iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO (3550) Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum – Now Clean by Room with Smart Mapping, Empties Itself for Up to 60 Days, Works with Alexa, Ideal for Pet Hair, Carpets​, Roomba i3+

Never again! Apparently the charging base can melt one of the charging ports. This is on my 2nd Irobot I have purchased. It has happened twice! I will NEVER OWN ANOTHER ROOMBA PRODUCT! This is a safety issue! They have replaced 2 charging stations and now I may be on my 3rd since it hasn't even been a year since I've had my new one. BUYER BEWARE!! Update on earlier review--I replaced the filter and all spinning things. They have a kit you can buy at Amazon to do this. It works great again. Just like the first day i bought it. So my review has gone to 5 stars. I have had this for about 7 months. I previously have had 2 Shark robots. Each lasted about a year. I have 2 dogs that shed. Pros. It definitely cleans better than the Shark and before I bought the Roomba I didn't think the Shark did a bad job. The Roomba does clean better. The Roomba does map out your room and is thorough. I love that it empties itself! Time saver!! It also doesn't get stuck near as much as my Shark did. Cons. After 7 months it seems to be confused. It used to go put itself on charge when the battery was getting low and it could get to it's destination pretty quick. Now, it seems to wander aimlessly for what seems like forever. I have never timed it but it will wander for what seems like 10-15 minutes within 10 feet of the docking station and I usually go pick it up and put it on myself. Here lately, I'm having to empty the bin more because it says it's clogged. So it's not just emptying itself each time. For 7 months it has done an amazing job. I'm sure that with my 2 shedding dogs (a beagle and lab) it is having to work overtime. That being said, for $549 I would hope I could get at least a year out of it but with the signs it is showing now, I don't think it's possible. I'm going to order the replacement parts and change them and do a thorough cleaning and see if helps.

I always thought these were gimmicky. But I got one for Christmas and liked it so much I bought 2 more. I have all hard flooring, no carpets, and 2 dogs, a cat, and two birds that all contribute to mess. So I had to sweep everyday or I'd get those pet-hair tubleweeds blowing around. Having to sweep all the time I get lazy and let it go; or when I do it I spend an hour or 2 sweeping or vacuuming. These robots save me hours of time and get the job done better because they are relentless. I set them on a schedule and they do it everyday completely. I have one robot that I manually have to empty the cup everyday. He's in the bedroom, since I'm in that room every day that's convenient enough and only takes 2 minutes. I bought an i3+ and an i4+, they self empty and I have to change the bag about once every 2-4 months. I don't mind the cost of the vacuum bags because they give me so many hours of my time back. The first one I got is the little guy. The little guy's name is Finigan. Finigan isn't too smart. He vacuums in a random pattern. I started with him in the main part of the house. He did a great job but his battery usually ran out before he considered himself done. So the space is a bit more then he likes. He did a great job though. But I loved it so much I got more to cover the whole house and moved him to the smaller bedroom area. In the bedroom suite (bedroom + bathroom~350sq ft), he spends about 45 minutes zipping around to cover everything. When his battery is low he docks himself. I have to empty his cup everyday. At first his cup was usually about 3/4 full to full. The first day it filled and he stopped. I had to empty it and re-start him. After a few months of daily vacuuming, the cup is about 1/4 full each day. So I switched him to a MWF schedule. He's still about 1/4 to 1/2 full each use. He even goes under the bed and keeps that clean. It's really great. The i3+ is Dixie. Dixie does the downstairs. Dixie is smart. She goes in straight line patterns and covers the entire space using a very planned straight line methodical routine. The first day she poked around learning. It was about 1.5 hours. After that, the entire job was planned out and she did the whole thing in about 45 minutes. She has no problem when certain doors