Unfortunately, the i7+ can’t climb stairs yet, but you can easily transport it from floor to floor, thanks to the convenient carrying handle. Furthermore, the smart vacuum cleaner robot also has a convenient carrying handle (4), so you can easily carry it from floor to floor.

The device has an excellent finish and looks very classy. The materials used seem to be of very high-quality.

How we test our robot vacuum cleaners

Each bag can hold 30 bin-fulls of dirt, so you’re looking at replacing a bag every couple of months or so, depending on how often you use your robot. You can operate the following touch screen buttons at the robot vacuum’s top: " Clean" (2) (start/stop cleaning process), " Home" (3) (return to charging station) and " Spot Clean" (1) (clean one precise spot). I couldn’t find any power settings for the robot; it just cleaned at the default power setting. The only option to boost cleaning is to change the mode from Automatic to Dual-pass, letting the iRobot Roomba i7+ cover each part of your home in two sweeps. In Automatic mode, the robot will do two sweeps for smaller rooms and one sweep of a larger area.

The mapping system can strangely remember only up to 10 floor plans at a time, which you can name either with set names or custom names. We imagine this is both because iRobot isn’t charging users to store their floor plans in its cloud servers and that its servers only have so much space for everyone’s Roomba i7+ maps. You have to decide for yourself whether the luxury of the self-emptying base is worth the higher price. We hope our iRobot Roomba i7+ review helps. The robotic vacuum cleans our home almost every day. Dirt can hardly accumulate on carpets or in corners.As for how the Roomba i7+ performs, iRobot has vastly improved its leading vacuum’s smart navigation capabilities. Now, rather than just map a single room and forget it after the job is done, the Roomba i7+ uploads maps of every room in your home securely to iRobot’s cloud servers.

The percentages may seem relatively low at first, but the result is excellent compared to other top models. However, that happens very rarely. The robot vacuum cleaner is gentle with the furnishings. It certainly won’t damage them. Our review of obstacle Overcoming and Precipice Detection Since the Roomba i7+ probably cleans the home several times a week, dirt can hardly accumulate in the corners. That said, even if you run your Roomba i7+ daily, that adds up to a rather tiny operating cost every two to three months. That’s not too shabby, but you might bristle at how much cash iRobot stands to make on these bag replacements.Oh yes - don't forget to open all the doors. Now the robotic vacuum cleaner can reach every spot in your home. The Roomba i7+ looks an awful lot like its predecessors at first glance, but contains so many more differences once you flip the machine upside-down. Before getting into that, one thing about the vacuum’s shell that’s markedly different here is that the LED now blinks and shines different colors depending on its current state. The map will be ready to go after 3 - 4 cleaning runs at the latest, so you can access it in the app. The battery is designed to last for 120 minutes of cleaning. In my tests, I had enough power to clean my entire downstairs and set off a second run. The robot vacuum part of the iRobot Roomba i7+ looks much like any other: you get a round cleaner that’s wider than it is tall. This means it can fit beneath a lot of furniture, but it may be a little too wide to get between some chair legs.

You’ll find a standard layout on the underside of the cleaner, too: you get a side-sweeper brush for pushing dirt into the main suction path, and there are two rubber rollers. These are designed to work well on both carpet and hard floors, and shouldn’t tangle with hair as much as a regular brush roller. I didn’t have a problem with hair at all during testing. Once your Roomba i7+ has uploaded detailed maps of your room layouts, it will assume a much more efficient cleaning pattern of pacing across each room in as straight of lines as possible. iRobot calls this ‘Imprint Smart Mapping,’ and claims that this new method will save both energy and time. Moving on to the hard floor test, I sprinkled an ‘X’ on the floor in the middle of the room and let the cleaner pass over it. Here, the results were much better, with practically all of the flour removed. However, your Roomba i7+ won’t come out of box knowing how every room in your home is laid out. It will have to learn them through its first few cleanings. During this process, the cleaning pattern of the Roomba i7+ will look much like that of the Roomba 980, as viewable through the companion app. An excellent app that offers fully customisable maps and quality navigation make this a quality robot cleaner, but suction power isn’t as good as rival models. Design and Features

Making the worst part of robot vacuums a lot better

The robotic vacuum cleaner hardly reached its limits with the lentils ( short carpet: 94%, long carpet 98%). But this isn’t a big deal since you’ll probably rarely use the robot vacuum at night - Unless you want to annoy your neighbours ?. Obstacle detection In terms of noise I measured the iRobot Roomba i7+ at 65.1dB, which is about average for robot vacuum cleaners. It’s loud, but not to a level that it’s distracting. While the Clean Base doesn’t take up any more floor space than a regular charger, it’s significantly higher and won’t fit under furniture, so you need to place it somewhere out in the open.