iRobotRoomba Combo j5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum & Mop – Identifies and Avoids Obstacles Like Pet Waste & Cords, Empties Itself for 60 Days, Clean by Room with Smart Mapping, Works with Alexa​

Vaccum: Mapped entire first floor after two runs, map surprisingly accurate. Having the map means you can designate rooms or areas to clean. I divided my large living room into three "rooms" so I can clean specific sections more often than others. Zones work great (i.e., an "avoid" zone around wires). I brought the vac to a different floor and it recognized that, and made a second map for the floor on its own.I have a large dog that sheds a LOT and I run this every morning in the room where he spends the most time, and most other rooms several times a week. Unlike my previous dumb robovac, which pingponged around the house aimlessly, cleaning the same areas over and over until it ran out of battery, and getting stuck in my barstools every time, this robovac goes straight to the area you select, cleans in straight lines, works the perimeter, then returns to base. Never gets stuck. You can tell it to clean several rooms in any order you want, or clean "all." I didn't get the smart base because I read that it got clogged with pet hair, the bags seemed expensive, and I figure I'd be emptying it almost as often, anyway, with all the hair. My pet hair load means I have to empty the dust bin after every room or two, but that's not exactly onerous. TBH, it's kind of satisfying to empty out the bin and see how much hair it picked up. If we didn't have pet hair, the dust bin would probably suffice for the whole house (2000 sf) or more.I have wood floors with a few short-pile rugs. Cleans the wood floors great and the carpets ok. Only complaint is that it's too tall to get under my particular kitchen cabinets so I don't use it in kitchen. The app is great. Alexa commands are inconvenient because it's a whole conversation ("Do you want to start the mop afterward?") and then it usually has some kind of communication issue and I end up grabbing the phone anyway. But the app is easy and you can make favorites so it's just a tap or two to get regular jobs going. This is a sanity saver for me because pet hair drives me mad. In some ways, it vacuums better than a big vac because it really gets under the furniture. However, if the mom-in-law is coming over, might want to pull out the big vac and get in the crevices that this can't get to.The battery life is good and it will vacuum most of the main floor (about 1400 sf) before giving out. Unfortunately, doesn't save enough juice to get back to base (poops out about 15 feet from base) so it doesn't re-charge and resume vacuuming as advertised. Not a problem for me since I tend to vacuum the house piecemeal anyway. I bought it on sale (altho not as cheap as it got before Christmas) and it's worth it.The robomop is a different story. I bought the two bundled. It's true that you can set the mop to start when the vac finishes. HOWEVER, the vac & mop do not share mapping. The mop has to do several runs of its own to make its own map. It will have different "rooms" unless you take a lot of care to ensure everything is exactly the same as the vaccum. And if you create a zone on one ((say, for a Christmas tree) you have to go to the other one and put it on there in exactly the same way. And here's the big problem: if you tell the vac to do Room 1 and the mop to start afterward, the mop doesn't recognize that the vac only did Room 1, and the mop cleans the entire house, not just Room 1. So the "mop after" feature is useless unless you vacuum the whole house first and you want the whole house mopped. Maybe there's a way to do this but I couldn't figure it out. Also, the iRobot floor cleaner, which they say is the only cleaner you can use, leaves streaks on hardwood floors. As other reviewers noted, water does better. So you are limited to water and like to use products that make my wood floors glow. Plus, this mop takes forever and doesn't get up dried on food or other hard stains. And for some reason, my mop doesn't recognize that I put the "wet mop pad" on it, and will only offer to "dry mop" , which is what, exactly? I haven't bothered to try to fix it. Plus, you have to put on the mopping pad and fill the reservoir with water every time. Easier, faster and better to just grab my Bona mop with its great hardwood floor cleaner and make a pass over my floors from time to time. To be fair, the robomop might work better for someone who works away from home and can schedule the vacuum and mop to run while they're gone, and then come home to clean floors. And when I have used it, it does make the floors appreciably cleaner than just vacuuming.

