn’t complete the map of my house and spends most of its time banging into stuff. I notice it rolls up pet fur into what looks like strings of thick hair and leaves them all over my white carpet and it also likes to dump clumps of fur along the edges of my area carpets. Day 3: it still doesn’t complete the map and I have lots of areas on the map that it simply doesn’t go to. It got stuck on an imaginary obstacle on my hardwood floor with absolutely nothing around it. I run my other robot to complete the job and it picks up all that Roomba left behind. Each time it empties itself, it sounds like a jet plan in my house. Seriously a jet plane. Day 4: STILL cannot complete a map. It refuses to go into one bedroom. I pick it up and put in there to start mapping it. It creates a whole new map that can’t be connected to the original map. I have a single level home. It shouldn’t be this difficult to map it. Day 5: I try again, same results. I don’t have anymore patience nor time. I run my other robot and it completes over 2000 square feet in one run effectively and easily. I’m on Amazon writing this review and returning this roomba. Again I really wanted to love this robot. I really wanted to support an American company. I really wanted to believe the reviews. But they’re BS, no wonder it was 25% off. It stinks. Im giving it 3 stars because I feel bad giving it less and it’s better than manually sweeping everyday.

So, we have coretec flooring all throughout our house. We live on the water with a lot of sand and that’s the reason we didn’t want carpet. When my wife first asked me about this little machine I said, “let me do some research first.” I run the vac in our house because of our golden retriever. She’s a shedder for sure! Please don’t think that this vac will 100% replaced your upright vac. It’s good. Really good. Probably a 9.7 out of a possible 10. The reason I give it a smidge lower score is it is obviously a robot and is not perfect. I can’t type the whole name that I’ve labeled mine in the app but suffice to say it is “HouseVac*itch.” Yes ladies…my wife didn’t like that name, but it did stick. We run this thing 2 – 3 x’s a week in our home. You will be absolutely amazed at how quickly the small collection bag in the base fills up. Why? Because this robot is going underneath furniture that we all probably rarely move. I know I don’t move it every time. There were one or two times that HVB got stuck in the pantry, but it was not really the unit’s fault. We had put too many things in there on the floor. Would I purchase this again? In a heartbeat. I may go and purchase another one to keep in the master suite. That way, I can run them both and try to keep up with the dog hair! (This dog should be bald by now! LOL!) Good luck!

I’m a normal guy…. Using the term loosely. We have three dogs in the house. Two puggles and a beagle, so there’s a lot of hair. So much pet hair. We have LVP flooring throughout the house, no carpet at all. This little guy is awesome! We just moved into the house about a month ago, the J7 will work without internet, it’s just not as nifty. But it does its job. With Wi-Fi, this sum bitch is my new best friend. He runs every other day, and the floors stay clean. We just moved into a newly built house, so we don’t have a yard….. we have a dirt bowl and the pups bring in a lot of dirt when they go out. Even with that my little suck machine keeps everything picked up. When he’s doing his thing he’s not loud, but you know he’s there working. It’s much quieter than a conventional vacuum. He cleans about 1600 square feet for us in about an hour and a half. The AI is great because it will recognize the dogs toys and just work around them. So theoretically it won’t smear doggy dooty all over my house. The dogs hate regular vacuum cleaners, but they don’t even notice this thing. If they are laying in the floor it actually just works around their lazy butts. I have to change the bag about every two weeks, but amazon has an off brand version of the bag that is about $1.50 each, so no big deal. It’ll tell you when the bag is full, and it takes 3 seconds to swap bags. The only thing that is loud is when the vacuum transfers the load of dirt to the base station. It is more like a shop vac on the volume scale, but it only takes about 10 seconds for it to be done. As far as purchases that I stressed about and researched, I put days into reading about various brands. This is the best purchase I have probably ever made for keeping the house tidy. If the little bastard could bring me a beer, it would be perfect!

Great little unit when its operating as expected. I used this roomba (I have 3 different models from over the years) on the main floor of my house which is 50/50 hardwood floors and tile. Unit was able to navigate very well and walked up onto throw rugs and transitions just fine. Virtual walls and keep out zones were easy to setup. This unit wasnt exactly quiet, but not as bad as my previous units around noise. Everything was going great until about 30 days ago. The unit all of a sudden started throwing ERROR 26 (very common I find out by googling for this model). Turns out, there are 5 different motors inside these things, 1 for the corner brush, 1 for the main brushes, 1 for each wheel, and 1 for the actual vacuum. The actual vacuum motor on my unit seized up. The roomba was maintenance every two weeks and was kept very clean so the vacuum was not stressed. Its been 30 days working with support and I finally got to the point that they are going to send the main head assembly as a replacement. This module contains most of the guts of the roomba and represents about half the cost of one. For a unit thats not yet 1 year old I feel like this shouldnt be. Of all of the motors on the unit, I would expect the vacuum motor to be the longest lasting, however, it was the first to go, and after disassembling the unit to do this replacement, I see that this motor in particular is poorly undersized for what it does. I still like my unit, but Im afraid that this one wont last too long either and I wont be buying a replacement.

