Roomba® i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum Review. We were recently sent a Roomba i5+ for review and I can’t tell you how pleased I am with it. We are currently renovating our kitchen (Mr W is doing it all himself!) and will have a huge tiled floor area that will be perfect for a Roomba. Mind, the Roomba will also move from tiles to carpet, so it’s ideal for both!
The Roomba i5+ is terribly clever and can connect to your smart speaker of choice (we have an Alexa in most rooms now as we love smart gadgets!). Mr W set the Roomba up so I have made him write the next (more techy) part of the review (in his own inimitable style!):
Roomba® i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum Review by Mr Wonders
“So then, Gerald, yes, that’s right, we had an opportunity to review a state of the art Roomba I5+ and we named him Gerald! We love our tech in this house, but we don’t love spending ages doing cleaning, so anything which makes this rather tedious task easier and/or quicker sounds fabulous to us.
What is a Roomba I5+ I hear you ask? Well, you probably know the answer already if you’re still reading. It is a robot vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that it is a very smart and clever robot vacuum cleaner! Now, we have past experiences of these types of vacuum and they were ok, but they were more of a ‘Roomba style’ item and were a number of years ago now.
What else does it offer that our previous one doesn’t is……well, it’s a lot, a little bullet point list if I may:
- The app and the I5+ together are able to map your house and rooms. You can send him off on a “mapping run” and he will zoom around bumping into things in search of where he can go. When I say bumping, he is fairly gentle, it’s not full steam ahead scratch your skirting boards style. He carefully works his way round the room, learning of any obstructions. You can then name the map and the rooms. So you can send him off cleaning just one room or all the rooms that he knows about. It’s also possible to schedule when and where he gets to work, which might be when you’re out, or when the cats are!
- Self emptying, yes that’s right, you don’t have to kneel down and pull out a tiny rubbish bin after every room and tap it into the bin. After each cleaning run, or indeed – if your floor is filthy – just when it’s full, Gerald will navigate his way back to his little home and have his waste extracted into an easy to change waste bag! It’s a decent size so shouldn’t need doing too often.
- Gerald will also return to his base when he needs charging so you don’t have to remember to charge him in between cleans.
- Very very fast, especially when your room has been learnt.
- Very quiet when hoovering, the cats just watch distrustfully from the sofa, they aren’t terrorised.
- Integrates with Alexa, so you can just request that Gerald gets to work.
- I simply must mention the handling of thresholds between rooms. For various reasons our house has a 1” (25mm) step up from our lounge to the rest of the house. I fully expected Gerald to just bump into this and assume our house only had one room. How wrong I was, he just bumped his way up it and carried on his mission. He has chunky. sturdy wheels and great suspension!
- Bonus for us, he fits under the sofas so can clean here too.
- Once the room shapes are learnt, subsequent cleaning is much quicker and less bumpy. Indeed he cleans in surprising neat straight lines back and forth for the majority of the rooms. We have a robot lawnmower and this just goes back and forth randomly for hours until everything is done. Our old robot vacuum was very similar and took much much longer
- The above takes me back to the app, you can look at the history for completed jobs. A small non complicated utility room was completed in 2 minutes. A lounge with two sofas to get in the way took 6 minutes,
- Spare large dust bag for the base and filter for the robot itself are both included
- Decent Wifi range without needing a repeater/range extender
- The waste box on the robot part of the Roomba is a good size – but really it is irrelevant as he empties in between each vacuum anyway.
- The rollers underneath the Roomba i5+ are also very sturdy and have mouldings for anti-wrap (so you don’t get hair wrapped around them).
- I am not sure what the official name of this brush is but I like to think of it as the corner brush. They stick out at the side of the Roomba and sweeps anything under it’s path. Great for difficult to reach corners (difficult to reach when you are circular!).
There was a couple of slight hiccups along the way
- It was a bit of an effort getting onto the Wifi to start with. There’s the frequent problem with connected devices of not working with 5GHz, only 2.4GHz. So if your router doesn’t separate the frequencies, you need to logon to your router, disable 5GHz, connect, then re-enable. It’s a small faff, but the first thing you may need to try with any new ‘Smart’ device that’s not talking.
- Despite sorting the above, there was just no getting past the “connecting to Wifi” stage. All the above was from a Google Pixel 6. In the end, I used an old Android tablet to complete this part of setup. Once setup with this, the I5+ showed up in the app as it should and I’ve been fine with my Pixel 6 ever since.
- Sounds like a plane taking off when having the waste extracted back at the base. It’s only for about 5 seconds but the cats hate this bit and me for doing it!
It’s a brilliant bit of kit and will make our lives so much easier (and will really help keep on top of things).”
Since writing this review, we have also reviewed the Braava jet M6 which pairs perfectly with the Roomba.
We were sent the Roomba i5+ to review. As always all our opinions are our own.