The Original Roomba (2002) vs Roomba S9+ (2019) - Wow!

in 2002 iRobot released their first robot vacuum which they called the Roomba intelligent floor vac you could purchase one at Brookstone the sharper image or on a robot's cutting-edge flash website if you had $199 which was the suggested retail price well as you may know iRobot has come a long way since then and this year in 2019 they've released what I think is their best robot vacuum yet so I thought it would test the original Roomba intelligent floor vac using the same criteria and tests that I use for modern robot vacuums to see how the original stands up I will also compare those results to the super popular Roomba 600 series as well as with the brand new Roomba s9 plus and I have to tell you there were some surprises so links in the description to all the Roombas i'll mention and let's get started so let's start out with the basic construction and cleaning performance one of the more interesting things I noticed was how similar the original Roomba was to the 600 series which is still being produced today I mean there are some small changes like the front wheels now swivel where they didn't before and there are slight changes to the spinning side brush which used to look like three spinning toothbrushes and the main drive wheels have different treads but the basic construction of the dual brush roll for example is very similar to the 600 series the dust ban on the other hand was still a work in progress it has basically two chambers you have to empty but even if you combine their capacities it could still only hold about 250 milliliters of debris which is incredibly small so I started out with some simple pick up tests and I was really impressed the original Roomba had incredible mechanics picking up the debris from hard floors really well in fact I would say it was at least as good as the 600 series and much better than some of the cheap fly-by-night robot vacuums being produced today it may have scattered some debris a little more than I would like but in general it was better than the average modern robot vacuum at pure debris pickup mechanics despite the originals great showing on the pickup tests the Roomba s 9 plus was better and more efficient with pickup I mean it does have 17 years more experience so let's not get carried away one of the really surprising results was with the originals carpet deep cleaning ability and I guess I need to back up a little and explain why I think it was so amazing so we test carpet deep cleaning ability by taking exactly 100 grams of sand and imbed into medium pile carpet running the robots for five minutes then weighing the dust bends to see how much they picked up i wasn't expecting much from the original Roomba because I didn't measure very much airflow in our tests in fact it was so low it didn't even register on my anemometer for comparison I measured seven CFM on the Roomba 690 and the new Roomba s9 got 22 CFM of airflow the highest I've measured so far despite this tiny motor the original Roomba uses it in conjunction with a dual brush system very effectively and it scored a 79% on our deep clean tests that would be tied for a vacuum wars record if it had not been for the recent Roomba s9 plus which destroyed the previous record with an unprecedented 95 percent in other words the original Roomba was as good or better at deep cleaning carpets than almost every robot vacuum on the market 17 years later ok so let's talk about navigation the original room of floor vac was a random navigation robot vacuum which means that other than a few programmed actions it bounced around more or less randomly to clean rooms this is compared to the modern smart robot vacuums which use cameras or lasers to map out your house and clean and straight ish lines the only choice you had back then was to choose whether you were vacuuming a small medium or large room and I'm glad we moved on from that system so the first interesting thing is that in our navigation test when compared to the modern Roomba 690 which is also a random navigation robot there was almost no difference after 10 20 and 25 minutes the original Roomba was at least as good as the Roomba 690 but the really interesting thing was when I added two of the smart navigation rumbas the i7 plus and the s9 plus to the mix I think anyone would be hard-pressed to see much of a difference between these four robot vacuums in terms of coverage after 1020 and finally 25 minutes now don't get me wrong I much prefer smart navigation robot vacuums for whole house navigation and cleaning and for making sure it gets every area but you have to admit the original Roomba can hold its own with the big boys in terms of single room coverage which is a testament to the original algorithm it wasn't all rainbows and unicorns though for example it still got pretty tangled up in our hair tests with one gram of seven inch hair which to be fair is a problem that has recently been solved with premium robots like the s9 plus its crevice pickup was also pretty dismal probably the worst score I've seen which is mostly due to its lack of air flow the lack of air flow did come in handy with the battery life results now I had a brand new battery that I bought but I couldn't be sure how close it was to the original so I just took the original specifications from Roomba which stated that it could get between an hour and an hour and a half depending on the floor type which is pretty amazing considering how far battery technology has come in the last 17 years but again I think that great battery life is mostly due to it not having to power a large suction motor so at the end of this experiment the new S 9 plus is the clear winner with its updated specs and futuristic features like the self-emptying clean base and all the app features but I think this shows that the original Roomba was an exceptional piece of engineering that was so well conceived that it not only launched a billion-dollar industry its design has remained largely unchanged and frequently copied as the default design of robot vacuums by upstart robotics companies so cheers to iRobot for all their hard work and links in the description be sure to subscribe to vacuum Wars to keep up with all the latest robot vacuums regular vacuums and carpet cleaners and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Vacuum Wars

Views: 816,727

Keywords: 2002 Roomba, 2002 Roomba vs 2019 Roomba, ASIN: B06XRT2B3P, ASIN: B07GNPDMRP, ASIN: B07QXM2V6X, Brand:, Brand: iRobot, EAN: 0885155000286, EAN: 0885155015709, EAN: 0885155017925, MPN: R690020, MPN: i755020, MPN: s955020, Original ROomba, Roomba Floorvac, Roomba intelligent floorvac, Roomba s9+, Roomba s9+ vs Roomba, UPC: 885155000286, UPC: 885155015709, UPC: 885155017925, iRobot

Id: YLWSXVS71Js

Length: 5min 42sec (342 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019