iRobot Roomba S9+ Experience
I purchased a new iRobot Roomba S9+ which includes both the Vacuum Cleaner and a robot Mop. It was most definitely not a cheap purchase but in pretty much every review it was listed as have the best suction of all the cleaners with the only downsides generally being that it is a somewhat noisy vacuum cleaner and that it attracts a high price.
This is not an in depth review but just my quick opinions 1 month after the original purchase. I may come back and flesh this out after at least 6 months so consider this page rough notes.
Initial Setup
The initial setup was relatively straight forward. You install an app on your phone and basically configure the cleaners using it. You can allocate jobs, assign schedules and even configure the mop to start after the vacuum has finished.
It can be tricky to get the cleaners to initially learn their maps and to this date my mop still has not managed to learn a large section of my house simply because it keeps getting interrupted but otherwise the fact that the devices are able to work out which floor they are on and what map to run with is impressive and does not require any additional base stations or sensors.
Home Automation
This is a cloud based device which has no (easy) way to use only local control. For this reason I have it isolated in a VLAN specifically for untrusted devices. This seems to work fine but does rely on iRobot keeping their cloud services around and does mean you need a working internet as well as have the usual delay of communicating with a remote server.
Home Assistant was able to be connected to the devices fairly easily and can be used to automate them.
Alexa is also easy to configure to control the devices.
What I Like
- Putting the device down somewhere randomly and pressing clean it will work out which map it is on and will return back to that spot at the end
- Cleans very well, even on low power mode which is a lot quieter
- Self emptying bin works well
- Very easy to unclip the rollers from the vacuum. There is a weak spot here I’ll discuss further down.
What I Don't Like
- Mop leaves streaks where the wheel runs through the wetness. This is a common complaint online about this specific mop and occurs whether you use plain water or use the detergent as well.
- Both the vacuum and mop like to kamikaze into everything. There is a careful mode (which I’ve not used yet) but the normal mode they will happily ram at full speed into everything. Sometimes for no discernible reason they decide to slow down before hitting the wall but most of the time the sound of vacuuming is punctuated by bangs. I’ve not noticed any damage to anything yet but it is disconcerting since my last vacuum cleaner (a botvac) always slowed down likely because of its LIDAR.
- The App is horrendously slow at times and sometimes will simply fail to connect to a device until you force close the app and re-open it. Note that force-closing the app and reopening is in the official docs! At the very least it would be nice to have a ‘refresh’ button.
- Mostly oddly, I sometimes can’t cancel a job through the app. It only gives me the choice of pause or return to home but sometimes I just want to totally cancel it because home is not reachable. What is odd is that there are times when I can cancel it but normally the option does not come up.
- After a couple weeks of use the vacuum starting making horrendous crunching noises sometimes even though it was very well cleaned and maintained. This will covered below in the service section.
Service
After a couple of weeks the vacuum starting making some terrible crunching noises. Here is a video I took:
I immediately went to https://www.shopirobot.com.au/contact/service and lodged a service enquiry along with the above video and all the purchase proof. And got no response back at all.
A week later I lodged it again, filling everything in and once again got no response.
After a couple more weeks I decided to investigate a bit more and noticed that the clip that holds the two rollers in looked damaged. Here is a close look right after a job:
Those two holes that hold the rollers should be hexagonal but you can clearly see that one has been worn into a circle. This means that it would have been spinning around causing the racket and the rotation would itself cause the plastic to melt and fuse together. This looks like a weak point in the design due to the way the clip works (one end will be slightly looser and thus the light green roller will have a bit more give) and may require something a little stronger in that position.
I then called support and to give them their due they answered right away and are sending out a new vacuum head unit though the problem may occur again if the same design flaw is present.
With regards to the unanswered support enquiries this may actually be an issue with their website/mail server rather than lackluster support. When filling in all the fields I added the video that I ensured was below the 50Mb maximum size specific on the form however most support systems rely on email from the contact form and its possible the email server rejected the attachment due to size which would have resulted in a double bounce. If this is the case they should certainly look at making sure the email server accepts a larger size than the support form.
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