New iRobot Roomba i7+ Robot Vacuum in Depth Review

hey everyone welcome to my review of the iRobot Roomba i7 plus robot vacuum so I have been looking for a robotic vacuum for a while and this is iRobot slay this model they just released it it's their new AI series and this is the i7 which is the top-of-the-line model and this is also the plus so the plus means that it has a new charging base that has an integrated dirt disposal system that automatically empties the vacuum so one of the reasons I was sort of hesitating on these is because you have to keep emptying the bin on them and they're not very big obviously because the unit itself is not huge so they fill up a lot and you have to from the reviews I've read people you know talked about having to constantly empty them so that was kind of a pain but they're our latest series this plus series just switches out the charging base with a new base that also has sort of a built in tower or vacuum which has a dust like a disposal bag in it and then what happens when the robot goes back to the base to recharge it also empties itself by supposedly sucking up the dirt out of the bin up until this bag so if I flip this over here you can see a little picture on the side so what's supposed to happen is and we'll see if it actually does work is it comes up to its base and then it sucks the dirt out and goes up into a disposal bag in this unit so that was kind of thing that sold me on it and this is also their latest generation so that means that they they've made some improvements to it has more suction power a whole bunch of other things obviously it's a smart home enabled for either Alexa Google home and a lot of its control to the app it's supposed to automatically map the floors so you can like take it to different floors and it should be to do all the different floors so we'll see there's no guarantee I'm gonna keep it it's just one of these things that I finally decided I was going to try I do have a lot of as you can see here hardwood floors in house the entire first floor is basically hardwood floors I do have some carpeting right here but it's very low pile very thin low pile carpet like in the dining room the kitchen is all tile so and there's not really cords or anything hanging any on my floor so I figured this would be a good unit to try and see if I could keep the the wood floors thus free basically so that's why I got it so we'll see if it actually works but we'll do a review on it and the software and everything so why don't we unbox it and see what we get inside here okay so we open the box here it looks like we've got three main boxes here so there's one with a handle actually so pull this up I expect this is the vacuum of course which it is so there's the vacuum itself pretty simple just has three buttons on the top there's a home button the clean button and then some other button here I'm gonna look up and see what that is and if we pull it out here you can see the bottom here it's got some rollers different style rollers here looks like a rubber got some wheels and then looks like the edge a little edge brushes here so that's pretty much the unit it's all assembled you don't have to do anything and then here we've got looks like some instructions we got a quick start card and of course everything today first thing yeah I do is download an app so looks like you got download the app plug it in put it on the charging base and let it sit for a couple hours probably while it charges up and there's a couple other manuals in here that's pretty much it for the first box so it's just the vacuum itself and we have a box here with a plug in gear on it so this is probably all these accessories so looks like we've got the dust bag so this could be a problem actually because these look like they're going to be probably expensive that you have to buy from iRobot for the automatic disposal so you are gonna have to actually buy dust bags looks like and yeah they only give you one which is kind of like not the greatest this is like I said this is the top-of-the-line model with the plus so this is almost $1000 so you think for that kind of money they'd give you at least a couple to start with so I don't know how long these last but I've got some kind of filter here there's the power cord for the base looks like they give you an extra edge brush here and nothing else in there this is I think this is the virtual barrier thing so give you a couple of double-a batteries and that's pretty much it for this box so not a lot in there either and then yeah the biggest part of this whole unit is this base which is why this box is so big here okay so obviously this thing is pretty large so that's one sort of consideration with this unit is to have this auto disposal thing you also have to have a space for this and obviously you don't want it kind of in the way where everybody's gonna see it all the time can be kind of ugly probably that's the thing about the other models if you get them you can actually put them like under a couch or something like that and hide them because the the charging base is basically you know no taller than the actual vacuum itself so you can sort of squeeze them in different places this this unit it's kind of big it's almost like a mini little garbage can so that's something you have to keep in mind now you can get the new eye series same exact vacuum without the tower here and that is the one that's just called the i7 no plus so without the plus you just get the base with the plus you get this big unit right here which you can see is a sort of the charging base down here and then looks like there's some kind of unit on the top here so they do give you one bag so they give you an extra bag so that's the bag there so that's pretty much it so you get have a place for that I'm not sure we're gonna put it because obviously you have to have a plug to go with it