are opened vs closed. When it's open, she goes in and vacuums. If it's closed, she skips it. Her cleaning time varies from about 45 minutes to 1hr 15minutes depending on whether the extra rooms are included (doors open vs closed). She drives back to her base when done and docks. And the base sucks out what she collected. I love the base, it means I do not have to tend to her everyday. I actually only need to change the bag about every 3-4 months. There's not a lot going on downstairs. The litter box is there and so the cat pays visits. But we aren't down there daily tracking things around. Thanks to Dixie, there's no fur balls, hair-tumbleweeds, dust, or dirt. Always a nice clean floor. It's awesome. Her map in the app shows where she found 'extra' dirt. Usually right in front of the litter box. It's so awesome not having to sweep up litter daily. I have her on a MWF schedule too and that is more than enough to keep the place clean. I recently got Nick, an i4+ for the upstairs. He's quieter. He's like Dixie in is planning and map reporting, so he's smart. It's very cool. He also gets the job done quickly. First day was like 1.5 hours learning. Now he's done in 50 minutes. The base sucks everything out so I don't have to tend to him as much as Finigan. He's in the main part of the house and it gets the most dirty. The dogs spend all there time here. The cat is up here most of the time. And we have two birds who send seeds everywhere. It's amazing how far from the cage those birds can flick seeds. And their feathers and drift everywhere too. Nick takes care of all that. I do need to manually get under the couch and behind and under furniture which I do once every month or so. But this robot is awesome. Saves me the day in and day out sweeping and vacuuming. Having robots spend 3+ robot labor hours each day vacuuming is an awesome human labor saver. Once they've hit the whole house for a month or two I'm able to step them back to MWF schedules. Their brushes do a great job in the corners, better than me sweeping or vacuuming; mostly because they hit those corners every day and spend the time swirling that brush to work on it. That constant day in day out effort pays off over time. I really can't imagine going back to manually doing this. I look back at the hours I spent doing it thinking that was Neanderthal days. I look forward to telling my grand kids how I used to walk to school uphill in the snow everyday, dial rotary phones, select music off of CD's I had to manually put into a machine, and now, that I spent hours sweeping the floors in the good old days.

I've used a super cheap Shark robot vac for a few years. For the price, it did a good job, but you always had to pull dog hair off of the brush after. It would get wrapped around. It also left what I call "braids" of dog hair behind on the floor. My Shark was getting really long in the tooth and had multiple broken parts, so I broke down and bought this vac, since people said it was good when it came to pet hair. Firstly - If you are looking for a vac that will pull German Shepherd hair out of a run and not tangle, this isn't it. This one doesn't tangle like the Shark did, but it doesn't suck everything up. It leaves a lot more "braids" than my Shark did. This isn't because it's worse than the Shark I had, it's because it's a lot more powerful and is pulling stuff up that Shark could never dream of. However, it still leaves it behind. My next fear with this vac was the wall unit. Could it really suck the dog hair it picked up out of the vac? Yes. It really does pull everything out of the vac. The only crappy part is that it puts it in a bag. I know why they do this, but still, it's something that's going to have a very short shelf life when you own a German Shepherd. Some people complain about the noise this thing makes. It's less noisy than a regular vac. It doesn't really bother me, since it's doing a good job. The wall tank is super noisy when it pulls dirt out of the unit. It's almost shockingly loud. Some people complain about the app. I'm not sure why. I've used bad apps. This isn't one of them. I've had zero problems with the app or trying to figure it out. If you can get this on sale, it's worth it. I would not pay full price for it though. At that price point it's very expensive. I got it on sale and at that price point, I'm happy with the value it offers.

