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’m a normal guy…. Using the term loosely. We have three dogs in the house. Two puggles and a beagle, so there’s a lot of hair. So much pet hair. We have LVP flooring throughout the house, no carpet at all. This little guy is awesome! We just moved into the house about a month ago, the J7 will work without internet, it’s just not as nifty. But it does its job. With Wi-Fi, this sum bitch is my new best friend. He runs every other day, and the floors stay clean. We just moved into a newly built house, so we don’t have a yard….. we have a dirt bowl and the pups bring in a lot of dirt when they go out. Even with that my little suck machine keeps everything picked up. When he’s doing his thing he’s not loud, but you know he’s there working. It’s much quieter than a conventional vacuum. He cleans about 1600 square feet for us in about an hour and a half. The AI is great because it will recognize the dogs toys and just work around them. So theoretically it won’t smear doggy dooty all over my house. The dogs hate regular vacuum cleaners, but they don’t even notice this thing. If they are laying in the floor it actually just works around their lazy butts. I have to change the bag about every two weeks, but amazon has an off brand version of the bag that is about $1.50 each, so no big deal. It’ll tell you when the bag is full, and it takes 3 seconds to swap bags. The only thing that is loud is when the vacuum transfers the load of dirt to the base station. It is more like a shop vac on the volume scale, but it only takes about 10 seconds for it to be done. As far as purchases that I stressed about and researched, I put days into reading about various brands. This is the best purchase I have probably ever made for keeping the house tidy. If the little bastard could bring me a beer, it would be perfect!

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

Ive been watching these robot vacuums for years and finally decided to take the plunge. I know myself well enough to admit I would benefit from one that self empties, for a while at least. (For reference I have one child and one small dog in my household.) The vacuum seems to be very well built and designed. Same goes for the base. I am impressed by the vacuums ability to traverse various flooring scenarios as well as its capability to pick up debris. It cleans remarkably well on hard floors, but carpet is a mixed bag. We have a Persian area rug, various shaggy bathmats and runners, as well as some wall to wall carpeting. Pet fur tends to stay pretty well velcroed to the Persian rug until I break out the upright vac. To be fair, we have another rug with tassel edges, and it amazes me that they have caused zero issues thus far. Some notes: It may self empty for 60 days for you, IF you live in a NASA white room. Otherwise, expect notification of approaching capacity within a week or two if you have pets, children, or just generally live in reality. Not a deal breaker, but dont glaze over promises of up to... If this vacuum picks a fight with a high-pile or shag rug, expect the vacuum to become disabled, lost, or confused, and be prepared for your rug to take significant damage. Granted, most of our bathmats are of the pretty economical variety, but be warned. They are fraying rapidly at the edges where they were in pristine condition previously. Also- I do not feel that this is adequately addressed in any advertisement, question or review so I will state it as clearly as I can: when the vacuum self empties, the base is LOUD AF. I have read it described in many delicate and generous manners, but it only sounds and EXACTLY SOUNDS like one thing: someone running the average shop vac for 4-6 seconds. Fortunately our base station could not physically be any farther from our bedrooms and still be in the house. This was not a result of the noise, just preference, but it still helps a great deal. I wouldnt call it a deal breaker, and the feature certainly seems to work very well, but you should be completely aware. I also dont love the size or proprietary nature of the waste bags. They seem to hold a fair amount, do a fair job of filtering during empties, and are certainly easy to remove and install. But it would be nice if the manufacturer would accommodate recycling the bags at least once or twice by offering some intuitive method of opening or disassembly. Ive been using some long forceps to fish the larger eggs/pellets of fur out of the filter bag now and then to prolong the life of the bags, but frankly its tricky. The refills are pretty affordable, but still... With regards to obstacle avoidance, its what youd expect. You really ought to follow it around and supervise on its first vacuuming run, because there are just some things it avoids, and others it simply steamrolls. You wont know if it can avoid your charging cables and shoelaces etc until you try. As for the software, its pretty impressive but still needs a little love. I set the vac up, and sent it for a mapping run a few times. I picked up some trash cans and hampers and such to give it a broad picture of the physical furniture. I was surprised and intrigued at its accuracy and thoroughness. Then I realized two bedroom doors had been closed. I ran another DOZEN mapping runs, specifically updating the existing map, and even after finding and searching both rooms several times, the app refused to add them. Finally I decided to shake things up, so on the last mapping run, I moved the dock before the vac returned. Whoa buddy was that hilarious to watch. It did finally manage to find home, and on the next mapping run it was entirely discombobulated for the first few minutes... then it seemed to realize where it was... then it rescanned the two missed rooms again... then it returned to its dock without too much consternation... THEN it recognized both new rooms with no issue. The ability to label rooms, define borders, create sub-zones, schedule jobs, and so forth are all pretty cool features. I use my Google ecosystem to send it to specific areas regularly and its pretty reliable. Ive seen it get stuck in a mess of dining room chairs that its explored a dozen times before. Ive seen it take the alternate long way around when a baby gate was closed. Ive seen it aimlessly banging against a corner it has turned many times flawlessly. I have also noticed that when it fails on a job, it seems to sit and pout, then spitefully run the battery down to nearly dead until I cradle it in my arms and gently nestle it back in the dock. It confuses me why I cant just set it near the dock and tap the top button to let it know everything is hunky dory and it can return home. I say this because when manually docking this bad boy, it *is* just a little quirky and you *do* have to make a concerted effort to confirm that the contacts are indeed making positive connection. Having said all that, I still think its worth the investment as a helper (not a sole vacuum) and I dont regret the purchase!

Bought the J7+ to replace an 8 year old model that still works but I was ready for a quieter model. The J7 maps your house which I love and you can program it to pick which areas you want it to clean. Then you favorite the cleaning schedules. It’s very quiet and I like that this model doesn’t have the remote little antennae on top - it would get caught on our kitchen cabinets. I also like that it has a compartment that sucks up the dirt/fur so I don’t have to dump it everyday. We have 1 long-furred dog and white flooring so having the roomba clean my floors daily makes my life much easier. Have only have it for a couple days but so far so good. I’m curious how long the collection bags last, since we went from dumping the compartment to now bag-system in the tower.