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+

Compared with a broom and a dustpan, it is OK; its cat fur-ball cleaning capability is zilch. (Use a Dustbuster for that). However, because it is so well designed for the lazy man, my hardwood floors and rugs get cleaned a LOT more often, so that is a big win--I wont tell you how rarely they got cleaned before. Also, like all carpet vacuums, it cant get the edges. Again, use a Dustbuster. UPDATE 6/22/23: If you have cats, expect to have to open and empty the bin on the Roomba itself weekly. The cat hair doesnt get sucked out by the base. I have short haired cats, if I had long haired cats I probably would be cleaning the bin on the Roomba daily.

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!

Had the 9 and watched it literally chew up the edges of some small carpets. 20 years of wear in a minute. Sent it back and got the 9j. It does not destroy carpets, does not get tangled in fringe and overall does a satisfactory job. It has a shorter run time than the 9 but like the 9 it comes in for a charge and then goes out to finish the job. It mapped the floor faster than the 9, but has a bit more hesitancy about darker areas. The vacuum bin sounds like a jet winding up but it only lasts a moment. The 7 is quieter than our older model. It might be just a bit less effective with cat hair, the jury is still out. Freaky feature-- it takes images of foreign objects on the floor and asks you if this is a temporary or permanent thing. You have the option to let it send the images to iRobot. I saw a shoe, a cat toy, a small ball, an extension cord dressed down a table leg, a wrapper dropped next to a waste can and the same wrapper pushed two feet away. After a brief discussion we decided not to send images to the iRobot database. Let them get their own cat toys and shoes. Alexa integration is never so easy as it should be but it works--mostly. You can name your robot during the setup and I named it Drudge. If I say Alexa tell Drudge to go home. Alex says Drudge go home. but nothing happens. If I say tell Roomba to go home, Alex says she will tell Drudge to go home and it does. The cat tolerates it, the other party at interest just wants the floor kept clean, and I much prefer that Drudge does the job. We are keeping Drudge. So all in all an improvemen

Like the ability after cleaning to clean out the bin.

We considered the more expensive S9, but decided on the j7 because we primarily have wood floors with some area rugs. We live in a tri-level and have moved the vacuum & stand to each floor for mapped and cleaning. OBSERVATIONS - The cleaning performance exceed our expectations - Quiet when cleaning except when complete the the base suctions the debris out of the j7 It is so quiet that we are surprised to hear it GENTLY bumps into things - we forget it is running - The methodical approach to covering the entire floor is refreshing compared to previous random pattern vacuums. - The mobile app is excellent. It shows a nice graphical representation of the cleaning after completion. I just wish it would show the coverage as it cleans (vs waiting until the end) - It detected and avoid electrical and USB cords. This is especially nice because we forgot what was under the couches & beds (out of sight out of mind). it NEVER ONE got tangled or pulled on the cords. - Faster at cleaning than our old random pattern vacuum. Those would run until they were nearly out of power verse knowing they covered the entire floor. With the mapping this vacuum knows where it needs to clean avoiding unnecessary vacuuming time. - The short squat base fits nicely next to dressers, night stands, and couches. While Roomba recommends space to either side of the base I ignored that recommendation to hid it away from casual viewing. It worked perfectly always finding its way home. - transitions over thresholds without an issue. Wood to carpet, wood to tile, tile to carpet, it never had an issue scaling the threshold. Interestingly it did not scale the padded mat I use at my standing desk. It somehow figured out it was not a threshold and vacuumed around the small pad. Nice! - The attached wall brash was deformed because of the way it was packaged or moved during shipping. I replaced with the included second brush and will try to straighten the brush arm after heating up with a heathen. It is not badly deformed and Im going to try to straighten simply because I have a heathen handy. - The packaging was good with minimal use of non-recyclable materials We are happy with the j7+ and will likely purchased an extra base or two to leave on the different floors of our house.

I got the Roomba j7+ - this little gem is amazing! Weve been drowning in pet hair for years (my beautiful chocolate lab sheds like crazy). No matter how much I swept up, it was everywhere. Not any more - I set the Roomba up with minimal effort and let it loose! It roamed the house, sweeping up everything it could find. I watched it suck in that pet hair with glee - nothing escaped the Roomba and nothing was tossed up into the air. Intrigued, I explored the app further. After it explores your house completely, I found that I could map the house (you add dividers to the edges of each room), name each room, and even mark some areas (like the pets food bowl area) as an exclusion zone. , I set up 2 schedules - morning for one side of the house and afternoon for the other side. I also set up a Do Not Disturb time. Some great features: *The Roomba will avoid spills and pet waste (like barf). It also detects steps/stairs to prevent a tumble. I watch with great intent the first time and sure enough! It stopped at the top step of the basement stairs. *You can pause a job, even if its in the middle cleaning, and restart it within a certain timeframe. If it goes beyond the timeframe, it will cancel that particular job and you can restart it at any time. *The device empties its own bin when needed. The big bin is on the home base and that can be emptied when full (comes with bags and you can get refills). *If the battery gets low during a cleaning job, it goes back to its base, recharges, and then continues the cleaning job. *You can control the Roomba from the app, even if youre not home. Im really loving this device and cant imagine not having it. My floors are super clean every day. All I do is swifter the floors, or just do a good mopping, whenever its needed. But, dust, dirt, and pet hair are completely gone! Woot, woot!

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.

When it gets jammed up in a room you should get a notification on your phone before it runs out of battery. Doesn’t adequately remove all the debris from the unit into the bag plus it would be helpful if there was a mechanism that removed dust from the filter. But in all fairness, my house has never been this clean. Thank you.

This vacuum cleans really well but the battery life is ridiculously low. My single story house is less than 1900 square feet, and it cannot do the entire house on one battery charge. This is the third robot vacuum I have owned, and the only one that couldnt finish the job in one charge. On the positive side, it is able to handle one plush area rug that my upright vacuum cant.

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