so I'm gonna see if I can find a place for it and then go download the app and then we'll come back and see what we need to do okay so there's not a really good spot in my house for this thing so I did put it in the closet here I had to take out a little shoe rack I had behind it but I can shorten that and put it on the rest of the wall there but I have an outlet in this closet that I used for my Dyson handheld box so I figured this might be a good spot and there's plenty of room for it to get in and out the only problem is according to the instructions you need to have one and a half feet on both sides of it and four feet in front so there's enough room but it's definitely not a one and a half feet on each side especially on this side against the doorway so I'm not sure if this is actually going to work or not or if that's just you know the recommended distance but it'll still work otherwise because there's no good spot in my house otherwise the only other place is probably the kitchen and that doesn't have an outlet nearby then I can actually plug it into so I'd have to run a cord so that would be like really ugly so again this is something you really want to consider before you buy this model because if you don't have a place to have this and you don't have a good you know 12 square feet around it it might be a problem so we'll give it a test and see what happens if it'll still work or if it doesn't but if not we might have to come up with either some other location for it or maybe have to return it for the model without the the auto emptying feature so that's where we're at okay I downloaded the iRobot app because that's the next thing the quick tip quick start instruction said so it just says welcome to and select your country so it has United States is default so I'm just gonna hit continue here you got the standard terms policies accept and now it wants me to create an account so of course like everything else you got to create an account so let me fill in all this information and I'll be back okay I push those two buttons they're actually just touch buttons you and I got out of tone and now it's sort of pulsing blue so go back to the app okay so I'll check those little boxes I press the buttons continue and then it says we found one Robot Roomba I seven five five zero two zero tap to setup and so this is connecting to the Wi-Fi says it could not connect there was a problem alright say ok and I took me back to that same spot where you hold the buttons for two seconds all right let me go try this again at work okay so it finally did I think it wasn't just patient enough because it didn't look like it was doing anything but it did finally say completed it said the robots set up and ready to go and then of course the first thing I get is there's a new software update for it as usual everything gets a software update so there's a little button here to start update so we'll hit that sounds update in progress it's got a downloading bar here so let's keep the iRobot on the base during the update well let you know it's finished so I'll let this thing continue on and we'll come back once it's finished all right we've got everything updated and apps installed robots connected everything's good to go so the last step for setup is if you want to connect it to your smart home so in my case I'm using the Amazon echo system so you're gonna just open up your Alexa app and then once you're open up in your Alexa app on your main menu there you're gonna go to skills you can do a search for the iRobot home skill I already have it set up here so there it is right there iRobot home so all you're gonna do is enable that skill and that's pretty much it as far as the settings go there's just the account linking and that's it so there's nothing in there except a link your account so that account that you created the iRobot account you just and enable that skill and then it'll have a couple things here there's not super complicated skill basically you're just asking it to do these commands so you can do these simple commands here which is just to say room gonna start cleaning room oh stop cleaning room I to go home ask what it's doing currently where it is you can schedule a cleaning you can remove a scheduled cleaning you can ask it when it's going to clean next and those are its basic commands that you can use pretty much with any of the robots not just this one that that our smart home enabled the ice series allows you to do something else something additional and that goes back to that that imprint smart mapping I was showing you earlier which is the room names you can actually say with the ice series through echo or Google home to clean a specific room so you can say Roomba cleaned this room or whatever it may be and it'll only do that room based on that map in those boundaries that you have so you get that one extra sort of command where you can actually tell it to do a specific room and that's only because it the iSeries has that imprint map in it and that's why so that's it so simple commands that you can remember really easy probably the main ones you're just going to use our start cleaning stop cleaning go home and then maybe a specific room and that's pretty much it so set that up in your Amazon or Google home and you're set to go okay now that we got the robots set up we went through the basic setup let's just review the app real quick I've done a couple of runs and so now that I have it all sort of set up and ready to go let's just review it real quick it's actually a pretty simple app there's not a lot to it you've got a menu up here that you can touch that will show you all the rumbas that you have on your account lets you add a robot talks about the smart home so for instance if i go under the actual robot itself just takes me to the main screen to control that robot if I go to add a robot just lets me go through the