Roomba i5+ review: this robot vacuum is certainly more useful than most pets

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

MARKETING-WISE, there are few things companies dream of more than their names becoming a shorthand for their products.

In the UK, we don’t say “ballpoint pen”, we say “Biro”. We occasionally say “hot tub”, but we’re as likely to say “Jacuzzi”. At a restaurant, you don’t ask for a “cola”, you ask for a “Coke”.

Perhaps the most famous of these examples is in floorcare — we seldom go to the effort of saying “vacuum cleaner” in the UK, instead we say “Hoovers”.

However, for robot vacuum cleaners, that’s not so true; instead, they’re commonly known as Roombas, after a line of robot vacuums designed by iRobot.

To find out whether the sub-brand deserves such hallowed status, I put it to the test for my in-depth Roomba i5+ review.

Rating: 4/5

Pros:

• Great as an everyday cleaning option
• Incredibly easy setup
• Can be controlled easily from the useful iRobot app
• Maps your house automatically
• Optional mop combo model

Cons:

• You will still need to vacuum now and again
• Initially seems to focus more on nooks and crannies, often missing dirt in wide open spaces
• Expensive

Roomba i5+ review: How we tested

I’ve had the Roomba i5+ for a few weeks now, and as I live in a house of four 26 to 28-year-olds, it’s safe to say it’s been put through its paces.

All four of us tend to cook separately, meaning that there are up to four dinners being cooked in the kitchen every night, and four dinners’ worth of debris on the floor, providing the perfect environment to test out the Roomba.

So yes, we’re in need of some cleaning hacks.

It’s cleaned the kitchen every day and the rest of the house a few times per week, and I’ve also swapped in the mop attachment a few times and had it give the floors a deep clean.

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

Roomba i5+ review: First impressions

Unboxing

The Roomba was delivered swiftly and efficiently, in a surprisingly small box that belies how big the unit is.

Inside the box were all of the bits required to get started: the robot vacuum itself (obviously) — which was already fully put together and needed no assembly — the mop attachment, a couple of instruction cards, a spare filter, and an American charging cable.

Oddly, the British cable came in a separate package, which is probably something to do with iRobot being an American company. It was delivered alongside the box containing everything else, though, so I’ve got no issue with that.

Because I tested out the i5+, rather than the “standard” i5, I was sent the brand’s Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal dock, which allows the Roomba to empty itself for up to 60 days, saving you even more work.

If you opt for the more affordable model, then you’ll be sent a standard charging dock, which doesn’t have the self-emptying properties of the upgraded base but is pleasingly compact.

Set-up

Being honest, I was anticipating that setting up the Roomba would be a massive pain in the neck.

My previous experience with connecting purportedly “smart” appliances to my wifi network has been nothing short of agonising.

However, I’m pleased to report that within half an hour of opening the box, my Roomba was exploring its new surroundings.

Inside the delivery box was a simple, colourful instruction card that talked me through the initial setup steps. The final stages of setup, meanwhile, are explained to you via the iRobot app.

One of the final things you’ll be asked to do during setup is name your Roomba, a step that helps with a phenomenon I’m sure Roomba encourages, which is making your robot vacuum into sort of a pet, and encouraging you to form an emotional attachment to it. (It’s not working on me, I swear).

Once my housemates and I had pointedly named ours after our less-than-tidy housemate, setup was pretty much complete.

One of the things that separates the Roomba from some of its more budget compatriots is its ability to “map” your floorplan, allowing it to work according to a blueprint, rather than just roaming the house randomly bumping into things.

(It does rather a lot of that anyway, but we’ll get into that later).

To get this blueprint integrated, your Roomba needs to explore your house, meaning that you need to move anything that’s not a permanent fixture in your house. While this is a bit of a pain, it’s a good excuse to tidy the place up.

Once you’ve given the house a once over, the Roomba will take to pottering around and figuring out a floorplan for your house, a process that took around an hour for a house of my size.

It does this with remarkable accuracy, even figuring out where the boundaries of each room are. Once these boundaries are set, you can label each room, enabling you to tell the Roomba to clean the kitchen, lounge, hallway, or wherever else.

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

Roomba i5+ review: Price and availability

The Roomba i5 comes in two guises, with a gulf in price between them.

The “standard” i5 is £399 on iRobot’s website, making it the cheapest vacuum/mop combo that the brand offers, and only £20 more expensive than the entry-level i1, which comes with no mopping capabilities.

The i5+ is a rather more hefty £649. While that makes it the most affordable self-emptying combo model that iRobot sells, it’s certainly more of an investment, and people will be split on whether having the extra features justifies an extra £250.

For comparison, though, the i8+ — the next model up — usually retails for £799.99, and all you really get for that extra £150 is the ability to clean specific zones of rooms (e.g. under the kitchen table), and to specify “no-mop zones”.

Eufy, one of iRobot’s main competitors, sells its most comparable model, the X8 Pro, for £599, £50 cheaper than iRobot’s model. However, the i5 comes out just on top when you get into the nitty-gritty of the stats (it has a bigger capacity, is lighter, etc), and when you compare the brands side-by-side, people tend to rate the cleaning performance of Roombas more than that of Eufys.

And at the time of writing the Roomba i5+ is actually cheaper than the Eufy X8, thanks to a very generous deal on Amazon that takes its price down to just £449 (a 36% discount).

Roomba i5+ review: Design and build

Although they come with varying levels of expertise, Roombas all look vaguely the same — like a hockey puck for giants.

That isn’t to say they look bad. As far as robot vacuum cleaners go, they’re quite stylish, with a sleek black design that will fit neatly into any interior design scheme, and a texturally satisfying grey fabric upper that prevents it from looking too sinister.

