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 is my third robotic vacuum. The first two were epic fails (neither of them had the app for home mapping, which is a feature I feel is a *MUST HAVE* if you want your vacuum to run correctly.) I cant believe I actually paid $650 (with tax) for this one, but I have to say Im pretty happy I did. Overall, the Roomba j7+ is an awesome way to keep your house tidy—with a few exceptions. See below: The good: The first day was intense. It took a total of 8 hours (including two breaks for a recharge), but I finally got it to map out my house. Its an open concept design and on Roombas map, I unfortunately couldnt tell where some rooms begin and others end. The placeholders (rugs, doorways, etc) arent set to scale, and sometimes my estimations of the boundaries were way off based on Roombas diagram. Part of the problem was my fault because I was so picky about getting the boundaries accurate. Once it was all set up, Roomba and its software really showed its strength. I was very impressed with how efficient it was at cleaning. It even readjusted and learned better ways at cleaning tight corners after taking a few trips around the same space—proof that the vacuum truly does get smarter over time, as is promised. This was a welcome surprise because I usually have to vacuum daily due to our pets. The bad: The living room is the only room where the Roomba completely failed. I tried running 8 separate cleaning sessions on this room, and it only seemed to get more confused over time. Its your typical rectangular room with a couch, multiple chairs, end tables, a few planters, and a coffee table on a rug in the center. The rug is a high pile, so I never expected the Roomba to be able to tackle it (even traditional vacuums struggle with it). Surprisingly, the Roomba *was* able to make its way over the rug, but only after fighting and curling the rug every which way, which I fear will damage it in the long run. ... AND... It never correctly identified the rug on the map. If it had marked it as a rug, I could have drawn a shape over the area and marked it as a zone to avoid. But without the map, I have no idea where the rug is in the app. I tried making an estimated guess, but it ended up missing important parts of the living area off the rug. And each time I edited the rug, I had to run the vacuum again to re-map it. I finally gave up. This will just have to be a room I continue to vacuum manually. The fugly: After cutting my sons hair, I figured Id let Roomba clean up the mess instead of cleaning it myself. MASSIVE MISTAKE. The Roomba gathered all the hair into a tidy pile on the bathroom floor, then proceeded to mow right through it and drag huge clumps onto the rug over by the shower! Then it backed up and ran more clumps over the rug again. After it had sufficiently painted the rug with hundreds of tiny hairs (which I swear Ill never be able to get all out), it went outside its boundary and spread more hairs into the bedroom. I was convinced that Roomba would somehow fix this based on its dirt detect technology. But no, instead of going back and cleaning up the mess it made, it traveled merrily back to its home base, leaving a long trail of hair behind it. On the clean-up summary, there was no mention of dirt detection, and no indication of an irregular cleaning session. Lesson learned, and I was the idiot for sending a robot to do a humans job. I wont make the mistake again. All that to say, I wouldnt trust Roomba again if there was a mess to clean up, such as spilled chips. Id be afraid the vacuum would just crush them and spread the bits all over the house. Where it really seems to excel is cleaning small day-to-day things, such as dust and pet hair. It does a really solid job of this. My house was already clean when I started using it, and Ive watched each day as it cleans up new clumps of pet hair and little bits of dust and debris. Overall, Id say its a good vacuum for maintaining an already clean home. For that, Im still pretty happy. It saves me a lot of work. I run its cycle daily and its so much nicer to not have to do the work myself.

Context: Two humans and two cats in a 1400 sq. foot space with half hardwood flooring and half medium pile carpet. Weve had the J7+ for just about a year now, and it runs three times/week. Ive previously owned two Neato D5 models. Pros: Relatively quiet, efficient guidance system that avoids troublesome obstacles and questionable floor messes, well-designed app, easy to clean and maintain. It almost never gets stuck. The self-empty base is nice (but, see below). Cons: While quiet, the suction is poor. It is miserable at picking up cat hair and long human hair, despite any marketing that touts pet hair features or the unique brush design. Much of this hair simply accumulates around the brush spindles, which means that you absolutely must clean it every 3 runs or it will soon jam up (Roomba does make this relatively easy). Occasionally the hair ends up in odd little wads strewn about your carpet. Why? Given that I have to clean the thing every Saturday, what do I even need the self-cleaning base for? Bottom line: great vacuum for low-pile carpet or hardwood floors in homes without pets or humans that shed. Thats not us, and I wish we had either sprung for the higher end Roomba or perhaps tried a Roborock.

