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’ve purchased 4 Roomba sweepers & a mop so far because I’m apparently stupid & don’t like to clean. Initially, this thing is a dream come true & you’ll love that it sweeps while you’re doing something else. I don’t use the programming app because I find that to be a bit much, I just hit the button & it goes. I can tell a huge difference with different types of dog hair. Longer dog hair gets trapped in the wheels & underneath and clogs the machine so I’m pretty good at disassembling the unit & cleaning/replacing parts by now. This newest j7 purchased 10/3/22 - 6 mos. ago - is already spouting multiple errors at me. I had 3 just today & cleaned it out completely. It still doesn’t work. I have 2 of the j7 self emptying & a 980 currently. The I7 Wi-Fi connected self emptying machine was thrown in the trash 2 years after I purchased it due to multiple issues, not limited to the fact that the design of the emptying dock was bad & they’ve since changed it but it was a complete loss for me. I can say that the most reliable machine so far is the 980 that you have to empty by hand. I’ve had it since 2017 and it still works well. The dust bins are larger on the non-emptying types and they hold a lot and pack the bin full. I purchased an extra basic dock for this machine & move it around. I think this is the best bet due to the fact that the more tech on the machines, the quicker they break down. I have mostly hardwood floors & some low pile carpet/area rugs so I’m not beating this thing up. Really disappointing longevity on the self-emptying styles.

When it gets jammed up in a room you should get a notification on your phone before it runs out of battery. Doesn’t adequately remove all the debris from the unit into the bag plus it would be helpful if there was a mechanism that removed dust from the filter. But in all fairness, my house has never been this clean. Thank you.

We have 3 kids and 2 cats and this Irobot has been amazing. It cleans up crumbs, dust, hair and dirt very well. I run it once a day instead of vacuuming myself everyday. I now vacuum about once every 5 days to get the tough spots and small areas the irobot just doesnt get well enough. Out of multiple rooms it struggles the most in the room with cat litter. It definitely does not get every little piece like I wish it would but I guess I cant expect complete perfection!

We named her Hazel and she operates out of the Guest Bedroom away from being under foot or in constant view. Having mapped out the entire house, shes ready to head into specific areas (especially after the Grandkids leave) and make the crumbs and tracked-in dirt disappear. My wife has had breathing concerns for the past few years, but with Hazel now having removed 6-years worth of dust-bunnies from underneath the Master Bed, we both noticed a marked improvement sleeping in fresher air after just the first 2 days. Hazel also gets the dust out from under our sofa, coffee table, and leather chairs - and into the back corners of the walk-in closets. Shes much more thorough than the hand-pushed upright (now donated to charity) and dutifully vacuums multiple times a week vs. once a week (if I remembered to vacuum at all...). No turning back now!

This is an update: We have had this for 10 months. I still like it and it is better than the old ones, BUT it does not pick up cat litter very well. As a matter of fact I give it a poor rating in that dept. It has also ruined our wool rug. It transitions well from floor to rug but leaves dirt and debris on the rug. It has also ruined out hand knotted rug, whereas the older models didnt seem to phase it. We own 2 older Roombas. Have had them for 4 years and they just keep on going. Only had to order one battery in all that time. We have a 3 level house and it has always been a pain to drag one of the Roombas upstairs and keep a eye on the time so decided, after doing a lot of remodeling, we would get the big boy for the middle level and move one of the older ones upstairs. I read a few bad reviews but as a Roomba user for so long I can say that this model is a winner. It has no problem transitioning from my floor to wool rugs. It does make a 747 jet sound when it empties itself but it is much quieter while cleaning that my old guys.

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.

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.