process of adding robot smart home basically means you can connect it with either Alexa or Google home or IFTTT actually I have it connected with the Alexa so I enabled that skill it was real easy just go to your Alexa app and download the iRobot skill and enable it and you're pretty much done and then account and privacy that's just your actual account so you do have to create an account because it does send all this information to iRobot so just be aware of that it'll send maps and everything and probably all the information to iRobot so your floor plan of your house so be careful with privacy and that if you're concerned about that kind of stuff which is what this account of privacy is you get notifications that you can have set up here so you can as it finishes its jobs cleaning errors bin is full updates all that kind of stuff can be sent right to your phone so you can turn those on and off standard privacy settings those store if you need to order like more bags or brush heads or something that needs a replacement of course the app version and then they actually have iRobot beta which if you want to sign up for that you can actually become a beta tester for either I guess the software or whatever for a new stuff they're trying out so I'm not interested in that I just like when things actually work so on the main screen here you'll just have the name of your robot I need to Hal after the movie 2001 Space Odyssey Odyssey it'll tell you it's ready to clean and fully charged so it gives it status at the top it's hard to see on this because it's in light grey but it's it's there you have this big clean button in the center and then at the bottom here you've got preferences history schedule smart maps and more so preferences there's not a lot underneath here you get one choice which is basically how many cleaning passes would you like you can either be automatic so that the Roomba sees how much dirt is on the floor and we'll decide if it's going to be a single pass or more passes you can force it to one cleaning pass or you can force it to to cleaning passes whichever you like so I just left it on automatic so you just have that one choice for preferences history when you hit that will show you all your cleaning jobs that you have today and you know how many square feet it cleaned and how long it took for each job so you can see here's a job I did today for six minutes here's a job it says stock I actually pulled it off the base because I was cleaning the bottom and stuff like that but it'll tell you all your different jobs and you can go into any of like if you click one of those jobs then it'll show you in a map exactly where it actually cleans so anything in green is where it cleaned and the gray is where it did not clean and then it always shows you where it's located it's home base so every time you do a run you'll get a map of exactly where it cleaned and that's what the history shows you this schedule is where you can actually schedule this now this is the best part of the package because that's what you really want to do is just schedule it a certain time of day to go clean certain areas and you never have to worry about cleaning your floors again we're gonna get into how well it cleans the floors but I'm just gonna tell you right off the bat it does an amazing job cleaning I can't believe it actually I was really shocked so but I have two schedules right now I got one for the hallway which is the piece of the room that gets the dirtiest because that's where the front door is and every you know coming in and out and everything so every day at 9 a.m. it's going to clean the hallway and then three times a week it's going to clean the kitchen so I have to schedule set up right now and you can turn them on and off with these little sliders so if you turn them on then when you go into that schedule you can adjust the time you can just which days of the week it does it if it's just a one time thing or a weekly thing and then you can choose your rooms so you can see here I got these four rooms laid out living room kitchen hallway and dining room and that's because it mapped out the rooms after you did like four or five cleaning jobs it maps out the rooms and then you can actually delineate your rooms and then divide it when you want it to clean so this is really nice so every day it's gonna clean the hallway for me which is not a big area but it's nice that it's gonna be clean every day and I don't have to have the the robot running around the entire first floor I'm able to like just narrow it down to one specific room quickly and every day so really nice and then anytime you hit save or you do anything in here and you can hear it you'll hear a beep on the actual robot and it's pretty instantaneous so there's no delay so you can turn these things on and off as you need to and you know if you're going away on a trip or something you can turn them off so it's not running while you're gone things like that so that's the scheduled part which is really nice now this is the big part with the iSeries robots which is these smart maps so in the previous generation they did map the rooms like the history showed you right there but it lost its it's lost its map every time it finished a run so every time you ran it the next time it would overwrite and you get a new map so it never remembered anything this new generation does remember and it has these things called smart maps and they call an imprint mapping so basically at the bottom here you have the two choices you get clean and map now or start a training run and the training runs are basically if you just want it to map out your floors and you don't want it to vacuum yet because you just want to get the maps so then you can divide it all up now you're gonna have to do at least four to six runs before you see the map appear so at first I thought there was a problem with