iRobot Roomba i3+ review: We put the automated vacuum cleaner to the test – but does it clean up?

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Set up

The initial set-up of the Roomba i3+ is incredibly straightforward. The charging hub, or so-called “clean base”, is quite tall and designed to sit against a wall. You need to put it somewhere with good wifi signal where your Roomba can come and go. Once the base is plugged in, it’s just a case of popping the Roomba on it to charge and pairing it via an app on your smartphone, which is really easy to navigate. When the Roomba is ready for action it makes a cute little powering up noise and a light on the top lets you know what it's up to – different colours denote different modes.

Setting schedules is easy from the home screen in the app. We selected for the Roomba to do an initial clean to get to know the layout. It quickly got to work sussing out our floorplan, working in semi-logical lines across the floor as it went.

We then set a daily schedule (have we mentioned our house is busy?) to do the whole of the ground floor at the time we put our kids to bed. This was quick and easy to do, and meant we could totally forget about it until action time.

Cleaning

The Roomba i3+ gets to work quickly, using two multi-surface rubber brushes and an edge sweeping brush that gets into corners and against walls. It then sucks up the dirt and carries it away.

We found the Roomba did a really decent job, sweeping up bigger chunks of dirt such as crumbs and food mess in the kitchen, as well as leaving our wooden floor looking much less dusty.

It cleaned carpets well too, leaving satisfying lines like a Wimbledon tennis court in our carpet. We wondered how it would fair with long hair and other trickier things to suck up from the carpet, but we were impressed with how much it got. However, the bin did get full on the robot much more quickly when used on carpet, which meant it needed emptying more regularly.

The i3+ apparently travels in logical lines, which was more or less the case in our house. It dealt with obstacles well, negotiating around chair legs to find a way under the kitchen table and the sofa. It also dealt well with chunky rugs, managing to get up on them fine and clean those too. Our house has many obstacles and we were impressed with how it tackled what was in its path without getting confused.

Read more: 10 best handheld vacuum cleaners for hard to reach spots

Like a Dalek, a Roomba cannot negotiate stairs, so if you live in a house with lots of steps into rooms it might not fair so well. However, if you have a few floors to do like we do, you can take the Roomba to a different floor and it will start vacuuming. We tried this and it worked well and was fairly seamless apart from having to ferry it up and down stairs to empty the bin a few times.

We’d say it might not do as thorough of a job as if you were vacuuming yourself. After all, it cannot move furniture out of the way or get in behind doors. However, we were impressed and felt it did a great job that left us only really needing to do a run around with the vacuum once a fortnight to get where the Roomba couldn’t.

Smart home

We found linking the Roomba to our smart assistant a bit tricky. It took a few goes to link our accounts and get Alexa to fire up the vacuum cleaner. Eventually we had success but we found this functionality a bit clunky and it was easier to just use the smartphone app.

However, we liked the IFTTT (If This Then That) functionality of the Roomba. This means we could set the Roomba to work when we left the house. It uses location services on your phone to see when you’re leaving and then fires up the robot. You return to a clean house – amazing.

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This is great if you’re leaving for the day and no one else is at home but perhaps less ideal if you’re just popping to the car to grab something or there’s someone else in when you go out.

Having said that though, it’s easy enough to press a button on the Roomba to manually stop it and send it back to the dock if you need to. Not in the spirit of smart home, but at least there’s a fail-safe.

Noise levels

On carpet the Roomba i3+ was pretty quiet and we quite enjoyed the ambient background hum. On hard floors it’s definitely noisier – we couldn’t watch TV while it was running, for example. However, it is quieter than a traditional vacuum cleaner.

It was especially loud when it re-docked and the dirt was sucked into the clean base. However, this lasts about 10 seconds and added extra excitement for our fascinated children.

Dirt disposal

One of the key selling points of the i3+ is that it has an automated dirt disposal unit. We used this frequently for weeks and it didn’t need the bin on the disposal unit emptied.

But of course, in the spirit of thoroughly testing, we gave it a go. The bag is easy to empty – just lift up the lid of the base unit, lift the bag out and put a new one in. The bags are quite pricey though – it comes with two, but a replacement pack of three is just shy of £22.

Battery life

The Roomba i3+’s battery life was impressive. It charges while it’s docked on the base and we found it only once ran out of batteries during a cleaning “mission” in the whole time we tried it.

If it does run out of power during a clean, it simply takes itself off to the dock to recharge. Then, once it has enough charge to complete its job, it returns to the spot it left off on and carries on.

The verdict: iRobot Roomba i3+ robot vacuum cleaner

We can’t lie, we fell in love with our i3+. It fitted so well into our lives and definitely took one job off our plates. In a busy family, it’s hard to put a price on that. While it’s not going to get into every nook, it did a comprehensive cleaning job and was a breeze to use.