In 2023, when I learned that Neato was being shut down, and soon after their cloud services became unreachable for a few days, I arranged to return the two Neato D8's that I had previously bought for myself and my mom (the latter also turned out to be defective) from Amazon and purchased two Roomba i7's instead (model i7156, both units being shortly used Warehouse Deals). I always considered iRobot kinda legendary and above what I was willing to pay, but the price of i7 was comparable to that of D8, the reviews were pretty good, and i7 seemed like something above entry level, nearly top-of-the-line, so, I thought, it would be a great purchase.
Now, after a little over two years of using it, I must say that I'm feeling quite let down by my i7 in particular, and Roomba in general, to the extent where I actually want to replace it with something that would specifically not be a Roomba. Here's why:
First, what annoys me the most is that way– waaay – too often the vacuum fails to properly connect to its charging base after doing its work. I blame the charging contacts for that, which, compared to the Neato models I previously had, look stupidly small. Yes, cleaning these contacts helps. For a while. But if I get to do that every week or two, is that still reasonable??? To me, it just seems very stupid. I mean, did Neato hold a patent on longer charging plates or something? Why is nobody else making charging contacts like that, but everyone is doing these tiny little pins instead? By the way, I don't think I've ever heard the robot warning me about failed connection to a charging base. At best, it plays some chimes which indicate nothing to me, except that perhaps I should check out the app. But that shouldn't be the only way to solve issues like this!
Second biggest annoyance. I have a daily vacuum job scheduled in the app, but even when the robot manages to charge properly, sometimes it won't start. Instead, when the time to clean comes, it will loudly announce that its dust bin must be emptied (so it can be informative after all?). But even if do so right away, that scheduled job is now lost for today and if I still want the robot to clean the house today, I get to go to the app to trigger the job manually. I find this logic extremely stupid: why can't the robot warn me about its dust bin being full after completing a job? Or an hour before starting a new one? Or at least restart that job if I clean the bin within a given time frame after I'm warned? Why does it have to wait for the next scheduled job, only tell me then, and quietly fail that job as a side-effect? (Ahh, correction: I just found a setting in the app that allows me to tell the robot to keep cleaning even if it detects that the dust bin is full. I've switched it over and will see how that works).
Other pain points are less severe, but still:
- Somehow the spot cleaning function is very messed up. In addition, it can't be triggered via the app.
- The area around the base also seems to never be cleaned.
- It looks like the area map gets slightly distorted (rotated) over time, meaning that the robot will not clean immediately next to some walls and no-go zones, but might end up violating some other no-go zones.
- Seemingly inefficient cleaning of certain spaces: we have a small foyer, which could be cleaned by going two or three times along its length, but the robot always goes perpendicular to its length for some reason, resulting in many more turns and, likely, poorer cleaning.