the software but it turns out that you actually have to one run is not enough it has to go through the rooms multiple times until it finally comes up with a map I called support and they explained it to me and then on the fourth run it actually came up so what you will see it come up once it actually gets generated and you can see I have one up here it's just I named it main floor four rooms and there's my layout basically so I've got this hallway the kitchen the dining room in the living room and you can see these lines in between each one and that's what delineates the rooms and so after the robot gets done mapping everything it guesses at the rooms now it could be wrong so they did the living room in the hallway it kind of put together as one single room which I didn't want the dining room in the kitchen it did delineate correctly in the living room but to put these two together so these little there's a little three dots at the top here where you can say rename the map edit the map rename the rooms or delete the map so if I edit this map okay you can see it has these green bars in between the rooms and you can move these dividers around you can make them bigger or smaller so that you can you know basically delineate these rooms and so that's what I did I added this green bar here between the living room and the hallway it already had the one between the kitchen in this hallway but it didn't have the one here so this anytime I run this was gonna run this whole big room so now I can actually just run the hallway now what's nice about this is on the iSeries if you have a Alexa or Google home you can actually just say it and it will actually just clean that room so you could say just clean the hallway or just clean the kitchen and it'll actually do that which I'll give you a demo of how that works it's really kind of cool so now that it's been all mapped out and delineated you can use these dividers now what would be really nice is if you could take other lines inside the map and like block off certainly areas that you don't want the robot to go near so for instance in the dining room you can see the sort of lightest gray area here that means that we're the robot then clean so that is the dining room table and chairs there and I actually have a set of dining room tables and chairs that the robot sorta wants to run up on because of the type of stands of the chairs they're not regular four legs so because of that I don't want it running up on these chairs because it's gonna actually probably damage them or more of them up so it'd be nice if I could just put a box around the dining room set and not have it hit that so I haven't tried that yeah I'm gonna try to put some of these lines here but I'm pretty sure it's gonna make the line go the entire length of the room and it's gonna cut off the room so that may not work so there is another way to get around this they have those little invisible berries you that you can set up and use if you need to but at least now I don't have to worry about it running up and damaging the table or the chair bases because I can be around when it's actually cleaning a diamond-like if I now that I have it all separated out and I don't have to just do the entire first floor okay so you'll be able to do that when you click this add divider it gives you this map here and you've got a couple tools down at the bottom where you can delete a divider you can turn a divider this way or that way depending which way you want it and then you can place it wherever you want in the map so and then at the top here under those three little dots again you can also rename the overall map so you can have the roomba map different floors in your house this is the main floor of the house if I take the Roomba up to the second floor then I could have it run up there it'll make a new map and then I can name that map like second floor or whatever one I do you can also name the rooms whatever you want now when you click the when you actually you're on the the rooms and you want to name them it will actually give you a whole list of pre defined rooms already and then when you you can pick them off there or they have a choice where you can do a custom name whatever you so you have total control the everything the map shows you is the home base there which is where the Roomba is actually located so you'll be able to see where that is and that's that's pretty much it all right so this is this infant smart mapping is the main new feature of the the eye series in addition to the more powerful suction and improved navigation that's part of that series and then the other thing is they have a more button right here which there's a care button right here so talks about you know if you want information on how to care for your robot debris extractors all different kinds of stuff there there's the help which is just getting the online help of how to do things and then you have a Settings button here which that's where you can name your robot tells you the version it's on tells you the version of the clean base your Wi-Fi settings language your bin behavior so if I click on that you can see it says paws cleaning one full so if it says the bin is full the Roomba will return to where it started and pause its cleaning job and once it's empty then it'll then you press clean then resume it or you can say keep cleaning one full and it always finish its cleaning job even if the bin becomes full in the middle of the job so because I have the i7 plus the one with the automatic emptying feature if you leave it on pause cleaning one full it'll go back to the base it'll actually empty itself and then it will keep going and finish its cleaning job so you want to leave it on that if you have the i7 plus if you just have the i7 then you have a choice of which one you want there they have this map privacy right here so if you of course don't