Allergens are swiftly swept up and locked away with this Roomba’s smart mapping model. We sent them on a normal run of the house cleaning run as well as runs with handfuls of cat litter on the floor and carpeting. But for staying ahead of dust and dirt buildup, they’re solid investments that will save you time, and as part of an overall cleaning schedule they make a lot of sense.
The downside is that it doesn’t work quite as fast as some competing models, and you can’t use a smart-home app to tell it to clean specific rooms like you can with a bot like the Roborock S4 Max . But if you can live without that level of control, the Roomba i3 is clever enough to get the job done in almost any home. The Roomba i7 is a more recent instalment in iRobot’s line of industry-leading robot vacuums. It will set you back about $100 more than the 960 below, but you’re getting a serious step up in power and features for your cash. We’re seeing robot vacuum deals hitting this model a little more frequently now, as well, so you might find a better price here than you’re expecting.
The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are only meant to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t weigh them too heavily when we’re deciding what to recommend. We’ve aimed to recommend irobot vacuum cleaner a handful of robots that should work well in most homes while not being wildly expensive. But plenty of models that we don’t explicitly recommend can be good or great, too, and we cite many of them throughout this guide.
We can’t be sure whether other models will have similar rates of problems, though the typical user ratings for EcoVacs’ laser-nav bots tends to be a few tenths of a point lower than other brands’ ratings. To EcoVacs’ credit, we’ve found that their bots are a little better at traversing tall rugs and large thresholds than other brands’ bots. First, you need to connect the bot to Wi-Fi via your router’s 2.4 GHz frequency only, and like anything Wi-Fi related, some people seem to have trouble getting it to work smoothly on their network. Then, you pair it with a companion app (either Xiaomi Home or Roborock’s own app—their features vary slightly, and we find the latter to be simpler). It’ll take some time to get used to the icons and sub-menus, while the imperfect border-drawing tool means you’ll be doing a little trial and error to get some of your zoned cleaning really dialed in.
We also fully disassembled some popular bots to get a sense for the build quality and how straightforward they might be to repair. If you have thicker rugs, or you just feel like owning a stronger bot, then go ahead and spend a little more on a bot with better brushes or stronger suction. bissell crosswave cordless The next important task for a robot vacuum is to cover as much ground as possible, as efficiently as possible. It just informed us in the app, after the session was over and the Nutella smeared everywhere, that there were many objects on our floor and that we should pick them up.