Review: iRobot Roomba 980

The most annoying part of vacuuming is the prep work. If you want to avoid making thousands of little tiny passes with an awkward push vacuum, you have to invest a significant amount of time picking up and putting away toys, cleaning up clothes, and moving furniture.

Unfortunately, many robot vacuums do not offer significant improvements in this regard. Their instruction manuals warn you to tidy up beforehand if you don’t want the botvac to get stuck. They often come with additional gizmos (infrared beacons or other navigational aides) to cordon off terminally cluttered areas.

But iRobot and the Roomba have been around long enough to know that this is not necessarily a time- or energy-saver. I’ve been running the iRobot Roomba 980 for almost two weeks now and it has kept my house clean with minimal effort on my part. If you’re willing to lay out the cash, this is the best robot vacuum you can get.

The word “Roomba” is synonymous with “robot vacuum.” “It’s almost a verb,” said iRobot product director Ken Bazydola. The Roomba has been in existence since 2002, making it one of the oldest botvac systems, and iRobot has only improved on it since then. The Roomba’s patterning algorithms are derived from iRobot’s defense-related research on robots that search for mines on beaches, so the robot is thorough, sensible, and reliable.

First, plug in the botvac’s charging station and align the botvac with its charging ports. iRobot says that the vacuum will take up to three hours to charge fully; I found that mine was ready in 2.5 hours. Each charge lasted about an hour and a half, but the botvac uses up more energy depending on how cluttered or how dirty your house is.

Download the easy-to-use app and register your botvac, and then push the enormous “Clean” button and you're off to the races! The Roomba 980 starts out from the station in a straight line, adroitly and intelligently navigating its way around obstacles. The promotional literature states that the botvac makes more than 60 navigational decisions a second, and I believe it. I watched it get stuck under the kitchen table in a forest of table legs, slowly and patiently testing different escape routes until it finally broke free, without damaging itself or the table.

I found that the Roomba 980 minimized the need to clean up clutter beforehand; it avoided cords and toys on the floor pretty well. But if there are areas that you would prefer to be undisturbed, iRobot’s virtual wall barriers are the best ones that I’ve tested so far. They are unobtrusive, little black beacons that have two separate modes, lines or circles.

They aren’t as unwieldy as magnetic strips, like I recently used with the Neato Botvac D5 Connected. Simply select the mode you want and place it near your clutter. I put one in circle mode under our Christmas tree and the Roomba left the presents undisturbed.

Many vacuum companies tout their mapping capabilities, but the Roomba 980 actually has a map that you can see. When you open the app to determine how much the botvac cleaned and how long it took, you can pull up a map of your home in virtual bas-relief.

There are your chairs and shelves. There’s the bed. There’s a few crosses where the Roomba’s Dirt Detect system determined that you were particularly filthy, and there’s the charging station. Theoretically, it marks any places where the botvac got stuck but this never happened in my home.

The botvac took anywhere between 45 minutes to 1.25 hours to clean between 250 and 400 square feet. You can also select different cleaning preferences, like whether to boost up the suction when the botvac detects more dirt; if you’d like one or two cleaning passes to get a less or more thorough clean, and whether you’d like the botvac to edge clean once it’s finished.

Through the app, you can also schedule cleaning sessions and get push notifications when your botvac needs attention—are the debris extractors cleared? Is the bin full? All of the notifications link to clear, step-by-step guides in-app on how to perform these basic maintenance tasks.

iRobot has had about fifteen years to perfect its botvac design, which, means the 980 is the product of years of research and insights. One of those insights is the unique rubber carpet agitator. “What is that?” my spouse asked, the first time we ran the Roomba 980. “No vacuum makes patterns like that,” he said, as we stared at our carpet as if discovering dinosaur tracks across our living room floor.

The agitator is designed to make tangled carpet brushes a thing of the past. There are no bristles. Both my daughter and I have long hair that has snarled many a vacuum in the past. With the Roomba 980, it was a non-issue.

The Dirt Detect system was also almost miraculous in its operation. The Roomba 980 made a first pass under my daughter’s kitchen chair, scattered with various toddler crumbs and debris, then thought for a minute and made a second pass. When I checked on the map, it had marked that spot with the dreaded X of filth.

However, this Roomba is ear drum-bustingly loud. When the carpet boost is bumped up to max, it made a whopping 80 dB of noise. That’s almost as loud as a prop plane flying overhead. Even Eco Mode, a lower power mode, measured at 70 dB. There’s also no remote with manual directional control. It is annoying to see a mess on the floor, push “Clean” and have to wait twenty minutes for the botvac to make its way over. If you want a spot cleaned, you'll have to tote the vacuum over and hit a button.

And finally, it’s very expensive. No matter how much money you have lying around, $900 is a large sum when you can get a decent robot vacuum (some even from iRobot's own Roomba line) for less than half that much.

I asked Bazydola if he found that customers really were willing to spend the extra $500 for features like the 980’s mapping technology, which is not available in the lower-priced Roomba models, or the Aeroforce cleaning technology (the more affordable models use an earlier tech, called Aerovac).

“I find that customers appreciate the value at any point in the line,” Bazydola said. “What we find is that people are saying, ‘my house is cleaner and I’m free to do other things.’ That doesn’t mean they’re sitting on the couch. They’re taking care of their kids. That’s a big part of why people are willing to make that investment.”

Robot vacuums, especially pricey models like this, aren’t for everyone. If you have the time and energy to vacuum your own home regularly, you definitely don’t need one. You will still need do a deep clean every now and again, to unearth all the little crumb shadows under the junk that you refused to pick up during the week.

But if you, like a lot of other people, can barely make it through the most basic tasks necessary to prevent Child Protective Services from snatching away your offspring, then the Roomba 980 is a very attractive alternative to hiring human help to clean your messes. Seen from that perspective, it’s almost a bargain. If you’re going to shell out the cash, this is the robot vacuum to buy.