Vac reviewOk, firstly let’s start with the good stuff. I live with a dog near a the beach, so hair and sand are everywhere. I gave this 2 stars because the cleaning, when it works, is very good, I can clearly see the difference when it’s finished. The edge detection works well, I don’t think it’s ever taken a tumble off a step. The self emptying bin (when it works) is very useful, otherwise I’d be emptying the unit almost every day. The map (when it works) is great as I can tell it to clean in specific areas, for example “not the living room”, ie clean everywhere else while I’m in the living room. And I can tell it not to go to certain places, like outside through my patio doors.But, I have owned a bottom of the range robot cleaner before (a Eufy), and I can say categorically that this top of the range iRobot is not worth the extra money.The problems I have with it…It gets stuck or tangled up in something (like shoe laces) approximately 1 in 3 outings. I don’t have a messy home, but you have to have a 100% uncluttered floor for this thing to work. If I leave shoes on the floor, or the dog leaves a toy lying around, the unit will seemingly almost never detect them, and will get tangled up and disable itself quickly. Don’t even consider buying this if you have kids. Sometimes (rarely) it says it’s stuck when there’s absolutely nothing wrong - it just stops for no apparent reason.It’s object detection, if it has any, is poor. I’ve mentioned toys and shoes, but it also It constantly gets stuck on a floor plug - why won’t it learn? It’s not like the floor plug is moving around every day. It regularly gets stuck on the base of my kitchen stools (pictured) and even when I move it off it seems to immediately get drawn back to them, no idea why.The bin emptying doesn’t work at least once per week. Sometimes it’s because it’s picked up a piece or paper or something similar that blocks the exit. But sometimes I just can’t see any problem at all, it just doesn’t empty and I have to do it manually.The collection bags are designed to be single use, I don’t think they can be recycled, and they are not cheap to replace. I actually empty and reuse mine, so I’m still using the first one six months later. But because the bags are not designed to be reused, emptying them is a bit of a messy job, and it’s not easy. Come on iRobot, redesign these so the face can be unclipped so it cab more easily emptied.The map software is just bad. The unit sometimes gets a bit lost, and as a result it thinks it’s discovered new areas of my house, which obviously it hasn’t. I think there is now a way to tell the software to ignore the new / phantom area, but that wasn’t the case for a long time - it just kept nagging me to label the new area on my map.It can’t (or won’t) go from a hard floor to my carpeted area. I guess the difference in height between the two rooms in question is too much for it.The schedule doesn’t work at night (sigh). The unit is very noisy (much than other robot vacs I’ve had), and running it at night would actually be quite handy. But I’ve tried and it’s doesn’t work. The unit wonders around for 15 mins before giving up and stopping at some random place. I guess it needs light? My cheap and cheerful Eufy didn’t need light.You can add exclusion zones to the map, which is a great feature - this stops the machine from wondering outside (via my patio doors). But the map rotation doesn’t work for exclusion zones. My house isn’t a perfect square, there are walls on a 45 degree angle (that lead to my garden). Problem is the exclusion zones have to be square in shape, and so the angled walls aren’t aligned with the square exclusion zone. The map software does allow you to rotate the house, so I can align the problem walls vertically - YAY. But then when adding exclusion zones the rotation disappears! The only solution I have for adding exclusion zones to non-90 degree walls is to add lots and lots of tiny little zones in a diagonal line to make a “pseudo diagonal” exclusion zone.The software is SLOW. Every time you make a change on the app, or every time the unit finishes a job, it saves it state (to the iRobot cloud I presume). The “save” process takes like 15 to 30 seconds or so and makes the app unbelievably infuriating to use. Every time you make a tiny change, wait 30 seconds, and do another, and wait 30 seconds. There is no reason for this, it’s just sloppy engineering. This isn’t a new product, they’ve had years to work on this stuff.Errors… so many errors. The software (the app AND the on-board software) is just terrible. I understand that sometimes there are problems that I need to manually fix. But this unit seems to have errors so frequently it has become expected behaviour. And the app is totally useless at telling you how to fix them. The app has a “lean more” button beneath each error, but when clicking it it just takes me to a useless page titled “iRobot cloud status”. I would expect it to show me information about the particular error that’s being reported, and maybe how to fix it. Most recently I get the error “sealing problem around base” as soon as I turn it on. No idea what this means, no help online, I just jiggle the unit on its base and suddenly it’s fine. It’s now happening 100% of the time when I start the unit.
Siri integration does not work reliably. I has worked in the past, then stop completely. I have to go into my shortcuts, remove them all and add them in again to get it to work. No idea why, I suspect the app engineers just can’t keep it working between releases of the app.The two rubber rollers that pick up debris have shredded themselves pretty badly in the 6 months or so I’ve had the unit. I think they need replacing already, for £1000 I would expect the hardware to last for a couple of years at least.In summary, this unit isn’t 5 to 6 times better than a unit that costs 5 to 6 times less. In fact, I say it’s just a bad product, with “ok” hardware and terrible software. A “dumb” unit that just wonders around randomly would almost certainly do a comparable job of cleaning without the constant attention that this thing requires. However, I need to be able to tell it not to wonder outside, so a totally dumb unit isn’t the right product for me. But if you don’t have that problem, take my advice and go cheap.