turn this on you can't do your smart mapping but if it would protect you from your floorplan being sent to iRobot so if you mind your floorplan being sent on a robot then you probably want to turn that off but you won't be able to do all the features with the smart map they have a reduced power standby mode here so it'll take you actually out to the irobot hope it explains what it means and the different buttons you push to get that I don't really care about the reduced power standby so I'm leaving that there's a factory reset if you having some kind of problem and you have to reset it and then you can also remove the robot if you need to now one thing I did find out this is on my iPad as you can see I wanted to put it on my iPhone because obviously when you get an app from Apple it automatically downloads to all your devices when I try to open it up from my iPhone it was prompting me to like re add the robot again so it looks like you can only have this on one device because somehow it's communicating with the the app directly with that robot so it doesn't look like you're gonna be able to have the app on multiple iOS devices just one so you have to pick one whichever one you wanted on so I haven't found a way around that yet so those are all the buttons at the bottom and then there's this empty bin one which is sort of a manual like if you want to empty the bin you can push that button and if it's on its base it will it will empty you have the big clean button in the middle here so when you hit the clean button basically you can just say clean all rooms or if you choose your rooms then you can actually select which room you want and that's on the main floor so once I mapped the second floor there'll be another main bar here for second floor and all the individual rooms under that and again you can decide you know if you want to manually use the app to tell which room to clean but the best part about this is you don't even have to use the app you can either just say it through your smart home device like Alexa or a Google home so either the echo devices or Google home or you can schedule it so it just automatically does it by itself so we're gonna do a quick demo here of what it looks like when you just use Amazon's ecosystem - just tell it to clean an area and then I'm gonna show you what when it's cleaning how it actually moves around the room so we're just going to do a small area we're just going to do the the hallway real quick but we're not going to use the app here we're just going to use our voice to start it and then you'll see how that works but this is the basically that's all the stuff that's in the app so there's not a lot there it's not very complicated app pretty simple straightforward so here's the room boys cleaning right now and it's doing its mapping of the room and when it comes to the edge here it doesn't go over the center it's not too loud so what it does is it keeps earning just a little bit until it finds the edges and eventually whether it will do go it'll go around the entire perimeter of the room with the brush which is on the one side only and it'll still go through the entire edge to pull out all the dirt from the edge and let's see how it's going underneath the fridge right here and it sort of zips around and it finds the edge that coaches we can get to get that little brush underneath there so right now it's all along the edge so just before it was actually the storm tore close to the edge but not on the edge but once it finds the perimeter of the room then right now you can see it's going up along the entire head to the baseboard so it'll be you'll think in the beginning that it's not going to get to the edges but eventually it finds the edges and it starts recognizing the rooms because it's already done the dining room to see how it's turned around but it has to keep basically bumping into all the little edges so it can find the corners of the room through simple right around the garbage can here around the whole petal and everything this will just be wrapping around they'll go around the water bottles and everything that's on the floor and it just keeps finding the edges so you really don't have to remove anything from the floors the only thing that you have to be careful of is towards if you have ports laying on the floor if you can see how it's going around the whole edge rate it just wraps around the corners and the edges to make sure that that little brush on the one side basically pulls out all the dirt out of the edges now this is my first cleaning run so it has to map all the rooms first and those house did not go over the edge there because there's a clip there step down right there Jindal did so now it looks like it's going back to its base [Music] is it right inside here [Music] so the vacuum just shut offs and outs just trying to get up to its base it looks like so it's done with its cleaning [Music] [Applause] so it's on its face and that's pretty much it so now we can check to see if what it picked up here so let me pull out the tray which i think is just right here I'm not sure how it comes out exactly not there's just a push button right here and you can't oh my gosh you probably can't see it but it's actually pretty pretty full so now we're gonna try the auto emptying feature so I think I can't remember which it is now have to go look at the instructions in the app there's a button to empty it so let me go pull up the app and see if it works that way I thought it was automatic when it came on to the base but it may not indicate that the bin is full yet so it may be just when it's full but let me go grab the app okay so remember earlier when I was saying I wasn't sure it was gonna work inside this closet here it actually does and you can see I actually put the shoe racks back up on the wall here just made a little shorter and so it sits in here pretty tight there's