iRobot - Roomba 800 Series

Your experience must be with the cheaper Roombas. I bought a $500 Roomba and base and my experience was the same as yours. Hot trash. Sent it back and even that was a bad experience, they never refunded me and I had to do a credit card charge back. But then I bought a $250 roborock + base. Wayyyyyy better. Never have to tinker with it. Completes our kitchen, dining room, main bedroom, and living room in 35-40 minutes. Does multiple floors/mapping. Vac and mop. A lot quieter than the Roomba. Very clean floors, like I'm blown away at how well it vacs, the Roomba left little crumb piles  everywhere. I have not manually vacuumed anything since I've bought it other than to spot clean when my dogs destroy a toy or something. Overall there is a reason irobot is going out of business. Roombas are overpriced and perform poorly. But not all robot vacuums are created equal and other brands are both cheaper and higher in quality.

I bought a Roomba that can mop and vacuum (pricey models are great). I bought a bunch of replacement rags/mops on Temu for a few euros, and exchange them every now and then. All you have to do besides that is fill its water tank with clean water and floor soap. I also went on my Roomba's App, drew out a map of my house, and set a cleaning schedule for every single day on setting 'deep clean'. And he keeps the floors like 98% spotless, while we have 2 long-haired dogs and 1 short hair cat. We still vacuum and mop ourselves like once a week or so. But if need be we could easily skip that. The difference has been amazing. Googly eyes are optional. ;) Why do it yourself if a robot can do it for you?

I bought a new roomba in 2016 i think it was an 800 series. It was an absolute piece of crap from day 1. Would get lost, couldn't get up on its dock, would just spin around and move it along. Wouldn't run on schedule. And eventually got to where it would just run into things full speed like it's sensors didn't work at all. We did customer support and they just said to do firmware updates but never fixed. Gave to my sister who ultimately threw it away. I'll never own another.

I have been using roomba 805s, two 960s and two 980s without the app - no wifi connection. They are probably the best irobot made, but they are really old. I recently bought a Matic vacuum (there is a reddit group for it) since the security is much better than other new robots. That was part of the design criteria.

Not aware of any random navigation models avaliable with a self empty station. At least none that are currently avaliable and work adequately well. Even budget models are more often including lidar and app functionality. Your options are going to be limited no matter what, and all the random navigation models are going to be the cheapest of the cheap now and unlikely to perform all that well. It might be worth finding a used irobot roomba e5 or 800 series model or similar. Those are about the highest performance random navigation models irobot ever made. You could also look for a 980 which had smart navigation but works totally offline if you prefer.

I had an 870 that lasted forever till two years ago.. it started speaking Chinese so I decided is time had come

I’ve had an 800 or 900 Roomba for decades until one died and then luckily somebody was upgrading and I got another one. The more fancier ones did not seem to clean as well and the newer ones with mopping. I only use on my carpet works relatively well, but it doesn’t get into the corner and against the walls as well. I’ll keep him until they die and then hopefully they will have something that works well on rugs.

Yeah it was iRobot’s game to lose, and, well, they fucked it up royally in ways that will be case studied for decades to come. That said I have an iRobot 805 as my garage roomba and what an unstoppable little beast it is. Except for the fact that it gets stuck under my 911, it’s practically perfect for that use case.

I have a Roomba as well (older 800 series), but find that I am having to do as much maintenance on it to keep dog hair out of the wheels, gears, and really any spinning parts as much as it would be to just sweep the floor myself. Is yours designed for pet hair?

Mine is named Robbie, I can’t keep the floor clear enough to use him. My goal for the weekend is to clear his path. Wish me luck!