If you know how to operate your own vacuum cleaner, a Roomba isn’t really necessary for most people. They’re good to have and they work, but if you can work hard yourself, you’ll receive better results. They also need more management than Kryten from Red Dwarf or Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons. When you witness this enormous hockey puck crashing into your baseboards, you’ll get a rude awakening and wonder what happened to the future we were promised. However, the new Combo J7+ presents a much stronger argument for itself than many of its competitors if you evaluate it on its own merits.
The Roomba Combo J7+ is the first “real” two-in-one vacuum and mopping robot from iRobot and can complete both tasks on its own. Between missions, a mop pad doesn’t need to be added or removed, and the dreaded risk of cross-contamination is eliminated. In fact, if your two-in-one is infused with contaminated water, there is a chance that it will spill its juices all over your recently vacuumed carpets and rugs. Even though it’s a first-world issue, iRobot thinks it prevents many people from purchasing a high-end floor-cleaning robot.
The Combo J7+ from iRobot is designed to hold a mop and pad on top of its chassis and only bring them down when necessary. The machine flips down the pad when it rolls over hardwood flooring as opposed to carpet, as detected by sensors. It’s a fairly clever piece of engineering, and the engineers at iRobot should be commended for coming up with such a sophisticated solution. All you have to do is put water and cleaning solution in the reservoir, start a mission in the iRobot app, select your dosage level (Eco, Standard, or Ultra), and then push start.
Given that the ground floor of my house is a mix of hardwood, laminate, and rugs, I’ve had the Combo J7+ in my home for three weeks at this point. My kids enjoy bringing mud and other debris into my hallway when they get home from school because they have to go along a gravel path. Additionally, it allows me to send it out after supper to clean the kitchen floor and remove the customary deluge of crumbs left by kids. Although it happens more frequently, I prefer to clean the floors in the middle of the morning when my children can’t object to the noise the Clean Base creates.
The Combo J7+ is the first Roomba to come with iRobot OS 5.0, which advances the efforts of the firm to avoid potentially harmful situations. (Use your own euphemism; I’m not sure how to express “rolling into a pile of dog poop and smearing it all over your carpeting” in a way that’s brand-safe.) Each assignment will ask you to examine the barriers the robot encountered and indicate whether they were temporary or would remain there permanently. For example, you might leave a pair of sneakers by the rear door. The key is for the camera’s computer vision to recognise these dangers and steer clear of them so that no collisions occur.
I will admit that the initial mapping runs were a little more frustrating for me than I could have anticipated. This was partially due to the fact that I had to clean up after my kids before I could send the machine for a run. And that both my welcome mat and the wall separating the hallway from the kitchen frequently managed to trick it. I truly wish there was a method for me to contribute to the map-building process using the location-aware technology on my phone. For instance, I’d be delighted to use dead reckoning on my phone to roughly map the ground floor of my house, which you’d think would expedite the process.
To be fair, since I’ve had the Roomba in my house, this power has increased tenfold. A few days ago, without any urging from me whatsoever, the system asked whether I wanted to designate a specific cleaning zone around the kitchen table. That is undoubtedly a fantastic approach to clean specific soiled spots without having to mop the entire kitchen floor each night. Where credit is due, the Roomba has developed a solid understanding of what is where in my house and where it should focus its energy.
The machine does an excellent job of picking up small, loose debris from the floor, although occasionally an outlier is still visible. Not to mention that you’ll need to constantly refill the Roomba’s water reservoir, despite numerous claims that it won’t require much micromanagement. The container holds a relatively meagre 210 ml (about 7 ounces) of water, which is just about enough for my small British ground floor, which is about 40 square metres (430 square feet) in size. However, you might need to refill the Roomba in the middle of a task if you live in a McMansion with flooring that are the length and width of a football field.
The clean base that comes with the Combo J7+ when purchased in the US costs $1,099.99, which is a sizable sum of money. You can get a Roomba without a base elsewhere, but if you’re buying one for convenience, the base makes perfect sense. The base of your machine serves as both a charging station and a vacuum, sucking up any material that the Roomba picks up and depositing it into a bag of its own. If I had one criticism, it would be that the Clean Base’s suction, which is roughly equivalent to a jet engine in terms of power (and noise), should be built into the Roomba itself. I would also like to be able to turn off this feature.
There are some portions of iRobot’s sales spiel that make me shrug indignantly and almost petulantly. Like telling your preferred voice assistant in your home to tell your Roomba to clean a specific area that gets a lot of traffic. After you attempted to wow your neighbours by altering the hue of your living room lighting for the third time in 2013, I believe employing a voice assistant has become dated. A strong voice assistant relationship is necessary for elderly individuals and others with accessibility issues, but it also makes me uneasy. particularly when it’s far simpler to simply activate an assignment from the app, which is done in a really straightforward way.
But in spite of my reservations, I have discovered that this gadget has become more integrated into my daily routine than I ever imagined. Walking home from the school run and spotting a mound of dirt on the floor that can be magically removed with the touch of a button is truly enjoyable. Additionally, by setting it up to mop the floor as well, the amount of times I have to clean it myself has significantly decreased. Your vacuum cleaner and mop may not be completely replaced, but you won’t need to use them nearly as regularly as you would otherwise.