not a lot of room on each side of the robot but it comes in in here out of here fine works perfectly so I think those dimensions they give you in instructions or suggestions I am on the first floor though and the Wi-Fi signal here is super strong so you know that's the other thing and remember if you put it someplace and you have a weak Wi-Fi signal then you could probably have problems but for now it's working good right where it is so it's in the closet here now of course I have to have to cause the door open for it to work so that's the only thing I have to remember but besides that it's nice because it's sort of out of the way here so we're gonna do a quick demo of this hallway which you can see is this a tiny little hallway to the front door goes off to the living room here so just right there and then over to here and this is actually a step down into a different room so it's not going to go any further than this this ledge here and we'll show you kind of how it cleans but what we're going to do is we're going to not use the app or the buttons on the robot we're going to use the echo system so we're just going to tell it to do the hallway so all you're going to do basically is on the echo system you can see now my key word is computer so computer tell Roomba to clean the hallway okay I will clean the hallway so it's said how will clean the hallway and you can see it's already come out of its charging base there and it's starting it's clean the little edge spinner just started up in the vacuum [Music] you can see it slowed down just before it came to the door so each time it cleans it remembers more and more about the room that it's in now what's interesting about it is when it starts cleaning you think it's gonna miss a lot of stuff because it goes basically sort of back and forth up and down but it's not close to the edges so you figure that it's not gonna clean the edges of a room in fact that this robot actually does clean the edges of the room and it's it's the last thing it actually does before the cycle ends and it actually doesn't it unbelievable job of picking up everything I this really surprised like how well these actually do clean like there's really no difference then if you get me using a regular vacuum because that little brush that sticks out the side actually does pull all the stuff in from the baseboards and the corners now you notice it's just going back and forth here and it's pretty much missing the baseboards and the images right now it's not really getting close to them yet [Music] and you'll know that says it like does the room a couple times it will start learning a pattern initially though you'll see it'll be kind of all over the place because it's just trying to learn where everything is the edges and now you can see I'm getting close to the edge here [Music] [Music] okay so now it's hitting this edge here and now look at it's going along the baseboard [Music] and those how it slows down Jeff before it comes to the baseboard so starts learning so it doesn't bang into it so hard but initially you'll notice when it's it's doing its thing it's still like sort of banging into things until it learns where things are so right now it's just cleaning the main floor area that's all it's doing right now [Music] [Music] and you notice how it's staying inside the room here because it's only doing the hallway so I have the line that's just it's sort of like just a little bit in living room okay so now it's really looking along the baseboards right here goats right along the baseboards right now and it gets to the corner it turns a little bit it's going to be right against the door so that little brush on the side is pulling all the dirt in and it's going all along the edge now and notice how it does not go over the edge of the step down here because it's got a clip Center on it [Music] so that's going on right along the baseboard and if you notice it's ring around the clean button is white right now it's just white [Music] okay and it goes into the kitchen a little because it needs to turn around so no power [Music] so if Christ get as close to the baseboard and you notice how when it does that it turns just a little bit of time until it goes right around the edge [Music] now you notice that the light is blue blue means it's going home so it's done its cleaning and it's going home now and it's this sort of this rocks very slightly back and forth align it stuff up perfectly but I want you to hear what happens once it actually gets on the base [Music] so it's on the base [Applause] okay so it's done it's cleaning job and basically that noise you just heard was a vacuum this this big base right here sucking up all the dirt out of the bin so if I actually opened up the bin here and pulled it out so I gotta pull the pin out here and you look inside here it's empty there's nothing in here okay so every time it comes back to its base it's gonna empty it automatically for you and then it goes into that bag and the top of the bin that you change out and supposedly the bag will hold 30 cleanings so that's pretty many so the bags are $15 for a set of three so if you go if you think you thirty cleanings let's say it ran let's say you ran the vacuum every day 30 days a month right so you need a new bag per month that'd be 12 bags so you know times that by $15 times 3 so you'd buy about $60 a year in bags so that's what it would cost all right now I've already run the vacuum in this hallway like I can't even tell you how many times as I'm doing all this testing and everything else so it there was it as it was going through its cleaning right it didn't really find any dirt so that's why I just sort of like you know went through its run and then it finished and you're you know back where you started but when you let it run through the living room and all the other places I think the first run took around 46 