How Well Does the Roomba i7+ Handle Cluttered Areas

Our home is just a few short weeks away from being torn apart and opened right up, but until then, Robby the Roomba is zooming around some fairly cramped quarters, most notably in our dinning room. Until today, anytime I sent Robby on a cleaning run in my dinning room, I would lift the chairs up onto the table as I would when I normally vacuumed the room by hand. Today after lunch, I decided to leave the chairs on the floor, and see how Robby navigated this mess.

Of course, as you always should prior to vacuuming – whether with a regular handheld vacuum or a robot – I picked all the large items off the floor, including a left over napkin, large piece of pizza crust my son dropped, and a juice-box straw. After that, the room was primed and ready for Robby.

For context, the dinning room is about 12 feet long and 8 feet wide. We have a large table with 4 corner legs, and 6 chairs – two along each side, and one on each end. In total, Robby would have to navigate around 6 chairs (24 legs) and one table (4 legs). That’s a total of 28 legs for Robby to deal with. To further complicate his job, while Robby can navigate under my kitchen chairs from left-to-right, and even come under the chair from hte front, he cannot get out from under the chair via the backend, as the legs on the back are closer together than the other positions.

OK, context out of the way, and Robby was set free. How did he fair?

I’m not here to tell you we had the best experience ever, but think about the context. Robby did miss a few items on the floor (some cheerios and 2 broken crackers), but to be fair, there’s a chance I also wouldn’t have gotten them UNLESS I moved the chairs out of the way. I’ve quickly learned that your Roomba will only perform as well as you prepare the space for it. While this sounds like work you shouldn’t need to do with a Robot vacuum, think about if you vacuumed yourself – you would NEED to perform these small ‘setup’ steps to maximize your clean potential.

That being said, had we moved the chairs to allow Robby free reign of the dinning room, I’m more than confident saying he would have picked up those missing items.

I was shocked, however, by how well Robby maneuvered around all the obstacles. We had carrot cake for dessert, and if you’ve ever given a two year old a slice of carrot cake, you can imagine how much of that ended up on the floor. Even though the crumbs were all over on that one side of the table, including under chairs and in corners, the Roomba picked it all up.

We will have a ton more on the Roomba i7+ once we’ve used it for a while, but it is easily one of the top tech devices I’ve used in 2020!