The iRobot Roomba s9+ Is So Smart That It Even Empties Itself
After testing the Roomba s9+ for a month, we’re confident in saying that it’s the only robot vacuum that can replace an upright or stick vacuum. In fact, the Roomba s9+ is the world’s best robot vacuum to date.
It not only is the most powerful robot vacuum on the market, its charging base sets it apart from almost every robot vacuum out there because it allows the s9 to empty its own bin. When the s9’s bin is full, it’ll automatically return to its base, empty itself, and resume cleaning where it last left off.
Agility and Navigation
With the vacuum’s “D” shape, iRobot has completely overhauled the s9+’s design. iRobot says the new shape — which is almost identical to Neato’s line of robot vacuums — helps improve the vacuum’s edge and corner cleaning.
The vacuum supports iRobot's Smart Mapping feature, which uses the cleaner's onboard sensors and camera to build a detailed plan of your home's floor plan. During our tests with the s9+, the vacuum successfully detected and navigated around obstacles in its path, including dining room chairs, an ottoman, and a coffee table.
Sometimes it still tries to go places it shouldn't. For whatever reason, our robot vacuum continuously kept lodging itself under my pup's food bowl stand, helplessly whirring until it'd give up and send a push notification to my iPhone telling me it was stuck.
Fortunately, the cleaner comes with an accessory beacon that you place in areas you don't want it to travel. The robot also has a Keep Out feature which allows you to manually highlight areas on a map where you want the robot to avoid cleaning.
Suction Strength and Cleaning Performance
iRobot said that this vacuum boasts 40-times the suction over previous generation Roomba vacuums. Carpet cleaning with the s9+ is truly out of this world. It offers three power settings: low, high, and auto mode (which automatically adjusts suction based on the floor type). We found that it surpassed its predecessor in nearly every way possible. Its increased suction also allows it to suck up debris deep within the grout on hard flooring and embedded in carpets of all thickness levels. The vacuum is faster, it climbs over thresholds and rooms transitions better, and it navigates almost perfectly.
The s9+ offers a wider cleaning path than its predecessor, the i7+, and it's equipped with 30% wider dual rubber brushes. Both pet and human hair won’t get tangled or caught around the brushes at all — it all goes straight to the bin. We also liked that its spinning brush doesn’t move as erratically as the i7’s, which caused the vacuum to scatter debris all over the place. The vacuum’s exhaust has also been repositioned, so it won’t blow dust bunnies away like most robot vacuums do.
Compared with the highly praised Neato D7 vacuum, we found that the D7’s low power mode to be slightly stronger than the s9+’s. Both vacuums offer a similar battery life of around 2 hours, but the D7 has a larger dust bin than the s9+. Considering the fact that the s9+ can empty its bin automatically at its Clean Base (which is large enough to hold 30 full bins) the s9+’s smaller bin shouldn’t matter.
Ease of Use
The appeal of splurging for the Roomba s9+ over other robot vacuums is that it will clean your floors without you even thinking about it. No other robot vacuum in the world requires as little input as the s9+, which makes it best in class.
You can ask your smart speaker to tell the vacuum to start cleaning, or you have the option to have the robot vacuum to clean specific rooms in your home. Another unique feature which sets it apart from the rest is the vacuum’s ability to pair and talk with iRobot’s m6 robot mop.
As soon as your s9+ vacuum finishes sweeping your floors, it will tell the m6 robot to begin mopping. But after dropping more than $1,000 on a robot vacuum, you probably won’t want to spend an additional couple hundreds on a mop.
Wrap-Up
The Roomba s9+ is without a doubt, the best, most powerful robot vacuum we've tested. However, it costs a pretty penny. If you're a pet owner who is tired of constant shedding, you have a large floor plan, or you just absolutely hate emptying your robot cleaner, the s9+ cleans fantastically without you having to worry much about it. We think it's worth splurging for if your budget allows.
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