minutes for the whole floor or the kitchen dining room living room and the hallway to run through the whole thing so each time that it runs it'll be quicker and quicker as it learns the knows exactly where to go which is really nice but you saw like how well it worked and the floors are clean and there's no dust in the corners or anything like that it picks up pretty much everything so I have to say that it really does work and it works really really well the only place that you're gonna have a you know maybe a spot or two like you it's not gonna get - for instance if I look back here obviously it can't get behind this lamp here there's no space to do that right so that would be something I'd have to like you know get a hand vac or something if it got dusty but it'll get actually it runs right on the top of the base here and it does everything it needs to gets underneath the couch does everything like I ran through this whole living room and it picked up a whole bunch of stuff underneath all the furniture and I didn't have to worry about it so here is the one area that you might need to buy some more of these things which are the invisible barriers so all right so here's one of the accessories that you can buy for the irobot these are called Dhumal virtual wall barriers so basically what these little unit is do is they create an a barrier invisible barrier if you want to block the robot from going into a certain area or running into something so when it maps out the rooms obviously it's bouncing around and hitting everything and finding the room layout but there are certain things you may not want it to go near and so this little unit basically just has two double-a batteries that go in the bottom here they come with it comes in this box here and they should be a little picture of the the two ways you can use it you can have a straight barrier which is just a straight line if you want to block something off or you can do a barrier that's like a halo and wraps around something and gets like a four-foot half radius from the unit and so I'm gonna use these here in the dining room because I had these tables this dining-room table that has for these pedestal type of bases on it and they're white lacquered and the robot will run right you won't bounce off these because obviously they're very almost flush with the floor so the rubber up wants to run up and bang against the stem here and the problem with that is it's gonna Mar up these these white lacquered painted aluminum bases here so I don't want it to basically run into these this table or chair set here so what I can do is before I run it just plop these little virtual barriers down and I would put it in Halo mode and that would give me a halo right around the dining room set here now when you turn it on there just there's a switch here and just it's either up or down and so up is the straight down is the halo and when you do that it actually lights up a little bit so I'll turn it on you can see a little glowing bar there and you want this side here which will has a little hole in it facing outwards for the barrier so if I put this here it should give a barrier that goes sort of like you know an arc around here a 4-foot arc now I don't know how it's gonna act with this pedestal in the way so it's really meant to be you know if you look at the picture here you can see they have it sort of in the middle between two dog dishes but if spam is not interrupted there so I don't know how it's actually gonna work if I just put it there so I do have four of them and I'm you know just using four different places around the house but I think what I'll do first is just see if putting it one on each side will work or if I have to put you know four of them around which in this case I'd have to go like this around the base of the table and that should give me a 4-foot radius around which should be enough to cover all all this way out to here so but we'll have to test them and see you know how well they work as far as their where they have to be positioned but once you know that then you're all set so these are just optional things if you need them to not run into something maybe you have an entertainment center has a tons of chords behind it there's nothing you can do they're just going to be there and you don't want to get tangled up so you could put one of these with us and use the straight line and it wouldn't cross that line basically and that's what they're for so they're not the cheapest they're about forty six dollars a piece they do come with the batteries but again it's just an accessory you get one with the i7 kit and then you can buy extras if you need them so we're gonna try that today and see what happens so let me set these up and then we'll get the robot started all right so we've got our four little virtual barriers around the table we just spaced them basically you know like a square around the table so it should put a perimeter right around the table and chairs so we're gonna give it a test and see what happens so we're just gonna actually start the robot with our voice using the Amazon echo system so computer tell Roomba to clean the dining room okay how will clean the dining room so I can hear it starting coming out of the closet over here real quick you can see there it is get out of the closet for whatever reason it takes a long way around goes to the living room to go to the dining room but our main goal here is basically to make sure that it actually doesn't bump into any of the dining room furniture all right so here it comes and it stopped right before it hit the chair there [Music] so that worked so far [Applause] like it's trying to get to it but it won't so it's going pretty much right around the table which is exactly what we want to happen so this obviously basically cleans the perimeter gets all the wood floors and it doesn't bang into the actual table