First-generation models must be recharged from a wall power adapter, while all subsequent models have a self-charging homebase that the unit seeks out at the end of a cleaning session via infrared beacons. Roomba uses a patented 3-stage cleaning process to vacuum your carpets, hardwood, tile, and laminate floors irobot vacuum cleaner on its own, automatically adjusting to different floor surfaces as it moves through your home. The Roborock couldn’t match the Roomba S9 Plus’ impressive ability to clean up pet hair, but it fared better than most. The S7 wiped hardwood floors completely free of hair and left only a few stray tufts on carpeting.
That said, the Roomba S9 Plus removed an average 71% of sand from our medium pile carpet while vacuuming, which is the best result that we’ve seen on this specific test. It also cleaned up more dog hair, pet dander and allergens than any other vacuum in this test group. The S9 Plus can navigate and map multiple rooms and floors, while avoiding “keep-out zones” that you can designate.
If you’re annoyed or creeped out by the whole thing, you can either buy a non-connected bot or just never set up the Wi-Fi—these bots all still clean your house automatically even if you don’t connect them to the internet. But you won’t be able to use interactive mapping features without an internet connection. If you decide to sell or give away a Wi-Fi robot, be sure to factory reset it to remove Wi-Fi credentials. Many of these robot vacuums can also pair with a smartphone app, which lets you command the bot to clean specific rooms or sections of a room, while ignoring other areas.
The Shark AI VacMop did not avoid any obstacles, nor did it even acknowledge in the app that it encountered any obstacles. We’ve also discovered that, as of late 2021, several other brands are selling near-copies of the Eufy bots. We dismantled an older Eufy RoboVac 30, and major repairs are impossible without breaking parts of the robot.
Like the Roomba 694, the Eufy’s navigation is semi-random, so it’s best for cleaning just a few rooms at a time. It’s not great at getting pet hair out of plush rugs, but it’ll work fine for keeping bare floors and short rugs pretty tidy. The RoboVac 11S was even the top pick in this guide for a couple of years. However, over time we’ve realized that, unlike the basic Roomba 600 series models, the basic Eufy series isn’t durable, nor is it built to be repaired. Roombas are the only robot vacuums that use two brush rolls that rotate toward each other, which works well on all surfaces but has its biggest advantage over other robot vacuums on rugs. In fact, the “brushes” on the i3 EVO are really rubber-nubbed extractors , which are particularly good at picking up pet hair, especially from thicker and higher-pile rugs, without much hair getting wrapped around the roller.
The same robot is also available as part of the Roomba i3+ package, which includes a dock that automatically empties debris out of the robot and into a vacuum bag at the end of a cycle—a handy convenience feature. It’s also sold as the Roomba i4 (and Roomba i4+) from certain retailers. IRobot recently rereleased the i3 as the Roomba i3 Evo, which the company is billing as the same robot as the original i3 we tested, but with the new Smart Map feature preloaded. Our ratings also factor in predicted reliability and owner satisfaction scores based on members’ experiences with more than 9,000 robotic vacuums from our recent surveys. The Roomba J7 performed relatively well on hardwood and low-pile carpets, removing 91.7% and 58.5% of test sand from those surfaces respectively. However, the robot struggled while vacuuming medium pile carpeting, pulling away just 17% of sand here.
In 2020, we sent a privacy and security questionnaire to the brands that make our picks and have compiled the key portions of their responses in the table below. In general, the owner data isn’t that sensitive, and the mapping data is unsophisticated for now. We’re more uneasy about what companies may do with collected information in the future, like selling it to third parties. The makers of our current picks don’t sell data for now, but privacy policies are always changing. Otherwise, our main concern is that the little amount of sensitive data on a vacuum, like your Wi-Fi network password, is stored securely (if it’s stored online at all), in case there are data leaks or breaches in the future.
But then you’ll figure out the pain points and get into a routine, and it won’t seem like a big deal. Plenty of models can reliably clean homes both small and large, by moving in an orderly path throughout your home, and making a map of where it has or hasn’t been. They rarely irobot vacuum cleaner miss patches or waste time re-cleaning areas that they’ve already visited. If their batteries run low before they can finish cleaning an entire level of a home, they’re smart enough to drive right back to their dock, recharge for a few hours, and pick up where they left off.