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 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.

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!

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 love this Roomba. I was hesitant to purchase another Roomba after the first one left so many scuff marks on my furniture (maybe 6 to 7 years ago), but this one is different. I honestly dont know how I lived without it. Is it perfect? No, but neither am I when I vacuum. Do I answer my own questions? Not usually, but Im a little drunk. Whats my biggest fear? Someone at work noticing this and bringing it up during our morning meeting. Shhhh. Anyway, have some discretion in morning meeting and buy this Roomba.

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 read the product reviews before purchasing. I allowed the roomba 1-2 days to just map out our floor plan with out actually vacuuming, and it was time well spent. It now has a floor map with room dividers and high traffic areas, and it keeps learning and updating on its own. The daily struggle of a shredding dog is now under control and our floors are cleaner than ever. Love this thing!!

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.

Initial impressions after using for a few days (overall, we like it): - The mapping feature needs work. The first time I mapped the house it missed several areas, including a bedroom and huge closet. When I tried to add those areas to the existing map, I kept receiving an error. Customer service advised me to do a factor reset and start from scratch. When I mapped the house the second time, it was able to find all the rooms. Because of the errors, the mapping process took 5-6 hours when all said and done. For a ~2,000 SF 1st story, it took about 75 minutes to map once. - When the vacuum returns to the dock to empty itself, the emptying process is incredibly loud. Its 3-4x as loud as the Shark robot we have upstairs. In most cases, there is no way you could run this vacuum while someone was sleeping, as they would be woken up when it empties itself. It really is that loud. If your house is 6,000+ SF, then maybe, but in our 3,400 SF two-story home, there is no bedroom far enough from the vacuum station to avoid this noise. - The app is nice and seems slightly better than the Shark app. I like how you can crate favorites/hot buttons. - The vacuum does a good job of quickly navigating to rooms on the map and doesnt get lost. I needed I will revise this review after a few months of use.

This docs and empties much better than prior version. Great battery life. For some reason it gets lost from time to time.