I upgraded from an off brand vacuum that cost less than $100 with coupons. At first, we were thrilled. It picked up better than the other vacuum and what’s not to love about the bin automatically emptying the vacuum? Now we’ve owned this thing for about 7 months and I believe it to be a waste of a few hundred bucks. It has stopped auto emptying. I’ve done all the trouble shooting I can find online. So now we have to hit to button to get it to empty, but only when the button is available on the app, which isn’t all the time. There’s a whole other fix for each time that happens, if you feel like spending 10-15 minutes doing it, which in my opinion I’d rather spend vacuuming my own floors. Sometimes it will randomly work and empty itself as well. We also constantly get errors that the roomba is stuck and when we go looking for it, we find it in the middle of the floor, not obstructed by anything, just stopped. It seems to error when finding home and just die quite a bit too. Overall, after seeing how great it did for only a short period of time, I would not spend the money on this brand name again. I’ve tried to submit a ticket for this on the app a couple of times only to have it error before submitting after I spend time typing all of this up. What a waste of $300. Save your money. This isn’t any better than the many other brands that are out there, but it definitely costs more. In fact, I talked a friend into buying a roomba during the first few blissful months when we loved it. I followed up with her recently and it turns out they returned it in less than a week because they too were getting constant errors, so this doesn’t appear to be unique. The whole idea is that it takes care of a chore so you don’t have to. But be prepared because you have a new chore now. Vacuum mechanic and locator. I have been in touch with customer care. They sent me a new clean base and the problem was solved, or so it seemed. Then the vacuum began getting itself lost and not returning home and giving location errors again. I reached back out to customer service and they opted to replace the actual vacuum. While I was waiting for that vacuum, the clean base stopped emptying again, which was the problem I originally complained of. I figured I’d wait to complain until I could see if the new vacuum fixed it. Well, the new vacuum came with its own set of errors. Now it’s telling me the clean base is clogged (it’s brand new and I have checked it for a clog and there is none). It also gave me an error that the bag was full but it’s a brand new bag and not full. I’m over this vacuum. The only good thing about it is that they’re trying to solve my problem however a new problem continues to pop up each time. And since the clean base is new and a separate vacuum was also sent to me brand new, this appears to just be a bad product.im frustrated because at this point, I’d like to mail the vacuum back for a refund but am told that I only had 30 days to do that so basically I’m stuck. Update. In 4 months we will have had this $400 piece of junk for 2 years, so it’s been just over a year and a half. The bin has NEVER emptied consistently and often doesn’t even alert us that it needs to be emptied so we think it’s working fine until we can’t get it to work one day and find the bin jam packed. We still consistently get random errors. We are unable to use “vacuum everywhere” because when we do, it just hops off the base, vacuums for 5 minutes and claims to have completed the job successfully. Now, it has stopped operating completely. We open the app and it says it needs to be rebooted but then the reboot doesn’t help. As soon as it comes back online it claims to need to be rebooted again. It won’t run. It won’t do anything. Absolute waste of money. I will never purchase Roomba brand again.

I got this guy for Black Friday after months of research and over analyzing. It is our first robot vacuum and we have been dreaming about one for a long time. It has been about a month since his inaugural run and I have to say I love him just as much, if not more, than I did that first day. He is a little noisy but his running noise is very easy to ignore and not distracting, even if you are in the same room, and both my husband and I have some auditory sensitivities. The self empty 100% sounds like a jet taking off. It isn’t so loud that it affects me in my home office two rooms away, but it is in our den and it is definitely “pause the tv” loud in the den. However the self emptying process takes maybe about ten seconds so is very easy to work around. We have two dogs and two cats. One of those dogs is a Great Pyrenees so it is basically like having five dogs. One of our cats is a Maine coon mix so lots of very downy fluff floating around, mixing with the great white Pyr tumbleweeds. This little guy does so well with all the fur. Obviously we do need to keep an eye on the spinning sweeper and the rollers but their maintenance is lower than any previous vacuum so we are very happy. Both my husband and