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+

The main issues are with the robot not alerting us when it frequently tangles itself up in a carpet edge or stray kid clothing or throw rug, etc. -- we come indoors to find it is not running and not on charger. It has not sent an Android notification (although we certainly get less relevant notifications from them), and it is not beeping or otherwise letting us know where/what the problem is. So we begin the Easter Egg hunt. You can push LOCATE but sometimes it has run the battery all the way down, as when it hooked itself on a spiral stairway pedestal bolt/nut. The software mapping is impressive BUT it has no provision to show you where the robot last stranded itself. And when we wish to exclude specific areas to avoid further problems in the future, the mapping doesnt allow us to see where prior problems were or to extrapolate where they might be precisely on the map the device created, which would seem to be a programming shortfall. The device seems to spend too much time traveling over same areas while passing by dirty areas. It also has a bad habit, when picked up from a trouble spot, of dumping dirt on the floor , or right in front of charger when you place it on charger manually because battery was dead. Then it doesnt know to vac up that dump. No apparent way to tell it to go to a specific spot, without designating an entire room. It does work well with Alexa from what weve seen and it is impressively persistent (bullheaded) at trying to enter a room you have closed off for safety reasons, that it previously found to be open. It actually knocked a spring-latched door open, entered the room, traveled to another room, bumped that door closed, and then found itself trapped in the last room because, of course, it doesnt know how to OPEN the door that it bumped. So it has made a lot of progress, and to its credit, we have a lot of obstacles like book stacks, etc., but some basic programming needs are lacking and we have tried to indicate those in the frequent surveys it requests, but no personal feedback from the company.

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.

If you have a dog, it is a must! great vacuum! Better than I expected.

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.

Ive had this roomba for 5 months now, and its doing a really great job. It cleans well. The app works great for me (android), it only froze on me once and it eventually came back. It navigates satisfyingly well (its mesmerizing). My house is not big enough for it to need to charge or empty itself during a run, but I have confidence itd get back home easily to do that (since Ive seen it B-line for home when its job is done). Setting it up was easy, and I love that I can set the rooms however I want. That way, I can tell it to clean most everything except where all the kids toys are, if thats the state the house is in today. It can hold multiple maps, so we have a second one saved for upstairs and it works so great; it just cant self-empty upstairs, of course. But it doesnt need to empty itself that often, so its a rare occurrence. But it does dutifully come right back to where its starting spot is (which I set as the top of the stairs). Self-Emptying, at our house, usually only happens at the end of the run, and its very very loud, but the kids got used to it real quickly and even sleep through it now. I didnt think self-emptying would be a feature I cared about at all, but I do appreciate it. In 5 months, I still havent had to change the bag yet. This roomba hasnt destroyed any cables that were accidentally left out. We dont have pets, but I do have super long hair and its doing great with that too. Theres a nice little feature where you can tell it, on a per-room basis, if it should do 1 vacuum pass or 2. So the eat-in kitchen area usually gets 2 passes. Because kids. I also really like that this roomba (among others) can pair with the mop bot (M6) so the M6 can go mopping right after the vacuuming is done. So convenient to just set it all up to just go.

I had one of the original Roomba’s way back when. It was…..okay, but fell out of use with it. Decided to try this and so glad we did. We have three dogs, so always need a good cleaning (daily) and this does a great job 7 days a week. There’s some fine tuning at first but now after a few months of use, we are not really paying as much attention to every recommendation. We have dog beds that may or may not get picked up before it starts it’s daily job. No worries, it covers it the next day. Replacement filters and parts are going to be required, but the time this saves it’s so worth it. We also got the Braava mop which runs a couple of times a week, and is also great. I think the only time I’ve pulled out our Shark vacuum has been to do things like under the fridge and occassional other clean up where I could have used the app to send the Roomba over to take care it, but just grabbed the older one. Big improvement over the original models.

This is a great piece of technology. It does a pretty good job vacuuming. It sometimes gets caught up on chair legs or doormats. Its rotating brush wore out faster than expected. It often needs to be emptied manually. It takes a very long time. BUT... it does a pretty good job and it does it by itself! There is room for improvement, and we still need and use a real vacuum, but this little thing is a nice addition to our lives.

The iRobot vacuum is amazing. We love it. My son had fun programming it and it is now the cat’s highlight of the day. It cleans well and navigates all the pitfalls in our home which is no easy task. That being said I am stupendously disappointed in the reply I received for the seller when asked about an owner’s manual. There was no kind of instructions on how to use the robot or to set it up. Thank goodness my son is pretty adept at these kind of things. When I sent a message to the seller about not getting a manual the reply was “Did you look on line?” !!!???/::!?- really! For almost nine hundred dollars I think it should include instructions. It was fun trying to figure out how to take the rotating bars apart when an object got stuck in it and it started to whistle. Now it’s telling me to replace some filter that I don’t know where it is what it is or how to do that because I didn’t receive any instructions Maybe I should have given this the title of what customer service. Bottom line the product is 5 star the seller is one star maybe

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.

So, just know that robots don’t have any suction power like an upright. But, they keep the floors tidy and looking good and the surface dirt and dust and junk picked up. And they gotta map well otherwise, what’s the point. The J7+ does everything it says. Great mapping, great clean up, learning, it’s fast, and very quiet. Just know, you gotta have a good strong vac for the deep clean every month. (We got a Shark Navigator for this part and it rocks.) Best of both worlds. You have a Daily hands-off cleaner and a monthly deep cleaner. Super clean house and you only have to vac 1-2 times a month or less. And your hard floors - will always be swept without picking up a broom. Not cheap but definitely a great way to reduce work without sacrificing the clean. $599 + $198 … we bought some time and effort back.