iRobot Reviews

I responded with the following in an email - I am very disappointed in your response and especially your request not to submit suggestions, ideas, or concepts. This is ridiculous and will definitely make me rethink my ongoing relationship with your company and impact my ability to recommend use of your products to others. Maintaining an open dialogue with customers is typically a trait of successful companies and it appears your company is changing directions. I am so sorry to hear that and definitely will not make any requests or offer suggestions, ideas, or concepts to iRobot again. I will also share your response on social media so others may receive the message too and possibly not disturb iRobot in the future.

When the new one arrived, it wouldn't charge. I found out that the new Roomba was not making electrical contact with the new base, so I swapped out the new base for the old base and it charged up. But after charging up and resetting multiple times to factory reset, it still would stop in the middle of the job or not be able to find its way back. I contacted iRobot again and they sent me a canned reply with reset instructions. I bought the Roomba so I could just push a button and let it go and not have to worry about vacuuming. I did not know I would be spending more time troubleshooting a different issue every time I use it. I would not recommend getting a Roomba until they come up with technology that will allow the Roomba to overcome normally encountered challenges of vacuuming.

Original Review: April 27, 2023

Recently I purchased S9 product, for ~$1000/-, I did lot of research before purchasing. Now I feel like lot of fake online reviewers made this product and company looks like genuine. Unfortunately, so far, the experience, both product and with support team is so bad that, for the first time I felt, it should be either a defective product sold or it must be having bad cloud influence, as it is cloud enabled product or it is a pure gamble product. Here are the list of issues with the product I faced in short time. Firstly, with great deal I was able to put together the map run after that

1. After doing couple of sloppy jobs one day it suddenly forgot that it is a cleaning robot and started roaming around without cleaning and coming back to dock station. The best support advice I received was remove and recreate the maps or factory reset and recreate the maps because Roomba got confused. 2. Consistently, it shows the job time as 15 min but runs forever, until it drains all the battery, some times I have to stop and send to dock station. 3. While vacuuming, on the edges, it never does it on circular brush side and leaves debris behind. 4. With-in 3 months, the wheels worn out so much that Roomba is stuck in the places where it used to move without any issues. 5. At times, while mapping and vacuuming, suddenly, in the middle of the room, it leaves message as “stuck” and need help, when I go and check I find nothing, moving a bit and pressing "Clean" it will start again.

6. While mapping it finds 2 disjoint spaces in a single room, not sure how to deal with that “virtually created” room. 7. After running map for 6 to 7 hours, when sent Roomba to dock station; in the night, the app considers it as cancelled and will not update the map. This 6-7 hr run is a pure waste of time. 8. When I re-run "map run" and waits it to finish the job, it runs again for 6-7 hr and creates a map which it can not update to existing map. And it created space like “Transformers”. 9. Without any seeming obstacles, it stops job and marks as struck while doing map run.

These few very obvious and big issue with the product. It has been ~6 months I own this product, I spent more time fixing its problems, sending mails to support team, recording videos for support team, emailing videos for support team to look, mapping, remapping, factory resetting, deleting maps and unsuccessfully trying to recreate maps.

Issues with Technical Team, I called 2 times reporting these issues and sent 10+ emails with photos, the best advices I received are “Factory reset”, "Remove & recreate map”, clean the camera, turn on all the lights in the house, open windows, clean bumpers; the worst support I have ever seen. Now I am very confident that issues are no way related to the support advises.

Worst of all, I was asked to record and send emails with videos, while Roomba is vacuuming and I have to wait for Roomba to do the bad job. It is like “Roomba Sitting” job for customers. Do not even have a way to upload these videos, you have to trim and email. What a pitiful product support? At times I wondered, are these issue common with this product?

In between I sent email to publicrelations@irobot.com, investorrelations@irobot.com, partnershiphs@irobot.com; thinking some one in this company care and love their product and company, so that I get proper support. It proved that no one care about either their product or company or customer. I normally restrain from giving bad reviews, reason being “respecting" the fact that people are working in that company and considering "benefit of doubt". But this company products must be pure gamble.