Robot or human?

The standard model has a large 600ml dustbin, which can handle five or six runs’ worth of debris in a small space before emptying it. If you’ve got hardwood floors, the G20 Hybrid model swaps the 600ml debris bin for a 450ml bin and has a 130ml mopping reservoir. shark cordless This will not do much to mop your floors, but it does help with fine dust and debris on hard floors. If you are looking for a robot that vacuums and mops, the Roborock S7 or S8 will suit you better than iRobot’s j7 Combo — a j7 with a mopping pad.

With just a 75-minute runtime, this is another iRobot model that would be better in a smaller space, said Williams, though it is a step up from the 600 series. The Roomba i series are equipped with tracking sensors, so instead of random navigation around your home, the i series can clean bare floors and carpeting in neat, straight lines, says the brand. The Roomba i3 EVO is a standalone vacuum, but the i3+EVO comes with a self-emptying dock.

Its defining feature is supposed to be its strong suction, with two turbines pulling 2,000 pascals each (whereas most laser-nav bots have a single turbine and less than 2,500 pascals of suction total). That’s fine, but it’s slightly less than what you get from bissell crosswave cordless the slightly more affordable Roborock Q5. The older Eufy RoboVac L70 is still available, as well, but its app is not capable of permanently remembering specific rooms in a home, which makes it substantially less convenient than most current laser-nav bots.

irobot vacuum cleaner

We’ve also discovered that, as of late 2021, several other brands are selling near-copies of the Eufy bots. Senior staff writer Rachel Cericola first started testing smart-home devices more than 20 years ago, when the only smart-home devices were X10. She has been covering smart-home gear for Wirecutter since 2016, and she has had her hands on everything from in-wall light switches, LED bulbs, and water-leak detectors to video doorbells, outdoor security cameras, and security systems. She has also written tech articles for The New York Times, Wired, and Men’s Health, among others. The i4 EVO and i4+ EVO are virtually identical to our previous picks, the i3 EVO and i3+ EVO, but have a longer run time and are typically less expensive.

This makes it less intrusive since it doesn’t try to clean the whole house on every run — so I didn’t find it dead in a corner as often after an annoyed family member shut it off. You can set it to clean when you lock your front door or close your garage, for example. Using the geofencing feature in the iRobot app, I had the j7 start running when I leave the house and stop when I arrive home. This worked reliably, with the robot generally docking as I walked into the house. The only times it failed were when someone else was already in the house and they shut the robot off manually. While most mapping robots allow you to create virtual keep-out zones — areas the robot shouldn’t venture into — this Roomba uses its AI smarts to suggest trouble spots, making creating keep-out zones a one-tap job.