7 Helpful Tricks To Making The Most Of Your Irobot Vacuum

The iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum Cleaner

robot mop vacuum combo mop best buy (more tips here) vacuums take pet hair, lint and dust from the floor before they can settle. They can also stay clear of obstacles like furniture that is tippy and stairs.

Most robotic vacs require some maintenance, such as emptying (and occasionally rinsing) the bin and wiping sensors and cameras. Also, they need to be connected to a power source. Many come with smartphone apps for scheduling, adjusting settings and more.

Roomba 960 by iRobot

The iRobot Roomba 980 is the most recent in the line of top-of-the-line robot cleaner and mop vacuum cleaners that are an essential part of every modern household. This model is incredibly powerful suction as well as a HEPA filter that will assist anyone suffering from allergies. In addition it also has a powerful battery which can clean for up to two hours, and it will automatically return to its dock once its bin is full.

Smart mapping is another feature that helps it identify areas in your home that require attention and provides a cleaning path to get around them. We've seen this technology in action and it does a great job of moving around toys that are abandoned on the floor, or furniture legs that stick out from under the furniture. It also comes with a sensor that can snap Roomba to its real-world location if it begins to move away from its initial location.

iRobot has also added a set of rollers underneath the Roomba which do not have bristles, and therefore are more likely to avoid the tangles that previous models. They're also a bit taller than previous rollers and can better fit under low couches and beds and are designed to allow this model to move more easily across different flooring types.

What makes the Roomba 980 stand out from other models of this class, though, is its incorporation of the latest dirt detection feature, which uses a camera to spot bits of embedded dirt. This is a significant improvement over the previous version, which relied on a sensor-driven pseudorandom coverage method to bounce around the room and clean it at minimum three times from various angles.

In our tests of its performance, the Roomba 980 did well on both hard flooring and carpets. Its score on the low pile carpet was impressive, and it got a very excellent score on mid pile too. It did a good job collecting pet hair, but struggled with long sweep and mop robot thick pet hair that was stuck together.

Despite these minor shortcomings, the Roomba 980 remains one of our top-performing robots, and isn't even far from being as costly as some of the other top-of-the-line models on this list. It's still packed with a variety of features that we'd expect to see in a flagship model, but it doesn't have all the fancy apps or smart home integration you'll find in other top contenders.

The iRobot Roomba can be set up in a matter of minutes and is available for use right away. After taking the yellow bin insert and battery pull tab from its undercarriage you just plug it into a wall socket or its Home Base docking stations, click the "Clean button" and let it do the job. It will return to its dock when the battery runs out or is full of debris, and it also has indicators at the top for when its bin is full, it needs to be recharged or its Wi-Fi signal has gone out.