Braava Jet M6 Review

For the past month, I have had the opportunity to use the Braava jet m6 robotic mop in collaboration with my Roomba j7+ robot vacuum. I have raved about how much I’ve loved using the Roomba, but have always been skeptical of the Braava line of products. A robotic mob? Have we taken things just a bit too far? Let us dive in to the review, and see whether this is a match made in heaven, or something to avoid.

While I generally don’t like looking at the negatives of a product first, I do think that there are a few things to note about the Braava that may appear negative, but are really just things to consider before purchasing. First and foremost, this is the equivalent of a generic wet mop with disposable pads that you might buy from the store. You know the thing: stick with a bottle of solution in it, press the button to spray the floor, and push the pad overtop. This is just robotic, is smart and can avoid carpets, can run whenever you want it too, and lots more. You are paying for something smarter, hands free, and generally hassle free.

So with that in mind, does the Braava jet m6 replace the need for you to actually mop your floor? No, in the same way that I would argue the Roomba, as good as it is, still does not replace a good vacuum every two weeks. There are no oscillating brushes on the Braava jet m6, just a pad – whether disposable or reusable – that slots onto the bottom of the robot. The robot sprays solution, drives forward with the pad, backs up a bit, sprays more solution, and repeats the process. So do not expect the Braava m6 to begin scrubbing your floor – it’s just not programmed to do that.

The other things to consider are transitions in your home, perhaps between the kitchen and dining room, or kitchen and living room. While you can update the smart map in the iRobot phone application to note where transitions occur, depending on the height of that transition, the robot might not make it from A to B. And that was the case for us. We do plan on having level floors throughout our home soon, but for now we got use to picking the robot up to place in the rooms we wanted it to clean. Minor inconvenience , but not one that is the fault of iRobot in any way.

And now for the good, because there is so much good here. Outside of our kitchen – where often dinner messes were not cleaned properly and hardened to the floor – the mop did everything we wanted it to do – pick up the light dirt that gets tracked about. You’d be shocked how dirty your floors can get, even if you don’t visibly see it. We put the Braava on the same cycle as our Roomba – Monday, Wednesday and Friday it would do the kitchen and dining room, Tuesday and Thursday it would do the living room, and it would do all three rooms on weekends. And each time we cleaned out the reusable pad we noticed that the Braava was actually picking up a significant amount of light dirt. And in the wet fall and winter months, there is plenty of it being tracked in on muddy boots, and the like.

The Braava can be set to three different cleaning regiments – the lightest will do single passes throughout your room, much like the Roomba products. The medium clean will slightly overlap the first pass, extending the length of time it takes to complete a room. A heavy clean will heavily overlap cleaning paths, and takes over 5x longer to complete than the quickest cleaning option. We generally opted for a medium cleaning path, and we could clean all three rooms twice on a single tank of solution.

And the solution is what actually sets Braava apart from the competition. While most robotic mops can only use water in their cleaning bases, the jet m6 can use iRobot made solutions. Non-approved solutions can still be a problem, however. Other cleaning solutions, even natural ones, can clog the spray nozzle and break down the materials inside the robot. That is not to say you cannot just use water, but we found the cleaning solution provided to us (both for hardwood and laminate floorings) was a much better cleaning option.

Like with vacuum products from iRobot, the Braava jet m6 can be controlled from the iRobot app, the same one that you use for your Roomba products if you have them. You can even set up your mop to run right after you vacuum finishes. You can do almost all the same things with the Genius software, including keep out zones, extra clean zones, and more. The Robot is even capable of avoiding carpets because, well, who wants liquid sprayed all over their carpets!

And when you are done, the jet m6 will find it’s home base, dock itself, and begin to charge. If the amount of floor you want to clean is more than what the robot can do on a single charge, it will return to the base, charge back up, and set out again without you touching a button. The base has a nice large bottom that will keep the floor from getting wet. Now if only iRobot could design a base that auto refills the mop – now that would be cool! Still, it wasn’t much work to refill the Braava before setting it loose. Plus, an auto-filling dock would greatly increase the price of the product, putting it out of reach for most consumers.

I’m very excited to see where the Braava line goes from here. While I would love for it to have a bit more flexibility in terms of higher transitions between rooms, the nature of it being a mop versus a vacuum somewhat explains why it would not be able to move across these high transitions. What I do hope is that Braava implements a line of robotic mops that has oscillating brushes to actually scrub the floor. That would have been helpful on those truly difficult messes, such as dried up ketchup on the kitchen floor.

Still, when used properly and often, most messes – as long as they haven’t hardened – can be cleaned up with relative ease. If you are as lazy as me – or just want more time back in your day because you are so extremely busy, the Braava jet m6 will make a great addition to your home. If you already own a Roomba product, this will be a match made in heaven!