Review: iRobot Combo Roomba j7+

Last summer, iRobot—Roomba’s parent company—announced that they had finally agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion. That news spawned a flurry of alarmed articles (including our own) that the megacorp now had access to data on the layout and possessions inside millions of peoples’ homes. Last December, iRobot reported to investors that it had 75 percent of the United States market in robot vacuums.

The main draw of iRobot's vacuums is its technology. While other robot vacuums use navigational systems that employ lasers or sensors, iRobot uses a camera to power iRobot OS and Imprint Smart Mapping. Theoretically, a camera makes iRobot vacuums more powerful, as they can learn to identify rooms and objects faster. It also means that pictures of you using the bathroom might get accidentally released. 

Stories like this may have contributed to iRobot’s stock price slip since last fall. But more importantly, I have not found iRobot OS to be significantly faster or more reliable than cameraless navigation systems like that on the Roborock. I love the Combo j7+’s design, but that might not be enough to compensate for both the principle and the price.

Photograph: iRobot

Like all of their vacuums, the Combo j7+ is insanely compact and beautiful (for a robot vacuum). The self-empty stand is 13 inches tall, shorter than most self-empty stations, and it has a leather tab to open the top easily and a shelf inside to store the included extra vacuum bag. Both the self-empty station and the vacuum itself are sheathed in a classy matte-black plastic.

The standout feature on the Combo j7+ is the robot arm. Most robot vacuum-mops still have one big hurdle, as I said when I reviewed the Shark AI Ultra: With most 2-in-1 mopping vacuums, you have to switch out the bin when you want to mop so that the cleaning surface is against the floor. You also have to place the vacuum in the area where you want to mop so you don’t have sopping wet mops traveling across any carpeted surfaces.

iRobot handily solves that problem with a nifty robot arm. When the Combo j7+ realizes it’s on a surface that needs to be mopped, a little robot arm with a mopping pad on top of the vacuum lifts and swings underneath the entire vacuum itself. To add cleaning fluid, hit a button on the side of the vacuum, and a tiny combo water tank/dustbin clips out. It’s all very easy to open and use, even if both the dustbin and water tank are pretty small. 

Frankly, watching that arm maneuver itself up and over is pretty amazing, and it solves one of the major pain points with a combo 2-in-1 vacuum: Now I can just start a vacuuming and mopping run with one single button in the iRobot Home app. You also don't have to place it strategically in the kitchen—you can hide it away, although it's beautiful enough that maybe you wouldn't want to. 

You can opt to start a mapping run in the iRobot app, just as with the Shark. But while the Shark AI Ultra finished its mapping run in 20 minutes with no problems, the Combo j7+ timed out after 56 minutes with an unspecified navigation error. It took several tries to complete a mapping run, ultimately taking an hour and eight minutes to map a total of 762 square feet.

Photograph: iRobot

That wasn’t great, but at least it developed a reasonably accurate map of my house. It automatically designated which surfaces were carpeted and which were hardwood, and I was able to designate no-go zones and clean zones—especially dirty or high-traffic areas—in the app. The mopping arm reliably came down in the kitchen, even if the first few passes were always dry, and the arm doesn’t scrub as reliably as the Shark or the Ecovacs versions. I checked after every cleaning run and never found a wet carpet.

On the whole, as you may have been able to guess with my mapping session, its navigational capabilities were disappointing. This came as a shock, as iRobot honed its abilities by developing robots for the military. For as long as I’ve been testing robot vacuums, iRobot vacuums have consistently come out on top—but unfortunately, companies like Roborock and Shark have quickly caught up.

When I check the Combo j7+’s history in the iRobot Home app, it’s dismal. Four out of seven of the past daily runs have had errors or stoppages of various kinds. In previous years, I may have excused this—after all, my house is large, has different surfaces, and is filled with messy children and multiple animals. Robot vacuums occasionally closing the doors on themselves and trapping themselves in the bathroom is just part of the game.

However, I took to running the Combo 7+ at the same time as the Roborock Q5+, and the Roborock effortlessly completed cleaning runs that the Combo j7+ repeatedly struggled with. When I tried to see what the problems were, sometimes the app simply crashed on me.

Photograph: iRobot

The increased functionality also meant that battery life suffered. The water tank is so small (a mere 212 milliliters!) that it needed refilling to clean my moderate-size kitchen—about 20 feet by 12 feet. I also appreciate iRobot’s auto-empty bin feature, which means that the vacuum journeys back to the dock to empty itself, rather than drag dog hair all over the floor. However, with a dustbin that has a capacity of only 0.3 liters (most bins have a capacity of at least twice that), it means that the battery often ran out before completing any one cleaning run.

Most of the cleaning runs take about four or five hours to complete, which means I forget when a run hasn’t been completed. Occasionally we all get the living bejesus scared out of us when we sit down to dinner and a vacuum that I’d assumed was dormant suddenly awakes and trundles off to complete a cleaning run that I started at noon.

It doesn’t help that iRobot’s auto-empty function is loud. I measured the auto-empty volume at about 95 decibels—15 to 20 decibels louder than other robot vacuums when they auto-empty.

Ultimately, I found the experience of using the iRobot app to be annoying enough to recommend the Shark instead. That's not to say the Shark is perfect—$600 is still a lot to pay for a vacuum-mop where you still have to switch out the bin, can’t mop and vacuum at the same time, and often find yourself hand-washing cloths. However, the $1,100 iRobot isn't double the vacuum by any means. I still recommend iRobot's cheaper (and cameraless) 600, 900, or i3 and i5 series, but this one is just too pricey to be this unreliable.