I grow our hair out to donate so there is a lot of long hair floating about and again our little guy is excellent with the lightest of maintenance. As previously mentioned we have two cats so kitty litter is a thing, we also have a “flinger” so despite our best efforts it does travel quite a bit, until it is time for him to make his run, then it is gone! He has done well on our wood floors, our stone floors, he even does well “off roading” on our brick fireplace. Our rugs look great too. I will say our only real struggle is our high pile carpet in our living room. It is an inherited home and that carpet is an area we have not gotten to renovating yet, so it is old, dirty and very plush. Think almost shag carpet but thicker. He definitely struggles to take care of it, trying to roll through all that fluff and trying to suck up accumulated dust, etc. from all that fluff, he almost always needs to take a little break to recharge before he completes the room. (Me too bud, me too!) However, he does make it through and it does look better than it has in years, so he is still doing a great job. With all that he has to tackle we have him scheduled to run twice daily and occasionally we will skip a run or block off rooms that have not been used. It would obviously be cool to have the options the other roombas have to create keep out zones or have specific tasks for them to do but it has not been that difficult to block off rooms or shut doors if need be. If he doesn’t have to tackle the living room carpet he can do his whole run without needing to recharge. I can not speak highly enough about how this little addition to our family has improved our life. To be rushing around to get ready for the tiny Christmas company we got to have, and have our little buddy running around helping, I can not explain how much of an impact that makes on our home and our mentality. This is not the perfect robot vacuum but for the money, he is above and beyond perfect for our family. Will definitely be a roomba “parent” for life! 😂

We've had our Roomba for about a year now; we hesitated to buy it thinking, is it really worth it? We can just keep vaccuuming? It'll be fine? Wow, was this completely worth every penny. We have the i3 with the tall self empty can and we're so pleased. The Roomba itself has been cruising right along; he (our Roomba has he/him pronouns lol) does get stuck on things every now and again if we've left something out like a rogue sock or cord, but I'm actually surprised how often he knows how to avoid or move off of something. Every now and again he might bump a door, but that's only because of the thoroughness of finding the corners of the rooms. I typically run the Roomba when I'm at home (the noise is almost like a loud dishwasher? very manageable!) so I try to pay attention if he's wandered into a room and hasn't been back in a while, and he's often already switched off because of encountering an object. The suction is great, and he does a great job on carpet but kind of rummaging up the carpet for a deeper clean; seems super effective, but also just kind of looks nice so you can see where he's run through already where he hasn't. We have two cats and there were a big decision in getting this; love the handling of pet hair and that's excellent (I wish I could run him over my couch!) We live in a 1200sqft apartment, and this little guy just runs for a couple hours and can do the whole place essentially. I'm not sure how much I'd recommend one for a place much bigger than ours; I'm sure it'd be convenient for areas of the house still, but there's something especially great if you're in a smaller place about just turning this little guy on before you head out and knowing basically the whole place will be done when you get back. Here's the biggest success for us: I have very long and thick hair. Anyone who has very long and thick hair or who lives with us knows that long strands of hair end up absolutely everywhere. You'd be surprised the places these strands can end up. However, because they're so long and thick, they're death for vacuums, and I've grown up constantly cutting hair out of the bottoms of my heavy vacuums while dust pours out, a gross process. Roomba solved this! Yes, we do have to take him apart every now and again and we do have to cut some hair loose from the rotators; but the parts are totally built for this! Everything comes apart in such a sensible way, including inside the rotator tubes where hair sometimes spirals; all of these pieces very easily come apart then come back together so you can regularly clear out that long hair with zero issue, maybe one scissor snip, not dusty mess, it's so easy. This was my biggest hesitation with the Roomba; would my fishing-line-hair break it immediately? Instead, I was pleasantly surprised how perfectly it knows how to handle it, and our guy is going strong after a year. I haven't had to buy any replacement parts (though they're cheap if we need them!) Overall, ridiculously happy with this purchase!