My biggest issue with the Roomba is that it usually dies from the battery going dead before it makes it back to the charging station. You would think it would learn how far it could get and start for home, but I've had it since August, cleaning 3 times a week plus spot jobs, and it doesn't seem to have gotten any better.I know it knows it is running on fumes because I've caught it a few times in the App saying it was returning home to charge, and had it not make it there. Instead it heads back in the right general direction but wanders off before getting there. If it had gone straight back (or even indirectly back), it would have had plenty of power to reach the charger, but it just doesn't dock, most of the time! I've seen it drive right past the dock, turn around, go into the next room, vacuum for while, and then let out a plaintive bleep and die. All the while the App on my phone saying it's returning to the dock to recharge. Often, when it does make it back, it will resume vacuuming before it is fully charged, and then die. If it had just waited on the charger for another 10 minutes, it would have finished the job!I think this is purely a matter of bad programming. It seems to know how much charge is left in the battery; the little battery icon in the App seems to be fairly accurate. I think the battery is okay. It is new and gives about an hour and a half of run time on a full charge.My house is as lot cleaner after 4 months of running 3 times a week. It does seem to work fairly well, except for its insanely over-optimistic notion of how much more work it can do on the remaining charge in its battery. My biggest peeve is the number of times I have to rescue it and carry it back to its base station because it ran out of battery. (The App keeps track and since Nov 4, it has run 30 times and died with a low battery 10 times and gotten stuck 6 times, so it had preventable problems more than half the time.)Update: 12/23/21. It refuses to vacuum my living room. If I set up a special job, it almost always claims it s path was blocked. But it is perfectly happy to vacuum other rooms that require going through the living room to get there! I have it programmed to vacuum the front rooms in the house twice a week, which includes the living room. Looking at the maps afterward, it shows it vacuuming all the other rooms, but only around the edge of the living room. I think there is some "memory" in it where it thinks it shouldn't be there, or thinks the living room has magically transported itself to another universe or otherwise is totally F'ed up. There appears to be no way to diagnose or reset it. I could erase it's map (basically do a factory reset), but that is a huge pain, especially since I currently have it set to avoid the Christmas tree (which is NOT in the living room, and if the keep-out zone around the tree is causing this problem, then that in itself is a serious error in its programming.)I've tried rebooting it, but that didn't help at all.Roomba's support is useless. Basically, they just read the minimally informative web page at you.It would be quicker and more effective to use a manual vacuum cleaner.Update 1/9/22: it is still refusing to vacuum my living room for no apparent reason. When told to explicitly vacuum the living room, it just skirts the edge and declares itself done in a couple of minutes without actually doing anything. When it does its regularly scheduled set of rooms including the living room, it does the sun porch (adjacent to the living room, where the base station is), traverses the living room to the front entry, then skirts the living room to vacuum the dining room, then returns through the living room to park in the sun porch. I've tried remapping my apartment to no avail. Next step is a complete factory reset, but I don't want to do that until my Christmas tree is down, because the tree causes it problems. and I'll lose my "keep out" zones.---------July 2, 2024 -I came back here to downgrade the rating, but it is already 1 star. For the last year, it has been getting worse and worse. It constantly requires attention, always get stuck on obstacles it use to negotiate with ease, like very low thresholds and the edges of carpets and the tile area in front of my fireplace, and often gets lost trying to dock to recharge or because (on rare occasions) it has actually completed a job. Often it gets lost within inches of the docking station. The software problems are worse than ever. For instance, it will announce that the charge is low and it is returning to the docking station, but then will wander off into another room, not on the path to the docking station, and the battery will run off because it forgot to recharge. I've actually seen it announce it was returning to the docking station, then hear it in another room, check the status and see it is vacuuming again with very low charge and not having gone anywhere near the docking station. This is clearly a software bug.Sometimes it get stuck on a perfectly level surface and says it is on an uneven surface, to move it and press clean. I DON'T move it, just press clean and it resumes. Clearly, it was NOT stuck.I've cleaned it many times, replaced the brushes and filters, replaced the pivot wheel, tested the main driving wheels as per the instructions, and today, discovered and performed the docking test. It worked perfectly and then got stuck 10 minutes later.On the advice of a friend, I replaced the battery last week. It seems to last longer on a charge but doesn't perform any better otherwise.I've done many reboots and checked for software updates. None available.Yesterday afternoon, I tried to delete and create a new map. After a couple of hours exploring one room, it ran out of battery and said to move it to the dock. I did so, but by then it was getting dark and it never resumed the mapping run