iRobot Roomba S9+: The BEST Robot Vacuum!

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I think its fair to say that we all want a vacuum that will just do the job for us while we sit back and relax! Robot vacuums have been around for several years now and have come a long way from the days of just randomly rolling around and bouncing off the walls! These things are getting smarter, more efficient, and more powerful – and the iRobot Roomba s9+ is the best of the best!

Performance

The cleaning performance of the Roomba s9+ is top notch. The Roomba s9 is the most powerful robot vacuum on the market today and has earned its place as our favorite robot vacuum of 2024. It has wonderfully powerful suction for such a small form and will pick up any dirt and debris in its path. It even has Dirt Detector sensors that will detect any dirt it may have missed and will turn around to finish the job. It has 2 rubber brush rolls that loosen and pick up debris, but avoid hair getting tangled and wrapped around the roller – a HUGE plus for pet-owners! All of this cleaning power is LOUD though – especially when emptying into the base, so you’ll probably want to schedule cleaning cycles while you’re away from the house.

The battery lasts about an hour, which is not the best we’ve seen in a robot vacuum, but it is usually plenty to clean your home unless you have a very large home. If the Roomba S9+ is running low on battery, however, it will return to the dock and finish up when it’s done charging.

Intelligent Navigation

The Roomba s9+ has one of the best vacuum mapping and navigation system on the market today. Starting on its very first cleaning run, the Roomba s9+ automatically starts learning and mapping your home and continues to refine the map on future runs. It took 3 runs for it to learn our 4-bedroom house. It also has an option to send it on “training runs” to refine and optimize the maps while not cleaning. Once your home is mapped out, you can easily mark boundaries and “keep out zones” in the app to avoid any problem areas.

While the Roomba s9 is the best performing robot vacuum when it comes to cleaning your home, we’ve found that the Roomba j7+ is “smarter” and has additional sensors that do a better job with obstacle avoidance such as pet waste and cords. We recommend looking at the Roomba j7+ if you think this smarter navigation is needed in your home.

The Roomba s9+ uses a very cool sensor & mapping system known as vSLAM (visual simultaneous localization and mapping) that uses cameras and sensors to build the map of your home and is aware of where it is at all times. You can even move the vacuum in the middle of cleaning and it will know right where it is to resume cleaning. The vSLAM system is proving superior to some other systems used by less expensive brands such as Wyze and Eufy that get “lost” when you pick them up and move them.

iRobot’s app has a lot of great features while being very intuitive and easy to use. Once your home is mapped out, you can easily mark boundaries and “keep out zones” to avoid any problem areas in the app. You can also create schedules, track cleaning time, charging time, and a variety of other fun stats. Another very cool feature is that you can connect to Alexa or Siri to give it voice commands like, “Roomba, clean up under the kitchen table” to do some on-demand spot cleaning!

Another great feature we love is that you can pair it with the Braava Jet M6 robot mop, so that the mop will start after the floors are clean. This is a very useful feature for those homes with hard floors and saves you from the muddy mess that often comes after mopping a dirty floor.

Self-Emptying Bin

The Roomba s9+ vacuum comes with a self-emptying feature that empties itself for 60 days. You can find this same self-emptying feature on other Roomba models with the + after the model name (s9+, j7+, etc). This feature sucks the debris out of the vacuum and into a sealed storage bag in the charging base so that you can stay hands-off with the vacuum for weeks at a time! Without this self-emptying feature, most other robot vacuums recommend that you to empty the debris tank after every cycle. Along with minimizing the effort involved with emptying the tank, the sealed debris storage bag eliminates any exposure to dust while emptying debris into the trash. Disposal bags are a recurring cost, but they are relatively inexpensive with 3-pack costing about $15 on Amazon.

Conclusion

The Roomba s9+ vacuum is about as close to set-it-and-forget-it as you can get when it comes to keeping your home clean! It is the best performing robot vacuum on the market packed with innovative smart cleaning features and a state of the art navigation system! This is a pretty expensive vacuum (although the price has come WAY down for 2024), but it’s loaded with power and convenience features and we think it’s a worthwhile investment!