Rachel Cericola is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter who has been covering smart-home technology since the days of X10. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Men’s Health, USA Today, and others. She hopes her neighbors read this bio because it would explain why she always has four video doorbells running simultaneously outside her home.
Aside from the extra suction, those are all nice-to-haves rather than must-haves, so most people – including you! It’s the fanciest robot vacuum iRobot has to offer, but you’ll get a similar level of quality with the Roomba j7 while spending a couple hundred bucks less. They’re smarter, more powerful and (marginally) better shark pet hair vacuum at avoiding chair legs than they ever were before, and some of them even have built-in mopping capabilities. It’s safe to say the space is pretty saturated now, with established names like iRobot and Shark competing with companies like Anker and TP-Link that are not necessarily known for their dirt-sucking tech.
shark dustbuster have a feature called Smart Sensor Navigation that allows them to sense the presence of furniture, objects, and other obstacles. The vacuum avoids obstacles in its path so your cleaning job isn’t interrupted. You’ll pay more for a model with higher-quality sensors, but a vacuum of this caliber will also clean more quickly and efficiently. Many robot vacuums cope well with hardwood floors and carpeted areas, but if your home has many staircases, you’ll need an additional vacuum to clean the stairs. With many robot vacuums suitable for programming from your phone, you’ll be able to switch these devices on when you’re out and about and come home to clean floors.
This easy-to-use model makes quick work of small spaces and is easy to schedule using the Shark Clean app. The iRobot Roomba S9+ is self-emptying when it reaches a certain level in its bin. The debris is captured in a 14.9oz / 440ml replaceable dust bag in the charging and emptying station. This makes it an awesome shark pet hair vacuum choice for those who suffer from allergies because all the dust is contained, and there is no fear of emptying any of it back out again (by accident) if you open it. Alerts when the bag needs a change and integration with Alexa and Google Assistant are a sweetener to an already excellent robot vacuum.
Replacing worn-out parts (brushes, filters, or wheels) prolongs the productive life of your robot vacuum. Therefore, make it a habit to replace these units at the recommended time. Once you replace the battery, your robot vacuum should revert to its old self.
However, once it noted there was an obstacle somewhere, the vacuum would avoid that area in the future. We spoke to cleaning experts to narrow down the best brands and models you can buy today, and we tested eight popular vacuums to find which perform the best in terms of cleaning, obstacle avoidance and smart features. On that note, there is still a place in the world for cheaper robots that rely on semi-random navigation. (We like to call it bump-and-run navigation.) If you need to clean only a few rooms at a time (800 square feet is a comfortable upper limit), one of these models can get the job done. We can’t pinpoint one spec or feature that helps a robot navigate well—we just have to test the bots and see how they do.