as it said it would. This morning, it was fully charged, and the map it produced yesterday looked bogus so I told it to start a new mapping run. It never got out of the room with the docking station, and, over an hour into it, it is stuck again on the 1/16" high lip at the edge of the fireplace hearth. I think it is trying to vacuum up the tiles, which it thinks are dirt, and despite the fact that it is not supposed to do cleaning while on a mapping run.The fireplace (and the thresholds) never used to be a problem. Getting totally lost never used to be a problem. I've replaced all the replaceable parts. The problems all have the stench of undebugged software. I suspect they might have replaced a rule-based algorithm with some sort of generative AI, or some other bone-headed move.If I can't get the mapping run (in my small, single-floor apartment with few obstacles) to work and can't discover any way to reload the original software from 4 years ago (which basically worked), I am going to trash the useless piece of junk.Is it possible to rate something ZERO stars?----------------I was just about to boost the rating to maybe 3 or 4 stars, when it struck again!i tried everything to make it work properly, including buying a new battery. It didn't claim the battery was at EOL, but friends who have multiple Roombas told me the problems I was having could be due to a dying battery. So I replaced it. Since i didn't know if it would help, I bought a "compatible" battery https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KXYNBDQ?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details for about half the price of an iRobot-branded replacement. The battery fit perfectly, has identical specs, charged up fine but didn't solve any of the problems I was having.Tried deleting and creating a new "smart" (i.e. idiotic) map. It kept getting stuck and never finished a mapping run. It could clean okay without a map, but kept getting stuck and could only rarely find its charging station. It would often vacuum at random for an hour or two, announce it we returning to the station for recharging, but never get there. I think this was due to the lack of a map. The vacuuming and battery life with the new battery seemed fine. But without a map, I couldn't schedule it or tell it what rooms to clean.Finally, I tried the last remaining replacement - the tires! The tires are cheap but a little tricky to replace, but I did so. The new tires have a much thicker tread than the originals and some reviewers said this was a problem but they seemed to work fine.The first thing I tried was a new mapping run. It worked perfectly! I then realized I had left a couple of doors shut, so it couldn't map two of the rooms. So I told it to vacuum the rooms on the map. (It had to go back and recharge a couple of times, which worked fine.) Then I opened the two doors and told it to map again. It found and mapped the new rooms and then I told it to vacuum them. Last week, I manually told it to vacuum, half the house on Monday and again Thursday, and the other half on Tuesday and Friday. (There were lots of "return to the base and recharge the battery" events in the course of these two weeks.)Over the weekend, I set up the schedule again. It was supposed to do 1/2 the house on Monday and Thursday and the other half on Friday. Monday evening, I noticed it had not done the scheduled Monday job, but didn't have time to look at it. Yesterday, it also didn't do its scheduled job. The App said it wasn't charged, so I wriggled it on the charger base to make sure it lit up. (Maybe I need to clean the contacts, though I did that pretty recently.)Today I had some time to look at it. The App still said it needed charging, so I made sure it was on the charger base again. The App said it couldn't contact the Roomba, so I restarted the App. (Sometimes this helps. Crappy software.) When I did so, it still said it needed charging, so I went an reseated it again and pressed the "Clean" button. This time is says "Please install an iRobot brand battery and now refuses to charge or do anything else!Back to zero stars for this incredibly annoying, incredibly time-consuming "labor saving device".

The media could not be loaded. I purchased the iRobot Roomba i5 during a discount deal, and I absolutely don’t regret it. After using it for about a year, I can confidently say it’s one of the best small home investments I’ve made.The vacuum quality is excellent it picks up dust, debris, and especially pet hair with no problem, even in corners and under furniture. I have two dogs, and thanks to this vacuum, there’s not a single hair left anywhere. It’s been a total game-changer for keeping the apartment clean.I don’t use the mopping function much; I mainly rely on it for vacuuming, and the results speak for themselves. You can clearly see and feel the difference between a cleaned floor and a dirty one.In terms of durability, it’s held up great after a year of use. No issues with the wheels, brushes, or sensors. It covers my one-bedroom apartment thoroughly, typically running for around 45 minutes, sometimes a bit longer if there are obstacles that confuse it during its mapping process.The functionality is solid. It maps the apartment effectively and adapts over time. The app is very simple and intuitive, giving you all the basic information and control you need without being overly complicated.Noise level is reasonable not silent, but quiet enough to run while your home without being annoying. The sensitivity of the sensors is generally good, though sometimes it struggles with new obstacles or small cords, but nothing major.Overall, if you're looking for a reliable, efficient, and easy-to-use vacuum especially if you have pets the Roomba i5 is highly recommended. Great performance, solid build, and very convenient for small apartments or homes.