I have been using this roomba J7+ for almost two weeks and its been pretty good, but could be so much better. First Ill start with the issues that Ive had so far. Note: this is going to be a long review. Cons: -Mapping takes a while and is not terribly accurate. I tried to update my maps after first generating them by sending the bot on more mapping runs, but it does not want to update the map to make it any more accurate after the first few runs -My unit came with a faulty side brush motor. It literally quit working on the second or third day that I used it. It would spin very slowly if I gave it a bump, but it would immediately quit spinning if the bot went over a transition or went into a corner where the brush would hit the wall. I contacted support and they issued a replacement side brush motor, but still, it was not confidence inducing to have the motor fail that early on. -The navigation is pretty lack luster. Before I had this robot, I had an ecovacs deebot n8 pro+ which had a LIDAR sensor for navigation and that robot could map your house down to the inch on the first try, but I returned it because the app experience with that bot was horrendous. The J7 uses VSLAM navigation which means it takes pictures of landmarks in your house and uses them as references to know where it is and then it bumps into things to find out exactly where they are. My problem is not with the navigation system itself, because it could work very well, but my issue is that there is no intelligible pattern that this bot seems to follow when cleaning rooms. It constantly jumps around from place to place and if it would just run around the outside of the room first and then fill it in with rows, it would be so efficient. If I could somehow remote control the robot, I bet I could clean the space in half the time just because on its own, itll hit a table leg or something and then jump to the other side of the room and then come back to do the table later and then back to the other side of the room again. -The app is supposed to show you pictures of the things the robot sees while cleaning and ask if they are obstacles. Mine does this now, but it didnt at first and I had to factory reset the bot to get it to work, not a huge deal, but not something I should have to do either. -Hard floor pickup leaves something to be desired. A side brush that spins too fast and below average suction power means that this bot misses debris on hard floors often. -My robot once had gave me a message via the app that it had something caught in the main roller and that it was going to quit cleaning until it was removed. I checked the main roller and there was nothing. I hit resume and it went on its way. This has only happened to me once, but I thought it was worth mentioning. -The auto empty bin is LOUD. This isnt too much of a con because it only lasts about 5 seconds and it always clears all the debris out, but you do not want this thing activating while someone is trying to sleep. Pros: -The overall cleaning seems pretty good. After letting the robot clean our bedroom a few times, I took our dyson vacuum through the room and it picked up almost nothing. -The bot is pretty quiet. I was able to talk on the phone while it was running with no issues. -The auto empty bin is very powerful and leaves almost nothing behind in the onboard dust bin. -iRobot has been around for a long time and they make a good, reliable product with easy access to replacement parts. -The app works really well and offers some nice features such as automations to clean when it detects that you are gone, cleans zones, keep out zones, room division that actually works (Im talking to you ecovacs), and just an overall clean user experience. -The obstacle avoidance is unmatched. To my knowledge this is the only robot vacuum with a guarantee not to hit pet poop, and it does an amazing job avoiding our cats toys, as well as streched out cords (a real struggle for most robot vacuums) and window blind pulls. With that said, the obstacle avoidance can be a con as well. Ive noticed that the robot does not get very close to obstacles at all, which is great if its pet poop, but its not going to hurt anything if it brushes up against a shoe. Conclusion: The Roomba J7+ seems like a solid option if you have a lot of carpet and have lots of obtacles that you want it to avoid. I would not pay full price for it though. I got mine for around 600 bucks and Im still not entirely sure that I am happy with it at that price. The retail price of 850 seems way more expensive than I would ever feel comfotable paying for something that has so many cons. iRobot, if you are reading this, the J7 was so close to being the best of the best. Adding a LIDAR sensor, paired with your excellent obstacle avoidance, parts availabilty, customer support and proven product longevity would leave people with no other sensible option than to go with your robots. I would gladly pay $800+ for a J7 with LIDAR navigation.

We bought this item last October for almost $1k and it has only been a headache since we have purchased it. We upgraded to this item from a different brand that was 1/3 the price. The cheaper/different brand item worked a hundreds time better than this item. We bought this item because it says it specifically identifies and avoids pet waste and cords and is ideal for pet hair. YEAH RIGHT! This irobot cant even go onto one of our plush rugs we have in the house because there is a cord it would have to roll over to get to the rug. Then we will pick the irobot up and put it on the rug and it shuts down and starts having errors because of the pet hair on the rug. Here is our irobot story from hell: VERY shortly after receiving our irobot it started to act up. Our app kept telling us there was errors of various reasons. My husband called customer support and they couldnt help. The company then asked us to send the whole irobot back to them. We sent it back and FINALLY received the irobot back after 3 months. During the 3 months, we never initially heard from them, we had to reach out to them. When we did reach out to them, this was their response they outsourced the company that they send the irobots to fix them and the company was so far behind on fixing all of the irobots that we would just have to wait however long it takes. Then after numerous calls and emails back and forth with the company trying to still get ours fixed, they said that it couldnt be fixed and they needed to just give us a new irobot. It takes 3 months to figure that out? REALLY? Then once we finally got the irobot back, it did not have a collector bin so we STILL could not use it. We called them and told them they sent us the wrong thing, so then they sent us the right collector bin and it was still the wrong item for our irobot. So we STILL could not use it. They finally sent us the correct collector bin and now after a total of 4 1/2 months (might I add from October of buying it to now, July, we have only had the irobot in our possession for about 4 months and it has never FULLY and PROPERLY worked those 4 months), we can FINALLY use it.... or we thought we could. Now when we attempt to use it our app tells us that the dust bin is always full and needs to be cleaned and emptied. We attempt to use it daily, so daily errors again from this irobot. Other than daily errors the irobot is VERY loud, (might I add the item that cost 1/3 the price and that worked better than this irobot was MUCH more quiet than this irobot) and we also have sensor issues daily. This irobot is supposed to be able to sense so wonderfully and smart maps the house, NO WAY DOES IT DO ANY OF THAT! It runs over things all of the time and gets caught on everything. We dont even like to have it running while we are gone or asleep because we are scared of the mess it could make or things it could pull down and break or things it could run over. However, we dont like to run it while we are here either because it is SO loud. If we could return this irobot, we would in a heartbeat. However, we tried to give it the benefit of the doubt because there is no way that a thousand dollar machine could not be the best of the best... or at least we thought. By giving it the benefit of the doubt we went over our time of return and are now out a thousand dollars with a machine that is supposed to save us a headache by helping clean the house, but that does the exact opposite. WE WERE SADLY MISTAKEN, INSTEAD IT CAUSES US MORE OF A HEADACHE WITH ALL THESE ISSUES WE HAVE HAD, AND CONTINUE TO HAVE!

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