Don’t get me wrong: I love me some robot vacuums but no matter which you pick, regular maintenance and babysitting is necessary. Even if a cleaning run goes off without a hitch and the botvac doesn't get stuck on a cord or trapped behind a door, you still have to clean carpet brushes and empty dust bins.
Oh, dust bins. Most botvacs have a dust bin capacity of around 0.5-0.7 liters. In my double-dog, double-kid house, I have to pause and empty the bin once or twice during every cleaning cycle. Otherwise, the suction tube gets clogged, or I can leave and walk back in my house to find the floors as dirty as when I left them. Most robot vacuums are still a long way from being your perfect automated cleaning assistant.
But now iRobot, makers of my favorite robot vacuum, has taken a significant step forward towards making the ideal botvac. The Roomba i7+'s first significant, and obvious, upgrade is the innovative Clean Base.
The Clean Base is a combination charging stand and self-emptying bin. Every time the Roomba i7+ (or "Pepperoni Dress," as my daughter and I dubbed this one) senses that the bin is full, it returns to its base. It then empties itself out into a cleaning tower that can hold up to 30 bins' worth of debris.
The app now also has smart maps, which allow the robot to map up to 10 different floor plans. On each floor plan, you can designate cleaning zones as small as three square feet. If you choose, you can tell the i7+ to clean only the foyer and the bathroom, or move it from one floor to another mid-clean. The botvac gets more efficient with each cleaning and cleans each zone at a time—no more skipping from room to room.
And as with all of iRobot’s products, the Roomba i7+ also has Dirt Detect, which automatically senses particularly dirty spots in your home and makes multiple passes over those spots. This botvac makes my house so clean and me so very, very happy. If I could plan my wedding again, I would put a dress on it and make it one of my bridesmaids (apologies to my real-life, non-robotic bridesmaids!).
The Clean Base isn’t small. It’s 19 inches high and 12.2 inches wide, with a small on-ramp so that Pepperoni Dress can slide itself onto the base’s vacuum. As with other iRobot products, connecting Pepperoni Dress to my home Wi-Fi and to my phone was simple. I turned on the vacuum and followed the instructions in the app.
It took about three hours from plugging it in for Pepperoni Dress to charge completely, and I found that I got about 1.5 hours of runtime from each charge. I measured it at 61-63 decibels on carpet, and about 65-70 dB on hardwood floors. It's loud, but comparable to other robot vacuums that I’ve tried.
When you open the iRobot app and click on Smart Maps, the app lets you choose between cleaning and mapping simultaneously, or starting a training run, which doesn't use the vacuum at all. If your floor plan is too big to vacuum in one charge, a training run can, in theory, help put together a complete floor plan much faster.