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 got this J7 plus on sale for $599 so for what I paid its a really decent vacuum. Ive owned a lot of iRobot Roombas for the past 20 years so I consider myself sort of an expert. Also keep in mind I do not hand out 5 star reviews lightly. This one gets 3 stars because I had some issues with the app, and getting it set up. I also can not use the function where you look at the photos with my iphone 11 pro max. I was finally able to do the set up using my OLD ipad air 2. I find it unacceptable that the app will not work for one of the main features or to set it up, using my newish Iphone on the latest iOS software. In talking to other users this problem is common. Had I not had the old iPad I would have had to return it because without connecting it to wifi via the app, its worthless. Once I got it set up, I can do the schedule etc from my iphone but it wont show me the photos for the obstacles it finds. I get the error message on my phone but if I open the app on my iPad I can see the photos and deal with them. I do not like that I have to go get out an old device to do it and do not understand why iRobot does not deal with it. I also tried to contact them about it and got no response. I might end up just turning off the feature because its not that big a deal to me. I did try turning it off and was hoping it would shut that light off but the light still is shining even with the feature turned off. It seems like it would waste power having that light on all the time and if I dont use the feature why is the light still on? Ok so on to the actual vacuuming. This model does an great job on hard surfaces but does not really do the greatest job on carpet compared to my older 980 which had a carpet boost setting that most of the other 900 robots lacked. I also liked that I could set my 980 to focus on cleaning and could turn off edge clean. Its probably silly on my part but I like to see the neat lines on my carpet after it cleans and it seems to do the back and forth cleaning with the j7 and then go around the edges so I see these deep marks on the edges and going around any furniture. I liked that I could turn that off with my 980 so I just saw neat rows. I could always go turn it on once in awhile but honestly that edge feature is more important with hard floors, than it is with carpet. One other thing I find odd is that the app shows me carpet the robot has detected, yet there are no settings for changing vac power level and it does not act differently on carpet, so why is the thing worried about detecting my carpet? I ended up having to set it to clean twice once one way and once across what it vacuumed to get it as clean as it got it with my 980 alone. I probably would have been better off going with the s9 for carpet but I did not want to pay that much and upstairs there is not as much dirt so it does and acceptable job. I just think they could have given it a little more power and more settings. on vac power. I love that I can set it to do certain rooms, and no longer need those dumb walls. In that respect its so much better than my 980. One other thing it seemed my 980 did better with was area rugs in the bathroom. My 980 used to knock them around a bit but did not get stuck on them. The j7 gets hung up on the little cotton rugs on the floor. Im not sure how Im going to deal with that. I want it to clean our bathrooms but its a pain to have to pick up the rugs each day so for now I turned off the bathroom cleaning. The self emptying feature is great. I do not have to empty the bin and once I do have to empty the bag it seals and goes in the trash without me having to get a puff of dust all over. I also love that they lowered the height with this self emptying bin so its not a huge tower. Ive been running it 3 times a week upstairs for over a month and have not had to empty it yet. Im thinking I might just change it at 2 months if it does not give me a notice that its full. I can feel stuff in there but I guess there is room for more. Im not sure what has to be in there to trigger it needing to be changed. The bags to me seem reasonable. Even the irobot bags are only around $5 a bag which seems reasonable considering Im not having to change it often, and its worth it for me to not have to deal with the dirty dust puff all over my cleaned area. It makes me want to upgrade my s9 to the self empying base and I might do it at some point if they lower the height of that self emptying base too. Over all this is a decent robotic vac. Its great if you have hard floors but with carpet its just so so. Id prefer a deeper vac power for carpet, but its passable. Thanks for reading my review

I have owned at least six other iRobot Roombas and two iRobot mops. This is the best one yet! I love that it takes pictures of obstacles and allows you to label them and enter into the data base. I did a mapping run first, labeled the rooms and nw I pick and choose where I want the vacuum to go. So far I love it!

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.

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.

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.

I had a very good, 5 year experience with my IRobot 900. I fully expected the J7+ to out perform the 900. I thought I was upgrading because I splurged and also bought the self emptying bin. I was completely wrong. I have been holding off on writing this review in order to give it a chance to do all of the mapping and acclamation that it needed to do. Its NOT getting better. CONS: 1. Upon first inspection, I noticed that it was lighter (not bad), but had a more plasticky feel than the older models and felt cheaply made. 2. Its noisier than the other models. 3. It is NOT good at all in the corners 4. Seems to be confused while mapping 5. Battery life could be MUCH better. The 900 did my entire downstairs w/o having to stop and had a bit of battery life to spare. 6. It gets clogged easily and frequently stops to tell me to empty bin. 7. Its NOT easy to empty the bin manually when asked to do so. 8. Many times, there really isnt anything in the bin that should have clogged it to begin with. 9. While it self empties after each job, you still need to manually wipe and clean all of the other parts. 10. I feel the need to be home babysitting the J7+ to get it through a complete job 11. Does not clean as well as the 900 12. It needs bags. Why couldnt it just empty into the big bin and empty that when needed. PROS: 1. Very easy to set up 2. Easy to set up the dividers and room assignments, and clean zones 3. Nice to be able to do a quick small job using the room assignments. 4. The self emptying feature is nice While the pros are good, I post them with a grain of salt because they dont always work as they should. I am still mourning the loss of my 900 and wish I could have stuck with it. A LOT of money for something that doesnt live up to all of the hype that IRobot claims.

Make sure you do mapping before starting the cleaning process. The mapping took a couple hours, but now that it is mapped out it works great! Love that it automatically empties and picks up where it left off.

I bought a used item in very good condition for $200 off. Came in a damaged box, but contents were still wrapped in original shipping material and undamaged. Terrific deal! I have a large home with a convoluted floorplan. The iRoomba j7+ mapped the entire area using 3 outings, including me manually placing it in the middle of an uncharted area-- it not only mapped it but figured out how it fit to the existing map. Love that I can say OK Google, vacuum around the fireplace and the mess made from emptying ashes and loading wood is gone. The spinning brush gently sweeps all dust and debris from the floor edges along the walls. Navigates over, next to, around area rugs with ease, doesnt damage rug fringe on my Persian rugs. Wish my bed wasnt so low or it could get all the dust bunnies under there. I love watching it move around and leaving clean floors when done. I got the companion mop robot that can be programmed to work with the vacuum by automatically mopping after vacuuming. Nothing negative to say about it.

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.

Like the ability after cleaning to clean out the bin.