Live With It: iRobot Roomba 675

On this episode of LWI, Sarah details her three month experience living with a iRobot Roomba 675.

Show Notes:

Price: about $249 or $304 with virtual wall barrier (similar model 694, still available for same price)

https://www.amazon.com/iRobot-Roomba-675-Connectivity-Carpets/dp/B07DL4QY5V

Roomba’s more expensive models have more bells and whistles like cleaning in rows and better allergen filtration, good side-by-side comparisons on iRobot website:

https://www.irobot.com/roomba/compare-products

A few notable features of pricier models:

- s9 has two square corners for more precision, 40x stronger suction, and shows app map of where you cleaned - $1100

- i7 has custom zones and keep out zones, recharges and resumes - $800

- i3 has 10x suction power, includes self-emptying dock - $400

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

- Easy to set up. I didn’t bother with the barriers at first. The Roomba to be charged out of the box.

- I ran it in Studio Redwood and quickly realized this is an unideal area for a vacuum I’m not controlling as there are tons of wires and cables everywhere and I’m constantly moving things around.

- It’s not as noisy as a standard vacuum but it’s too noisy to run if I were hosting DTNS or otherwise needed quiet time.

- Roomba has pleasant robot-ish chips and melodies when starting/stopping.

THE DOCK:

- Roomba will show green light indicating a charge when positioned on the dock properly. However, the light turns off after about 30 seconds. That confused me at first as I thought the charging connection was being lost.

- Unlike a lot of other products that will hold a charge, Roomba will not. If you’ve charged it and then store it somewhere off the dock, it will lose its juice quickly

- The dock needs an outlet and some room around it so that the Roomba can get in and out. I only have a couple outlets in my apartment that aren’t behind furniture or placed too high on a wall, so I have to dock the Roomba on the floor next to my bed. This isn’t a huge deal but I would rather not see it.

IROBOT COMPANION APP:

- Allows remote start and cleaning schedules

- Can be set up with Google Home or Alexa-enabled devices for voice control

- Keeps telling me there’s a firmware update for my Roomba which always fails

THE GOOD AND BAD OF CLEANING:

- Unlike more expensive Roomba models that clean in rows, the 675 is reactive, meaning it goes in a straight line until it hits something and then pivots left or right. This means it’s always finding a clear path but may clean more randomly than desired and unnecessarily travel over the same area multiple times.

- It does a decent job of figuring out when it’s at a corner of a couch or another piece of furniture.

- It doesn’t have memory over former obstacles, i.e. it will get confused under the same dining room chair it got confused under 10 minutes ago.

- If you have a lot of furniture/corners/tight spaces, you might need to prep your space a bit before a cleaning session. For example, I have five dining chairs that I put on top of my coffee table, fireplace hearth, and dining table before I run the Roomba to minimize its navigation needs. I prop the dog bed on its side. I move all shoes and slippers off the floor. I pull the coffee table out from the couch to give the Roomba a wider path. For this reason, I don’t use remote functionality all that often. I just press the Roomba button on my way out the door.

- This vacuum is circular shaped and will simply not clean corners well because it can’t fit into them. It has a little plastic brush that sticks out of one side that helps scoot dirt and dust into the Roomba’s path, but I find that mostly useless. Roomba’s s9 vacuum does have square corners on one side which may solve the issue, but it would still need a clean path in and out of the corner.

- I have a small apartment with wood floors, 3 different area rugs, and tile in the kitchen and bathroom. The Roomba navigates over everything pretty well. My bathroom tile slopes up about an inch at an angle at the doorway and at most angles the Roomba climbs up and over fine.

- Where the suction power mostly fails is between rugs where there are brief strips of bare floor but the Roomba is still elevated by the rugs. I actually moved my rugs around a bit to minimize this issue.

- The Roomba “senses” when an area is extra dirty and will spend a little more time going in a circular motion there before moving on. I’ve noticed the Roomba doing that both near the front door and in the kitchen, both high traffic areas so that makes sense.

- The Roomba has a “spot clean” button so you can place it near a spill, etc to focus on a specific area. It starts cleaning in a tight circle and then expands the circle out in order to cover the general area. I haven’t really used this feature much beyond curiosity.

