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+

Does not vacuum rooms well. Constantly gets lost. Maps are terrible. iRobot Support useless. I had high hopes for my 1st robot vacuum, $600 j7+ . I found online & studied; Owner’s Guide & “Complete Guide for Imprint Smart Maps and FAQs” I ran many mapping runs & cleaning cycles. Wasted a huge amount of time trying to get this to work as advertised. I searched for online Roomba forums for help & tips. Finally, I called the telephone support & spent ½ hr. With a support rep, who was no help at all. The j7 is very inefficient with time & battery life which would be OK if it actually got the job done. Clean the entire room & do not get stuck. It maps & cleans rooms at strange angle, rather than following the sensible layout of the room, which again is OK if it ended up cleaning the entire room. It would start in one area & w/o finishing, cross over to the opposite side of the room & start there & sometimes, eventually go back to the 1st area to finish. Often leaving a corner or different area unexplored/uncleaned. “Keep Out Zones” Unable to rotate the Red rectangle to align with a sensible barrier. I could make the square as small as 8” x 8” but always at a 45˚ angle so my ‘do not cross’ line was always a series of pointy diamond shapes. This resulted in the keep out area being larger than desired. It worked to stop the j7 from getting hung up but left too much floor uncleaned. I could rotate the map itself but the rectangles rotated along with the map. Support rep unable to help with this. Extremely frustrating! Room Divider lines: Often initially wrong. I can move the line & rotate the line but cannot make the line shorter! In one case, to correctly set the line correctly, between my tiled Entryway & my carpeted Family Room, the divider extended ½ way into the FR at an odd angle. If I was able to adjust the length of that line, I could make it correct. I could not & neither could the support rep. Maps are not correct re depiction of carpet vs. tile floor. This was strange. Often at transitions between rooms the map would have a bizarre carpet area encroaching onto tile & vice versa. Also the transition between rooms was often geographically incorrect. Instead of two rectangular rooms connecting via a doorway in between… Some odd angle would be introduced, which was just… Strange. If you have one floor and the robot can get everywhere, this might be a decent Robo vacuum. I have a single story home with a raised tile entryway. This results in three separate areas that the robot must treat as three different maps. The home base station is only in one of those areas. No matter how many times I tried, following the suggestion from the support rep, j7 continually failed to make a separate map of the entryway! It kept adding the entryway as a new area abutting the living room. This was technically true except the tile is raised 5–6 inches… An absolutely insurmountable barrier for the robot! The instructions and the support rep both state you do not need to move the base home station to other floors or other areas. Simply place the robot in the new area and then either press the button on the robot or press begin mapping or begin cleaning on the app. The robot will map/clean the new area and then since it will be unable to get home to the base station, it will stop, make a musical tone and wait for you to physically move it back to the base station. This absolutely does not happen! What happens is it will clean/map the new area and then the App says: “heading home and j7 will wander around, bumping into everything, in a failed attempt to go home until it runs out of battery life. So, in summary, I wanted three Maps; 1) front house area, which has the home station, 2) raised tile entryway, no home station & 3) bedrooms and hallway (no home station) hallway is again blocked by the raised tile entryway. I would have no problem letting j7 clean the front house area and go back to the base station to empty the bin or recharge. But, then I needed to be able to physically move it to the raised entryway and tell it to clean and then when it was done to stop and let me move it back to the base station. Same thing with the back hallway/bedrooms. The j7 is incapable of doing this. It did map the back hallway & BRs ~ 75% accuracy but, after finishing cleaning would wander around, lost banging into everything, till battery ran down. I think it sensed when base station was only 20 or 30 feet away but could not get to it due to tile barrier so, kept retracing steps, wasting time & battery. I was relieved to return this overpriced toy.

It is continually remapping my house every time I turn it on. I have 2 carpeted rooms & laminate in the kitchen. The map shows the tile in front of the fireplace and shows the rug in front of the kitchen sink. It weaves itself back & forth under the large dining room table & 6 chairs. I run Hazel(Roomba) twice a week and my large upright vacuum once a month. I wish Hazel had a little more sucking power. Even with that slight negative, she goes home & empties herself well.

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