or chairs we're good and I notice when it's coming against that virtual barrier the light sort of blinks blue for a second on it [Music] [Applause] [Music] yep doesn't come up near the base of the chair so it's just going back and forth cleaning the floor itself now this is this tidy area right here so you have to keep throwing around back and forth but that's fine as long as it doesn't actually hit the table with chairs we're good now I did run on this the first time and I had those little sensors almost right against the base of the dining room table and the Roomba did actually tap just the edge of the chairs so I moved them out you can see just like an inch or so from the base and that seems to have done the job because now it doesn't actually run up on the base of the exo chairs so you can see it does work the virtual barriers you might have to buy a couple more of those things but you know at least you have an area that you don't want it to go to for whatever reason you can still control it with those virtual virus now what I really like to see though is in the app since this does have the smart imprint and maps all your rooms out it'd be really nice if in the app you could just draw some lines around different things like furniture or whatever and it would obey those lines so that's an improvement that I'd like to see iRobot do and then you wouldn't even need these virtual barriers although that would probably be a money loss for them because they wouldn't be selling the virtual barriers so that may be the reason I don't know but that would be so much easier if I could just put a square around the Dyne the dining room and then there were about when donated area so otherwise looks like it works fine so that's a little accessory that you can get to prevent the robot from running into something that you don't want it to run into including uh like if you were had like power ports underneath an entertainment center or something don't forget it has two modes you have the for the radius or the halo mode and you got the straight line mode so if you did a straight line then it wouldn't go past that line all right let's finish up our review with just a couple of final comments okay couple last comments first of all I don't remember but I wasn't sure if it was gonna work in this closet it actually works perfectly fine no issues and you can see I have very little room on each side I got more over here but I got the put the shoe racks back in the closet I cut them down and so they're very close to it but it comes in and out of the closet no problem so I think as long as you have a good Wi-Fi signal you'd be able to squeeze this pretty much anywhere you want to longevity our outlet to go with it so that's one good thing because otherwise this could be a big eyesore depending if you didn't have a good space for it so that's the first thing the second thing is in the app in the in the room mapping that it does after about 4 to 5 6 runs you'll notice that I have these green dividers between the rooms that I've said so that's how I can use my voice or the app to tell it to clean specific rooms whatever maybe I told you earlier I was trying to experiment to see if I could put like a little box like around the dining room table or something like that with these lines but you can't the second you try to do anything with these lines whether you're add a new one or whatever it's just a straight line that goes from side to side across the whole room so you can't actually go in and actually you know mark off things with lines to make it not go into those areas that would be a gigantic improvement if this was able to do that because then it would be almost perfect you wouldn't even need those virtual barriers so that would be something I'd really like to see improved but for right now you can only do two dividers between the rooms now you could possibly put a divider and split the room in half or something if you wanted to but besides that that's that's about it the other thing just make it clear on my videos the first time I ran this into the base it didn't auto empty I'm not I don't know why that it was just a one-time thing in the beginning when I was first setting it up so but just so you know every time he goes on to the base no matter what how much is in the bin it will empty itself so it's always basically fresh and empty when it starts it's next to run so you're good there well final verdict on the Rumba i7 plus system is a big thumbs up so the system works really well it cleans the forest just just does a great job picking up all the dust off the floors all those empties itself you can schedule it you can control it with your voice if you have either Google home or Amazon Alexa system and you can divide up the rooms to make it only clean certain rooms at certain times whatever you want to do so right now this robot is scheduled every Monday Wednesday and Friday to clean this hallway and the entry rug basically so it automatically at 8:00 a.m. just starts its job and cleans it and then it does the same thing on different days for the living room in the kitchen etc so most of the time I don't even have to tell it to clean I can just schedule it however if it's in the middle of the cleaning and you got somebody coming over or somebody stopping by you can just quickly cancel it by saying just telling it to go home it'll stop cleaning and go back to its base and empty itself so this again is the latest generation so I think at this point after all these generations the they really have perfected the automatic robot vacuum system so highly recommended I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you in a future video peace

Channel: Sean's Train Depot

Views: 959,463

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Id: 8Dm6HPYIJ-8

Length: 58min 34sec (3514 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2018