I found this to be true with the Roomba 694—the more I picked it up and moved it around my house, the more trouble it had finding its home base at the end of a cleaning cycle. If you opt for a Roborock robot vacuum that you empty yourself, you can save a bit of money. The Braava Jet M6 robot irobot vacuum cleaner mop, also by iRobot, delivers a jet spray that can help you tackle messes on finished hard floors of stone, tile, wood and more. Keep reading to find the best iRobot robot vacuum deals available right now. The most essential function of a vacuum is suctioning up unwanted spills and debris.
We’ve concluded that the Roborock Q5’s smart mapping works better, but this new addition to the i3 EVO makes it slightly smarter than it was previously. For every robot vacuum, we run at least two regular cleaning cycles across about 1,000 square feet, with lots of obstacles and thresholds. None of the rooms have any wall-to-wall carpet, but the space does have several area rugs, with styles ranging from lightweight doormats to rubber-backed, medium-pile rugs that take up half a room.
It also has four times more raw suction than the already-strong Roomba i3 EVO, i7, and j7. That helps it consistently pick up larger debris such as cat litter or yard waste better than most robots, though it still doesn’t come close to deep-cleaning dust from a rug like a traditional vacuum does. But when we tried the s9 in 2020, it was one of the clumsiest navigators we’d ever tested.
Instead, it uses gyroscopic navigation to divide the space into individual areas and clean each one methodically. Watching it go to work as it moves up and down in neat rectangular boxes is quite soothing. The best bang for your buck, the Roomba i3 Evo cleans just as well as the j7 but won’t avoid clutter and doesn’t have app-enabled clean zones or keep-out zones. In future testing, we plan to assess whether those models offer any real improvements on the mopping process.
At the end of each job, the robo-vac automatically empties its small dustbin into the large clean base – that means you won’t have to empty the dustbin yourself and you’ll only have to tend to the base once every few weeks. Just keep in mind that most self-cleaning bases require proprietary garbage bags – another long-term expense you’ll have to factor in. Also, any vac-and-mop robot with a water tank will not dump its dirty water into the clean base, so you’ll still have to clean that yourself.