- The Roomba is designed to navigate itself back to its dock when its battery gets low to recharge. This happens successfully about half the time. I’ve found it behind doors that should have stayed open, stuck in its usual spot in the kitchen, and even just randomly dead somewhere else.

- The dirt chamber is not large and needs to be manually cleaned out after every use. The Roomba 675 doesn’t offer a self-emptying chamber the way more expensive models do, but that also keeps the dock at a much smaller profile. I also feel a ton of satisfaction every time I empty the Roomba chamber stuffed with dust and pet hair that is no longer on the floor with zero effort on my part. But the transfer into a garbage bin is a little messy.

VIRTUAL BARRIER:

- If you aren’t going to supervise the Roomba and want it to avoid an area, you can use the barriers to keep it from entering a room, or getting into a corner, etc. Even though none of my rooms are off limits, there’s a corner of my kitchen where a rug meets the wall that the Roomba gets stuck in. But putting the barriers out right there feels a little silly.

- I could see this being really helpful depending on your home layout. Maybe the laundry room is always a mess and should just be avoided. Or there are a bunch of cables under your desk and you don’t want the Roomba to get tangled up in them. Or you arrange your shoes on the floor and want them to stay placed neatly and not get run into over and over.

TOUGH LESSONS:

- An iPhone charging cable that I left dangling onto the floor got so wound up in the Roomba’s moving parts that I had to take the entire Roomba apart. This happened twice and luckily nothing broke. Do not leave any delicate cables out to be suctioned up. I do have a couple thicker cables that aren’t an issue (lamp cord, power strip, etc).

- My former living room rug was old and its underside was fraying a little bit. This wasn’t noticeable until I started using the Roomba regularly. Even though the Roomba can navigate over rug edges pretty well, one wrong angle can bunch the rug corner up and even flip it over. If your rug is falling apart at all or has any loose stitching, it’s going to be an issue. I recently got a new rug (I needed one anyway) and there have been no issues after about 10 Roomba cleaning sessions without my supervision.

- I mentioned the corner of my kitchen where the Roomba gets stuck. Because of the Roomba’s reactive path, I have no control over how quickly it gets into that spot, even though it’s on the other side of the apartment from the dock. The problem is that the Roomba only has about 60 minutes of cleaning time on a fully charged battery, and when it gets stuck it’ll try to get itself free for a while before giving up and shutting down. I’ve walked inside and found it dead in the kitchen without any battery power and the apartment not looking clean. This is where the “clean maps” on the more expensive Roomba models would come in handy.

PETS!

- Otis is a large dog and Lucy is a small cat. They both shed a lot. The Roomba will not help me on the couch or the bedspread, but it’s great maintenance for the floor.

- The first time I ran the Roomba with them inside it was pandemonium. Now Lucy doesn’t even wake up from a nap when it’s running and will casually navigate around it if she wants to reach her water dish, etc. I always take Otis out with me before I run the Roomba, but occasionally it’s still running when we come back inside and he isn’t spooked by it anymore. He’ll even lay in his doggie bed on the floor because he knows if it hits the edge of the bed it’ll just pivot in another direction. Your mileage may vary.

OVERALL TAKEAWAYS:

- The Roomba 675 is not a vacuum replacement. It won’t adequately clean corners or tight spaces, it doesn’t have suction/brush flexibility, and there’s no way to address any dust/cobwebs/etc off the floor itself.

- The Roomba 675 is an excellent maintenance device. I’m not realistically going to manually vacuum my apartment more than once a week, but running the Roomba while I’m downstairs hosting DTNS every other day keeps the apartment looking mostly spotless between weekly cleanings. And you can see the results every time you empty the chamber. It might not reach every nook and cranny, but it gets a lot of junk off the floor and thus my manual effort is that much less of a project.

- I would probably spring for an i3 or i7 model for the stronger suction alone. In the bathroom where the litter box is, I still need a stronger vacuum to properly clean the area, especially in the lowered grout between tiles.

- In a larger apartment/house with more surface areas to clean, having a self-emptying chamber might be necessary so it doesn’t overflow. Having a dock that not only self-charges but then will resume vacuuming once charged might also be necessary so you can cover your whole space, depending on its size.