iRobot Roomba Combo i5 Robot Vacuum & Mop - Clean by Room with Smart Mapping, Works with Alexa, Personalized Cleaning Powered OS, Ideal for Pet Hair, Carpet and Hard Floors

Affordable and works great! Our 2017 Roomba 960 (or something) was $600 and worked near daily until a few weeks ago. It was loud! I trust the brand and was super excited that the new version is so much cheaper. It works very well. I have had a few issues that are concerning but have not put the time into solving them:-Trouble connecting it to the app and WiFi. Kept loading over and over and not recognizing/finding the device after it had showed up on the phone as being found. Operating it without the app currently.-Tricky to empty, awkward to pop it out and then unlatch it to empty. Major plus is that the bin is huge, holds a ton more dog hair/sand than the older version. Maybe they made it annoying so I decide to upgrade to the self emptying one!-Gets stuck numerous times on one leg of the coffee table. Always the same leg and it keeps returning to the same site three or more times per cycle after I move it awayPros:-Quieter than the original but still loud-Lower profile, goes under most of the furniture-Hardwood floors get really clean - picks up dog hair and sand/dirt very well!-Finds the way to the dock no problem-Long battery and bin lifeHaven’t tried the dust/wet mop component yet but I’m very happy with our new Roomba!!

For the first week of ownership, we were disappointed in the robots random movements, but we had read in other reviews that it needs some time to explore and update itself, so we gave it a chance. The more it explored, the more software updates were downloaded, and the more efficiently it performed. Here are the pros and cons of owning this model:PROS:- Software updates that have greatly improved the i3's capabilities.-- Scheduled automatic cleaning is easy to setup in the app.- Unlike the more expensive Roomba models, it works in the dark. Lights off? curtains closed? No problem.- Sucks up a lot of dirt, lint, and hair from our floors. Long hair (we have a lot) collects at the ends of his rollers and is easily removed.- We have 2 steps down from the main level to our family room. It vacuums to the edge, but has never jumped.- The app isn't needed for a cleaning. For our family room, we don't use the app. We just set it in the room, press the button and away it goes, cleaning in an efficient manner.- Durable. Sucked up a USB cord and a sun hat string that had been left out on the floor. These items got tangled up, jamming the robot and causing it to shut down, but no damage was done.- Widely available replacement parts... for a day may a come when his little mustache stops whisking dirt into his big suck face.CONS- It took 5 days of assigning it to "clean everywhere" before it accurately mapped our single-story 1500sf home, then allowed me to divide up and label rooms/areas, and the ability to assign it to clean specific rooms.- It can't clean our whole house in one charge. It goes back to the station recharges itself and then finishes the job.- The main con is having patience with the robot exploring and the software updates (my experience below). It will take some time for all of the features to become available. Make sure you have strong Wi-Fi signal throughout your house and send the robot out on cleaning runs and the updates will happen.Software Updates:- The app and the robot started with limited functionality. After doing a few whole house cleanings over 3 days, it started getting updates and more features were added to the app. It took another few days before it was fully updated and had an accurate floor plan. While it was cleaning it was also doing a lot of exploring, going back over the same areas, pausing to ponder the universe, etc. I think this was part of preparation for the next software update regarding the mapping. After cleaning all accessible areas of my house a few times, a map appeared on the app and asked me if it was accurate or if the robot should remap my house. Some parts of rooms were cut off or shaped weird, but I clicked "accept" anyway. It then prompted me to add/delete partition lines to divide the house up into rooms. The lines can be moved any direction and rotated 360° so you have good control over creating different areas. After doing a few more whole house cleanings the map updated itself and accurately represented our floor plan.In the end I'm glad we had patience with it. It cleans great now and it's efficient.

I've had this vacuum for a little over a year and it's really just been an annoyance. My review is summarized below, but I would also suggest a quick Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo search with the terms "roomba terrible reddit". Confirmation bias is a thing, but so is astroturfing and premature reviewing, both of which are prevalent on this site.Let me go ahead and get the one positive out of the way: The vacuum is pretty strong. It pulls more crud from between hardwood boards than my Dyson vacuum. Yay.-----After owning an i3 since July 2022 here are my takeaways:-----* Automation should make life easier and this fails so hard it's almost impressive. I spend less time manually vacuuming and maintaining my Dyson than I do futzing around with the Roomba unit and app. It does get stuck occasionally. I knew that going in, but all the hand-holding the unit requires really adds up.* The Smart Map feature has yet to work for me and I've tried it several times. I think it was only recently added as a feature for the i3 when I purchased it, so I assume it's a feature that's been shoehorned in and that I should be grateful for their generosity. Basically, the unit will roam around the house not vacuuming. I will assume it's doing it's mapping thing, but it's not doing that either. By the time it's done not creating a map, there's not enough battery power left to really do any vacuuming. I mainly purchased this vacuum for the vacuuming feature so the Smart Map feature seems at odds with that.* The unit gets so close to cleaning the corners of rooms. So close in fact, that it's easy to forget that the robot didn't clean the corners at all, ever. This one's not a secret, but what else can't this thing do! Keep reading to find out!* The iRobot app says I have to replace the filters in 5 months. I've barely used this vacuum, and haven't had it running on a schedule in months. However, the app (as of today 8/13/23) suggests I spend $65 on new filters. It even sends me push notifications telling me that iRobot needs me to buy their filters asap. Why? Is it simply on a timer? I do have an option to "Reset" the "High Efficiency Filter" on the Product Health screen. Is that option there because it's unreliable? Is it being misdiagnosed by the app or faulty sensors within the unit? No way to know!* The app is rough. I'm not sure why honestly. It's hard to describe because the issues are so sporadic and intermittent. Maybe it's because iRobot has to support dozens of different models with marginally different feature sets in a single app. I get secondhand embarrassment even opening the app and this is coming from a person who has used the HBO Go, HBO Now, and HBO Max apps. I'm curious if the makers of my cheap, automated catfood dispenser are also MIT roboticists and engineers, because that app has more features and has been completely hands-off since the 15 minutes I spent setting it up 3 months ago.* The unit draws more power than it needs. I'm probably a stickler for this, but I'm surprised my cheap, Amazon-purchased cat toys don't draw nearly as much power continually once they're fully charged. I'd love to test it more and get some insight as to what's going on but then I wonder: to what end? So that I can get my terrible vacuum back up and running or something? Maybe it's because it's communicating to the cloud that new filters are desperately needed in 5 months!-----A couple of side notes for anyone still reading this 🤷:-----* I'm not surprised the Automatic Dirt Disposal unit is no longer for sale. I remember nearly purchasing it a year ago until I briefly skimmed all the negative review. Just now I checked the iRobot website and they indicate that there's an entirely different slew of issues there. Their business model with accessories seems to be: create the disease to sell snake oil.* iRobot, the manufacturer, uses green for its primary brand color but the design is not environmentally conscious, in my opinion. Unless my unit is very specifically defective, I think this is misleading. But at least they can say the logo was colored green back in the 90s before green = environmentally conscious. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they're just not good at branding or robots. Keep up the g̶o̶o̶d̶ work!Lastly, iRobot support, please don't respond to this review. If you do respond, please acknowledge that you decided to ignore this part of the review.