iRobot Roomba Combo J7+ w/Pads Replen Kit

The media could not be loaded. I've been using my Roomba j7+ for about a month now and can give an informed review.A word of caution: Beware of buying "almost new" for a reduced price. I ordered one and it would not charge no matter what. I followed all of the instructions and even called customer service and we worked together to try to solve the issue unsuccessfully. I returned the item to Amazon, but ordered another, this time making sure it really was new and not used. Don't buy used. At least I won't again for these things.Pros: The Roomba j7+ works really, really well especially in the vacuuming department. I have two cats, one of whom sheds prolifically, and a large dog that does the same. This thing does a pretty good job at getting all that off the carpet. It does a better job at vacuuming than my old push vacuum cleaner, and that was a pleasant surprise to see that.I run it every day. It vacuums the carpets, and vacuums and mops where I have white ceramic tiles: the kitchen, entryway and two bathrooms.The AI never ceases to amaze me. This thing makes decisions which room to vacuum next (unless you tell it to vacuum a specific room), goes around wires and I hear even pet poop (I don't have that problem in my house). It's very good at suction and goes slow enough to do a bang of a job cleaning the carpet.My wife an I have even given our Roomba a name. He's George.Our George won't fall down stairs. It just refuses. From my kitchen there are stairs leading down to the basement. There's no door at the top of the stairs. George the Roomba has "cliff" sensors preventing it from going over the edge of a top stair and tumble down the stairs. No need to set an obstacle blocking the robot from getting to the edge of the stairs.You can set a schedule for it to vacuum certain areas or the whole area (your home). You can have it do it every day at a certain time, every other day, any day of the week and any time of the day you want. You can even set it up so that it vacuums as soon as you leave the house. It's kinds like Santa Clause: it knows when you're asleep and it knows when you're home. (It was an early Christmas gift my wife and I gave to ourselves.)The Roomba J7+ works with Alexa and Google. I presume it works with Siri, but I'm an Android kinda person. I have Amazon echos in every room of this house, smart bulbs everywhere, and I can turn on lights or change their colors just with my voice. I can also say, "Alexa, ask iRobot to vacuum the bedroom" and it will say, "Okay, I'll tell iRobot to vacuum the bedroom." And magically the Roomba wakes up, backs away from the charging station, and make a beeline for the Bedroom without bumping into a wall or a door or anything. Cool stuff. Impresses visitors to the house.Cons: I'm disappointed with battery life. My house is fairly simple, not a huge mansion. I have a bedroom, living room, office and kitchen. That's it. Two bathrooms and the kitchen has white ceramic tiles, one dog, two cats, my wife and myself. Sometimes we have grandkids crawling all over the house, but not every day. George (my iRobot Roomba J7+) has to take two breaks, return to the charging station (where it empties the bin inside the robot by powerful suction into a proprietary vacuum cleaner bag (that cost $19.99 for only 3 of them). and then remains there while it recharges due to low battery. An hour and a half later it comes back on automatically, goes to the place it stopped before, and resumes cleaning until it's finished the mission.However, because it has to recharge twice, it can take over 5 hours just to vacuum and mop the house. So I'm disappointed with the battery life.I just had to finish mopping my kitchen floor by hand. I find that I have to do that once a week or so, even though the iRobot Roomba J7+ rolls into the kitchen, lowers it's mop and starts vacuuming and mopping the floor. George the Roomba doesn't do a very good job mopping.The little "mop" is a crescent moon shaped pad that inserts into the top of the vacuum cleaner. It can be removed and washed, but it's about the size of a small wash rag. You fill a small tank at the top of the vacuum cleaner with whatever cleaner you want to use. The iRobot Roomba j7+ came with two small packets of floor cleaning stuff. One for tiles, another for wood floors. Once that was gone, I just use stuff like Mr. Clean. You can pour it in full strength or diluted. It's up to you.But in the end it's all about that "mop head." You know, the small crescent moon shaped pad that is smaller than a wash rag? The Roomba comes with two of these in the box, and you can detach it and wash it in the sink. When it's all said and done, however, how well can you clean a floor with good cleaner but one small wash rag that gets dirty fairly quickly.So after a week I've noticed the ceramic kitchen tiles needed a more thorough hand mopping, and I consider that a con.Summary: Overall, this thing has improved the quality of our living and has been doing a good job vacuuming our carpets and picking up animal hair. It saves us time to do other things we enjoy doing, and it's fun to watch, too. It doesn't do a perfect job at mopping, true, but it does vacuum and mop. You might need to still do some mopping, but not as often as before. The battery life is disappointing. I thought it would be able to do the whole first floor of the house in one go, but it has to recharge itself several times and therefore takes a long time to finish the vacuuming.A workaround would simply to have it vacuum more used areas of the house more frequently, and the less used areas less frequently, thus reducing the area it has to clean on a daily basis. This would give enough battery life to complete it's job.I've read a lot of reviews, and i've got my personal experience. This is probably the best vacuuming robot that you can buy.