Initial impressions after using for a few days (overall, we like it): - The mapping feature needs work. The first time I mapped the house it missed several areas, including a bedroom and huge closet. When I tried to add those areas to the existing map, I kept receiving an error. Customer service advised me to do a factor reset and start from scratch. When I mapped the house the second time, it was able to find all the rooms. Because of the errors, the mapping process took 5-6 hours when all said and done. For a ~2,000 SF 1st story, it took about 75 minutes to map once. - When the vacuum returns to the dock to empty itself, the emptying process is incredibly loud. Its 3-4x as loud as the Shark robot we have upstairs. In most cases, there is no way you could run this vacuum while someone was sleeping, as they would be woken up when it empties itself. It really is that loud. If your house is 6,000+ SF, then maybe, but in our 3,400 SF two-story home, there is no bedroom far enough from the vacuum station to avoid this noise. - The app is nice and seems slightly better than the Shark app. I like how you can crate favorites/hot buttons. - The vacuum does a good job of quickly navigating to rooms on the map and doesnt get lost. I needed I will revise this review after a few months of use.

his model, ROOMBA j7 with the self emptying robot look okay; unfortunately that is all I can say positive about this robot. It doesn’t work effectively. I had an older model which vacuumed diagonally and it was way more superior than this. The robot does not have the suction power or brush power to clean an area rug, especially if you have pets that sheds. The brush bristle are too short, thin and sparse. While it is attempting to “clean” (Ian using the term loosely) my hardwood floor, pet hair (Pyrenees) and dust are swirling around instead of being suction into the machine as it is presumably supposed to do. The hair also wrap around the rollers and legs snd brush and is extremely difficult to remove. Hair has to be removed after 2-3 cleaning, if not done, the robot perform poorer. This is time consuming and tedious. The robot constantly bump into walls, furniture and other obstacle. This is quite curious to me because I keep getting notifications to OPT into some kind of obstacle avoidance …so that the machine can avoid certain areas. I have watched videos advertising this robot and it shows that it avoids obstacles. The paperwork accompanying the machine also states that it avoids obstacles. It doesn’t 80% of the time. The machine does not clean the floor area alongside baseboards. When it finally stop bumping into walls and obstacles intermittently, it stops at least 8-10 inches from the wall or obstacle! Frustrating. 80% of the time during operation, the robot does not return home to empty the bin. It shuts itself down, will not start so that you can send it home ( must use phone because there isn’t a “Home” button) like previous models. After shutting itself down, it flashes a red light when you push the start button and keep repeating, “Empty the bin.” Where is the “Home” button? Who has time in the middle of a busy day to pick up a phone or tablet to send it home. Oh! It will not move, so you have to physically pick up the robot and set it back on its base manually which is not the easiest thing to do because the sensors are not easy to line up. Plus the sensors seems to need cleaning after each use. Mapping, does not work. What I have to say about this would take a 5-page, single spaced paper. When the robot is placed in a specific area to clean, and placed in the direction you want it to go, it does a 180 degree turn and goes where it wants to go. After trials and errors, one learn to place the machine in the opposite direction in which you want it to clean. It is programmed to clean in a certain directional pattern and will not deviate at all. This one seems to go from east to west and cannot operate in any other directions. Maybe that is why it cannot find the way home to its base placed in the middle of the room. Hmmm. This robot have run over flip flops and power cords. Avoiding obstacle is limited to items at the level of the light on the front of the robot only it seems. Plus it doesn’t sense dust and dirt around it. Then there is the Beta option. If you opt in and receive an update which you don’t need, you are unable to reverse/delete that update so you are stuck with a robot which is now operating more erratically than it did before the update. If you are thinking about buying this relatively expensive machine hoping you that it will help with the cleaning of your floors and rugs, read all the reviews carefully. Most people seems to have written their reviews when hey were frustrated with the robot, therefore, it seems as if they are perhaps ranting. NO, the ones who have given the ROOMBA 7 a negative revive are correct. This upgrade is not effective against dust, dirt and especially pet hair! It appears that research on this machine was not done in a real home but in a sterile lab. THERE ARE A LOT CHEAPER MACHINES FROM OTHER MANUFACTURERS WHICH WORKS MUCH BETTER. Save your money, no ROOMBA 7.

I read the product reviews before purchasing. I allowed the roomba 1-2 days to just map out our floor plan with out actually vacuuming, and it was time well spent. It now has a floor map with room dividers and high traffic areas, and it keeps learning and updating on its own. The daily struggle of a shredding dog is now under control and our floors are cleaner than ever. Love this thing!!

My first robotic vacuum and Im a fan. Have used for about 7 months now without issue. If only it would do stairs.

Roomba does seem to get lost at time.