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.

It definitely works better than the last robot vacuum we had 7 years ago, but after about 10 days it started having sensor issues, emptying issues, couldnt find home, dog hair wrapped around the front wheel, etc. Familiar problems from the past, but at a higher price tag. Cleaning the vacuums sensors and resetting it seems to resolve the problems for another week or so. I guess I was just expecting less trouble for the price. Going to demo another make/model and keep the winner. Update: we tried a few different brands, and this device was by far the best performer due to the built in camera. It still needs attention every 5 days or so, but it beats vacuuming the old way, no question. If youre not in a hurry, considering waiting to see what other brands come up with once they start integrating cameras as well.

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!

The Roomba j7 is fantastic. The suction is only okay and its noisy. But I run it every day and keeps my floors very clean. Thats whats important to me. It deals well with obstacles (our house is very messy). It just goes around them. It tries to go back to spots it missed before it finishes. In a month of usage it only got stuck once. You do have to let it explore the first few times it runs. It gradually builds a map and continues to expand it on every run. It is very noisy when it empties itself into the base and is pretty noisy when cleaning hard floors. Its much quieter cleaning carpets and rugs. The vacuum isnt very powerful. So it doesnt always get everything on the first pass. However, you can run it often and it keeps the floors very clean. I run it in most rooms three times a week. I can also tell it to clean any room that gets messy whenever I want. Right now I only have one Roomba for a two story house. This means I have to carry the machine between floors. It works, but clearly having two machines would be better. I will buy another J7+ when I see it on sale.

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

I fired my new Roomba j7 today excited to see how well it avoids pet waste and objects. It did its vacuum run only getting one pet toy it should have avoided. Not too bad. Then on its way back to the dock it ran straight through a fresh pile of doo recently deposited by our 10 week old puppy. Not good. Thank heavens the suction wasnt on or this new toy would be on its way back to Amazon. Why would they program object avoidance for when it is vacuuming but not for when its returning to the dock! Talk about failure to plan ahead! I already have a robot vac that I recently purchased but when we saw the ad for the waste avoidance system with 9 pets we had to have it. If the next run isnt more successful they will be getting it back!

I have had this for a few weeks. It does a good job although to do the entire first floor, it takes most of the day. I have a long, ranch home about 2350 sq ft on the ground floor. It needs to go back and recharge when I set it to clean the entire floor. It does a good job about learning where the cat food and litter box are stored. It avoids cords and takes pictures of areas it is unsure about so I can tell it if the item in its path is there permanently or temporarily. The only problem I am having is getting it to clean specific rooms only. If I want just the bedroom cleaned, it cant seem to find the bedroom. It is marked on the map but maybe the distance from the base unit and my bedroom is too great. I am running a new map to see if I cant improve the map it has recorded. I am very happy with it but need to learn how to work out its quirks. It is likely human error. UPDATE: After using several weeks I need to update my review. This vacuum requires a great deal of patience. I direct it to clean the primary bedroom and it goes into the dining room and dances around there for a little while before finally going to the bedroom where it vacuums a few rows and returns to home base completed. It tells me repeatedly to empty the bin when the bin is empty. I did not realize until I removed the green rubber bars that the majority of the cat hair was clogging up the vacuum and never making it to the bin. I think it will require cleaning after each use, or at least every other use if you have a pet. I have 1 small, short haired cat, and the vacuum struggles with that cat hair. Some of the issues may be user ignorance and the more I learn the performance may improve, but I am not sure I would make this purchase if I had it to do over again.

I really, really like this little fella....on carpet. Luckily we have a lot of carpet because we have tile in our kitchen and hallway and if you asked me how well it does on it, Id have to say meh. It does ok, but where it really shines is on carpet. It doesnt have much suction power because the twin rollers do a fantastic job of agitating the carpet and it lifts it right into the bin without much suction. The tile floor it tends to throw a lot around if it doesnt catch it directly below the rollers. The side brush tends to throw it across the floor instead of into the path of the rollers. Maybe a future feature would be to slow the side spinner down on hard floors and have it speed up on carpet. That way it doesnt just throw it across the floor. The object detection is great and the only time it got caught on something was some sheer drapes that were hanging down too low. I just set a keep-out zone for the drapes and no problems since. Definitely love the auto bin empty feature! Integrates great with Alexa. Havent tried it with Siri, yet. It is a little pricier than some alternatives out there, but in my opinion, the obstacle avoidance feature makes it well worth it.