iRobot Roomba Combo j5+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum & Mop – Identifies and Avoids Obstacles Like Pet Waste & Cords, Empties Itself for 60 Days, Clean by Room with Smart Mapping, Works with Alexa​

Vacuum worth the money, maybe not the mop
Vaccum: Mapped entire first floor after two runs, map surprisingly accurate. Having the map means you can designate rooms or areas to clean. I divided my large living room into three “rooms” so I can clean specific sections more often than others. Zones work great (i.e., an “avoid” zone around wires). I brought the vac to a different floor and it recognized that, and made a second map for the floor on its own.I have a large dog that sheds a LOT and I run this every morning in the room where he spends the most time, and most other rooms several times a week. Unlike my previous dumb robovac, which pingponged around the house aimlessly, cleaning the same areas over and over until it ran out of battery, and getting stuck in my barstools every time, this robovac goes straight to the area you select, cleans in straight lines, works the perimeter, then returns to base. Never gets stuck. You can tell it to clean several rooms in any order you want, or clean “all.” I didn’t get the smart base because I read that it got clogged with pet hair, the bags seemed expensive, and I figure I’d be emptying it almost as often, anyway, with all the hair. My pet hair load means I have to empty the dust bin after every room or two, but that’s not exactly onerous. TBH, it’s kind of satisfying to empty out the bin and see how much hair it picked up. If we didn’t have pet hair, the dust bin would probably suffice for the whole house (2000 sf) or more.I have wood floors with a few short-pile rugs. Cleans the wood floors great and the carpets ok. Only complaint is that it’s too tall to get under my particular kitchen cabinets so I don’t use it in kitchen. The app is great. Alexa commands are inconvenient because it’s a whole conversation (“Do you want to start the mop afterward?”) and then it usually has some kind of communication issue and I end up grabbing the phone anyway. But the app is easy and you can make favorites so it’s just a tap or two to get regular jobs going. This is a sanity saver for me because pet hair drives me mad. In some ways, it vacuums better than a big vac because it really gets under the furniture. However, if the mom-in-law is coming over, might want to pull out the big vac and get in the crevices that this can’t get to.The battery life is good and it will vacuum most of the main floor (about 1400 sf) before giving out. Unfortunately, doesn’t save enough juice to get back to base (poops out about 15 feet from base) so it doesn’t re-charge and resume vacuuming as advertised. Not a problem for me since I tend to vacuum the house piecemeal anyway. I bought it on sale (altho not as cheap as it got before Christmas) and it’s worth it.The robomop is a different story. I bought the two bundled. It’s true that you can set the mop to start when the vac finishes. HOWEVER, the vac & mop do not share mapping. The mop has to do several runs of its own to make its own map. It will have different “rooms” unless you take a lot of care to ensure everything is exactly the same as the vaccum. And if you create a zone on one ((say, for a Christmas tree) you have to go to the other one and put it on there in exactly the same way. And here’s the big problem: if you tell the vac to do Room 1 and the mop to start afterward, the mop doesn’t recognize that the vac only did Room 1, and the mop cleans the entire house, not just Room 1. So the “mop after” feature is useless unless you vacuum the whole house first and you want the whole house mopped. Maybe there’s a way to do this but I couldn’t figure it out. Also, the iRobot floor cleaner, which they say is the only cleaner you can use, leaves streaks on hardwood floors. As other reviewers noted, water does better. So you are limited to water and like to use products that make my wood floors glow. Plus, this mop takes forever and doesn’t get up dried on food or other hard stains. And for some reason, my mop doesn’t recognize that I put the “wet mop pad” on it, and will only offer to “dry mop” , which is what, exactly? I haven’t bothered to try to fix it. Plus, you have to put on the mopping pad and fill the reservoir with water every time. Easier, faster and better to just grab my Bona mop with its great hardwood floor cleaner and make a pass over my floors from time to time. To be fair, the robomop might work better for someone who works away from home and can schedule the vacuum and mop to run while they’re gone, and then come home to clean floors. And when I have used it, it does make the floors appreciably cleaner than just vacuuming.

Had two everywhere clean for my house. No major issue, house is clean. Just complaining about trouble automatically empty the bin – something bigger was stuck the entrance

What a complete waste of money!This vacuum has never been able to complete a single cleaning accurately, even though it seems to think it has. Large areas are completely ignored, even though it’s a fairly small 2-bedroom apartment. Purchased the iRobot in November/23 but didn’t set up and use until May/24. I previously had a $299 Ninja Shark that cleaned 100 times better than this useless piece of junk, even though it had no mapping capabilities. The main reason I made a change was that I awoke in the middle of the night a number of times to the sounds of something, or someone, bumbling around in the living room. It turned out that the Shark had embarked on unscheduled vacuuming forays between 2:30 and 4:00 am, scaring me half to death. As I live alone, this was quite startling, so I decided to spring for a new robot vacuum with mapping capabilities.The iRobot is now giving out signals that the battery doesn’t work (button lights up in red) when it’s only been used for two months and is not used daily. Mostly once or twice weekly, some weeks not at all.I purchased all the mopping supplies as well, more $ wasted as I am afriaid to even try the mopping feature.I’m sorry that I didn’t just choose a new Shark with mapping ability.Tried to get to the support web site, only to find that “the server can’t be found”. Excuse me???I utterly regret this purchase, as it was fairly expensive and the vacuum is quite useless.The app is not at all intuitiveAmazon has had a LOT of my money over the years!NO, I absolutely DO NOT recommend this product.Update: now going backwards and in circles. Can’t even get itself out of the room where it docks.WORST PURCHASE I HAVE EVER MADE!!!

I cheaped out on my first robot vacuum and bought one without smart mapping. I had no idea how important that feature is. Don’t skip that feature! The knock off one I ordered before (Laresar) was like $350 and died in under 6 months. It constantly bonked hard into everything, was total chaos/random on where it would go, never connected to my Alexa, customer support was completely MIA, no warranty, just bad. For my birthday this year my husband bought me the Roomba J7. I am kind of confused why it says J9 on the side, but whatever. My only other strange thing is when you try to setup the mop on the Roomba app, despite scanning the barcode it came with, it seems to send directions for an entirely different unit. Telling you to put down a drip tray and plug in a separate device. Because of this, I thought my roomba was missing pieces, so I contacted Amazon and they sent me another roomba, that one didn’t have a drip tray/other plug in device either, so I came to the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the mop setup directions on the app. Besides for that though, it’s done a pretty dang good job of keeping the (hardwood) floor quite clear of debris. It’s fascinating to watch it slow down when approaching objects so it doesn’t hit them as hard, or how it reroutes itself around things in its way. Quite intelligent. It is a bit loud when it’s going, but that doesn’t bother me all that much. I have a medium pile area rug in the living room and it doesn’t do a very good job of sucking up the cat hair that’s embedded in the fibers of the carpet…it just pushes the cat hair into rolls. I wouldn’t waste my money on this if you mostly have carpeted floors – it works much better on hardwood/laminate/vinyl floors. I appreciate the ease of connection with Alexa to this robot, I like the self emptying container, I like that it reroutes itself very easily when it gets stuck somewhere. I haven’t used the mop on it just yet, but even still, I would recommend this product to others.