I was annoyed and frustrated by this vacuum. I bought it to replace an off-brand robovac that was about 1/2 the price, and I bought it because the reviews gave it good ratings with not getting the rollers tangled with pet hair (the off-brand vacuum was terrible about this) plus the self-emptying base. But after about a dozen tries, I could not get it fully map my house. I have a perfectly ordinary, non-cluttered, single story house. Yet every time I ran the mapping program, it got stuck in the most unlikely places and had to be rescued, or it just quit running with an 'error 15.' It does not create a partial map; the process has to be started all over again. The cheaper robovac had no trouble with this; I put the home base where I wanted it and it ran around, mapped the house and saved the map (oh and it did it while it vacuumed.) After several attempts at mapping, then deciding ok maybe I'll just vacuum without mapping, it still gave error 15 messages. Contacted support, they had me do the usual reboot, factory reset, etc and eventually sent another unit as a replacement. But while I have the 3550 iRobot+ with the self empty base, they sent a 3150 with just a basic charging base, which is an older, cheaper unit (currently about 1/2 the price of what I paid for the 3550.) It worked with its own base, but even after switching out the dust bin with the old one, it took numerous reboots, resets, repositioning of the base, etc to make it work. After a few tries, it finally mapped and it will vacuum and empty automatically. And it is good with not getting hair wrapped around the roller. Mostly hair gets wrapped up in the little wheel in the front, but that can be popped out and cleaned. The reason I do not give this more stars is a) it still has a hard time finding home (even after I have moved it multiple times, and even though the cheaper unit had no trouble with this, b) there is no reason I should have had to muck around for months to get something that mostly works, c) the customer service person I communicated with clearly never read anything in my emails because he kept asking for information I had already given him and d) iRobot gave no offer to reimburse me for the difference between the 3550 and the 3150, or even a part of the difference.

I’m not sure why people are having trouble connecting to wifi? Mine couldn’t have been easier, setup was a breeze. Also people complaining of noise? I actually couldn’t believe how quiet our i3 Roomba is. My son was watching tv while it vacuumed in the same room. Yes the emptying process into the bin is about as loud as a normal upright vacuum but that only last a few seconds. So far it returns right to its base for emptying and charging once finished. It got stuck only once under a low cabinet hutch, but that was really my fault as you do have to kinda “ROOMBA PROOF” your home if you expect it to work independently. It has great suction. We have three cats and it picked up the litter great. Hardly anything left. Now mind you, you do have to do a deep upright vacuum clean every so often. I mean I think people have way too High expectations if they think they will never vacuum again. Yes it’s strong and yes it does a fantastic job of maintaining the place till I can deep clean again but it’s not a replacement for that. It’s simply for me a day to day maintenance which means I don’t have to vacuum every day and when I do use my upright there’s much less to do. That’s very useful to me. I only had one weird run where it vacuumed only the kitchen(where home base is)and than after 6 minutes returned home and said job was “complete” Not sure if it got confused because it does literally have to map every time it goes out. Unlike the more expensive models that save the mapping info. However this does navigate quite well. I actually watched it for a couple runs and once it bumps and learns where the couch is or the table for example, it turns automatically and stops before it hits when it passes these obstacles again. I think for a very complex layout with many obstacles it does unbelievable. So cool to see it make its way all the way into our bedroom but than know how to travel all the way back to its base. I also saw it once impressively go between a stool there was barely enough room, vacuum under it and than make a 180 and left the way it came in without one bump. So yes once it learns and maps great and it does do as straight of lines possible which is nice and very efficient. The times you do see it doubling back or going out of the straight path is usually when it detects extra dirt which it than will circle back for. It also will tell you when it’s stuck and I love that I can set it to vacuum when I’m out. It’s a breeze to clean the brushes and everything is replaceable which I love. The app is simple but works fine and you can see after the job where it went and how long it took etc. I bought on cyber Monday for only $400 and I think it was a great deal and totally worth it. Its working as expected if not better. I will update if things change but as the title said so far it’s great! Love my New helper. UPDATE: ITS BEEN 2 YEARS. WOW TIME FLIES AND THIS VACUUM IS STILL DOING ITS THING. IF YOUR ON THE FENCE, DONT BE. ROOMBA BEEN DOING THIS A LONG TIME AND THEIR THE BEST AT IT. NO PROBLEMS TO REPORT AND THEY RECENTLY ADDING AN UPDATE TO ALLOW MAPPING WHICH MAKES THIS VALUED EVEN HIGHER. LOVE TELLING IT TO VACUUM SPECIFIED ROOMS NOW! AT $360 THIS IS A GREAT DEAL. HAPPY CLEANING :)