UPDATE 12/16/2023:It has been almost a full year since I wrote the Original Review below, and there is some additional information that I learned after I had posted it. In the end, I was working directly with one of iRobot's CSRs who also looked into other brands to make their products better. He was able to get almost immediate responses from Tech Support, and we were able to identify many of the issues that I had been having. One of the biggest is that you can't have multiple iRobot devices on your network when using this device. If you do, none of the devices will work properly, which is what I had reported.However, there is a core issue with all of iRobot's mopping devices which still exists today, and that is "conservation of matter". If you remember high school physics, or chemistry, you know that this means that matter cannot be created, nor destroyed. It can only be changed or moved. You might be thinking how does that have anything to do with this device? Well, dirt, grime, liquids, etc., are all matter. If you don't do something to physically remove them from the floor, they just constantly get spread across your entire house. The same goes for the cleaning fluid, which is never removed from your floors, it just piles up, layer by layer. BTW, the bottoms of my feet were solid black after using this for a couple weeks.I think you can see where this is going, as you will need to manually remove all of this guck that keeps getting thicker as you use it. I had concerns about this from the beginning, and they were confirmed when I bought a Shark Steaming Mop to clean the floors after I returned the Roombas. The steamer uses nothing but steam to clean, and when I first tried to use it I noticed that the floor was foaming up with soap and I had to stop using it, as the soap would have damaged the steamer.I did purchase a different system from a different manufacturer to replace my iRobot devices, and this device has been working perfectly for almost a year. At the time that I bought it, it was the top device on the market, and I had to pay full price ($400 more than the Black Friday Deals) because iRobot took so long to respond. But, I am more than happy with this new device. It is a full cleaning system, vacuum with mop and wash and dryer.The mop and wash cleans the mop every so many minutes (10+ in increments of 5 minutes) where I have it set to 20 minutes. So, every 20 minutes it goes back to the dock, washes the mop, and then resumes where it left off. When it's done, it empties the vacuum bin, washes the mop, and then dries the mop for 3 hours (configurable), something that Roombas cannot do. For the first 2 weeks that I had it, I filled the tank with nothing but water, and it took 2 weeks for it to completely remove everything that the Roombas had left behind. The water in the waste bin was almost completely solid black for the first week, and then became more transparent over the following week.I live in Las Vegas, so there is a ton of dirt that gets into the house, even with the house sealed shut. Now, my floors are very smooth, not at all sticky. Both my socks and feet are no longer covered in crud. If you solely need a vacuum, the iRobot vacuums are not bad. However, I can't recommend any of their mopping devices, as they do not clean anything. They simply spread the mess over the entire floor space and add a very thick cleaning solution to it, making it even worse and sticky. My current solution removes everything from the floor and uses a very light cleaner. After 3 refills where I add cleaning solution, I do 1 refill with water only, just to make sure that nothing ever builds up.I hope this update helps, as it brings up fundamental issues with iRobot's mopping products.Original ReviewAfter trying to get this to work correctly over the course of almost 4 weeks, I have decided to return this product, the M6 that I also purchased, and all of the accessories. The major reason being that the App just does not work correctly, and you can't use any of the devices w/o the App. Additionally, the mapping is absolutely terrible. My entire house has hard floors, which should produce almost perfect mapping, but each room has walls that 4-5 feet displaced. It thinks that walls are 4-5 feet thick as well, which has led to other issues.I have followed all of the directions provided online, and from working with their technical support, which stopped communicating with me once I provided them with a list of about 20 things that I found wrong. The App constantly loses communication with the devices, and when it does, you lose all control of the device. This isn't a WiFi signal issue, as I have full maximum signal coverage throughout the entire house, and all other devices work perfectly at all times.I performed a factory reset at least 6 times w/o any change. I have rebooted each of the devices at least 30 times w/o any change. You would think that after a reboot that you should be able to connect, but nope, none of the iRobot devices connects. I ran 3 mapping runs yesterday, all of which completed successfully, but not one of them updated the map. In the app it states that the map is not available, when I try to see the result of a Mapping Run.It will also ask you about changes to the map after a vacuum or cleaning, which is where I noticed that it was trying to tell me that it encountered carpeting in approximately 60% of my house. There isn't any carpeting anywhere, not even a rug. I could go on in regard to other issues, but I don't see a point. iRobot makes a lot of claims in their advertising, but I haven't found any of it to be true. When I did a deep dive into the issues that I have encountered, I learned that I am not alone, and that they've been reported at least 8+ months prior.I am going to try another product with the hope that it will work better. I expected better from a company that has been in business for over 32 years, but I guess that it is expecting too much. BTW, tech support has access to everything that you do with the app, and the devices. They described absolutely everything that I tried, they could see my map, and could see that I was constantly losing connection. All of the issues that I found are also listed on Reddit.