At 3.18kg, it’s pretty lean for a robot vacuum cleaner (the competing Eufy X8 is over 4kg), but that’ll only really matter if you’re planning on carrying it up and down stairs fairly regularly.

I quickly realised that its design is more important than I’d first thought, as it has to live in a part of your house that allows it to reach all of the high-traffic areas easily.

It also can’t be blocked in by anything, meaning there’s no way of covering it up like you could a regular cordless vacuum cleaner.

The trade-off you make if you opt for the convenience of the self-emptying model is that you’ll have to also have the Clean Base on display.

While bulky, it’s still sleek enough, with a ridged design that makes it look as much like a speaker as anything else; if you saw it, your first assumption wouldn’t be that it’s home to up to two months’ worth of detritus.

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

Roomba i5+ review: Features and performance

Vacuum function

There are two ways to use the Roomba as a vacuum cleaner. The first is by getting it to “clean everywhere”, which you can ask it to do pretty much straight out of the box.

If you select this function, the Roomba will behave very much like any other budget robot vacuum, moving randomly, bumping into things and getting the job done in a rather chaotic way.

The better way of proceeding is to first get your Roomba to map your house, as I explained earlier in this review.

This will allow you to tell it to clean certain rooms, enabling you to create a cleaning schedule that works for you. I get mine to vacuum the kitchen every day, and clean the kitchen and hallway, which don’t get anywhere near as dirty, once every two days.

Unfortunately, the i5 doesn’t have the technology required to specify specific “zones” in each room, meaning I can’t tell mine to, say, clean beneath the kitchen table, or next to the front door. If you want this technology, you’ll have to splurge on the i8 (or any model more expensive than that).

The other key piece of technology the i5 doesn’t have is the ability to recognise and avoid obstacles, meaning it does still tend to bump into things, albeit nowhere near as much as it does without mapping. To be honest, I didn’t mind this at all; the Roomba’s clumsiness is oddly endearing, like when you see a dog trying and failing to jump onto a sofa.

I was incredibly impressed by how thoroughly the Roomba vacuumed hard-to-reach areas; it cleaned thoroughly underneath my kitchen table, around plant pots and the far corners of every room, and the wasteland beneath my sofa is clean for the first time since I moved in.

It’s also important to remember that the Roomba learns as it goes, improving its knowledge of each area of the house each time it cleans it. After vacuuming it at least once per day for a couple of weeks, it knows the kitchen like the back of its proverbial hand.

However, with more unfamiliar areas, it does tend to miss spots; the first couple of times it cleaned my living room, it became obsessed with cleaning beneath my TV console and sofa (where it was in danger of becoming entangled in wires) to the detriment of the wide open areas of the living room, which remained comparably unclean.

Having said that, I have been incredibly impressed by its ability to negotiate uneven terrain; it can climb onto doormats and carpets without breaking a sweat, and has no issue with the small ledge between my kitchen and living room.

And in case you weren’t already aware, it’s worth saying that you will not be able to throw out your incumbent vacuum cleaner when your Roomba comes along; you will still need to get stuck in now and again to give things a deep clean.

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

Mop function

Installing the mop attachment is incredibly easy; there is a removable mop cloth that slots into the mop attachment, which replaces the front vacuuming element of your Roomba. Swapping the two elements is easy; one unclicks, and the other clicks in.

Before you slot in the mop attachment, you’ll also have to fill it with water in the same way as you would an iron or steamer; you can also optionally add a few drops of floor cleaner.

When the Roomba mops, it will also do a once-over with its vacuum beforehand, to make sure that the surface it’s mopping is free of debris. However, the i5’s self-emptying features don’t work when the combo attachment is affixed, meaning you’ll have to empty it yourself.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Roomba’s mopping performance; it gave the floor a good superficial clean, getting rid of any spills and leaving my white tiles noticeably shinier than they were before.

However, as with the vacuum, you will need to occasionally get the mop and bucket out, as the service the Roomba offers is nowhere near as thorough as a proper wet mop; it’s more akin to cleaning the floor with a wet wipe.

Roomba i5+ review: App

Traditionally, I’ve not been a fan of the apps that come with smart tech: they’re usually an afterthought and hamper rather than enhance usability.

However, I’ve got no such qualms with the iRobot app, which is sleek, well-designed and easy to use (from my iPhone, at least — I can’t speak to the Android experience).

From the central home screen, you can see what your Roomba is doing, select from a list of favourite tasks and schedule jobs; pretty much everything you’ll ever need it to do.

I also appreciated how easy and quick the app makes it to “send home” your Roomba when it starts a job. Say, for example, you’re at the crescendo of a dramatic film or hopping onto a work meeting and your Roomba starts vacuuming, you can cancel the job immediately with two taps of the app.

Roomba i5+ review: Verdict

I touched on this briefly earlier in this review, but it’s my firm belief that the success of the Roomba is down to iRobot’s realisation that people treat them as much as pets as they do as appliances.

That’s why the app says “welcome to the world” when you first name your Roomba and why it “returns home” rather than “returns to charging base”. It also helps that more affordable Roomba models have a penchant for bumping into things, like a dumb dog.

However, beneath all that, this is a great option for people such as myself who probably should vacuum every day, but are too lazy or busy to do so. (I claim I’m the latter, but I’m 100% the former).

It’s extremely well-placed on the spectrum of robot vacuums, I’d say; sophisticated enough to do what you need it to do to a high standard, without the bells and whistles that would add hundreds more pounds to its RRP.

• iRobot Roomba Combo i5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum and Mop, £699 £449 from Amazon – buy here

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