We are going to be reviewing this iRobot Roomba i4 Robot Vacuum Cleaner . As you can see, we’ve made quite a mess. we usually run this every day or two, but in preparation for this iRobot Roomba i4 review article, we had it run for about a week and a half. We’ve swept all of the dirt from the entire floor into one section so you could see how good it works. There’s some small stuff here like rice and chip crumbs. There’s some big stuff like dog food and plant seeds that are like plant leaves and flowers that the dog has brought in from the outside. And then there’s some of these other-sized things, so there’s a bunch of little crumbs here.
Pretty heavy
Basically, the Roomba sits here. It should be next to a plug, an outlet because there’s this dock that it sits on. And as you could tell, the Roomba is actually pretty heavy. We’d say it’s like 15 pounds. It’s pretty heavy for one hand. When it’s on the dock here, if you position it just right, you could see this green light lights up, and that shows that it’s charging. This light will also kind of glow different colors to say that it’s ready. And so to turn it on, it’s really simple. You just need to make sure that there’s nothing, we think within two feet, which is like 0.6 meters on either side of it. And then all you do is, there are three buttons here. we actually have no idea what this button does. This is the clean button; it also turns it on, and then this is the home button. If it’s out vacuuming and you want to send it back, you can do this.
And we should mention we’ve had this vacuum for two years now, no three years. We’ve had it for three years. we got it for Christmas, and it’s really good for cleaning hardwood floors. It’s okay on carpet. We will show you. Over here, we have near the couch, we have this kind of thicker pad carpet, so we have a carpet pad plus this kind of, we don’t know what this is called, but it’s kind of a thicker rug. we don’t like the Roomba to come on here because it does sort of this fraying thing to it. So usually what we do is we block it off on this side, but the Roomba does come with this little tool here. It sends like an IR beam out so you could set it to a b mode and you can see here it will go for 10 feet or three meters in a straight line or you can set it to a radius or like a circle mode and it will go in two feet diameter. So you just set it with this. You could set it to the line mode or you could set it to the round mode by just going down or up, and you could kind of see.
So this is off. There’s a light bar right here above the finger. If we do that it turns on, oops, and look it’s actually triggered that because it’s like, “Oh, we shouldn’t be here; We are too close.” So if we take this and we put it in the light mode that’s where it comes out right there. So it set it right here, for example, and then anything in a straight line for like 10 feet, so about to there it won’t be able to go past that line. It’s like an invisible gate for the Roomba. But let’s go ahead and kick this off. We were hoping it was full so in that case, if you have vacuumed and you haven’t cleaned it out it’ll tell you to empty the bin. This is really easy to do. You just come over here, there’s a little button on the side you press that. It’s easier with, We are right-handed so, but We are holding the camera with that. So, there’s actually not a lot in there. We will just take this and you could press the button right here again and just empty that out.
And then you close it, snap it on. It is not that hard to put it in. There’s a little lip there, you just put it around in there, and then snap it in. It’s really easy. Okay, so now it still hasn’t updated, there it goes. And we will press that, and it’ll start. Now, it’s kind of weird in its pattern sometimes. You never really know where it’s going to go. Also we’ve noticed it leaves sort of a trail at the home, so you might need to sweep that. As you can see, there is a clear line right here where it went.
New model: iRobot Roomba j7+ Cleaning Tests & Recommendations
It supposedly has a mode where it can determine if there’s a lot of dirt in an area and so it knows where the home is; it will just go out kind of seek around the house, and then it’ll go back. You can see it can make it up this pad, which is pretty big. But you can see some of the bigger stuff got stuck there. It cleaned that entire half of the pile, so it’s still got a little bit left; it missed the dog food. So, we still don’t know how it’s going to do on the bigger pieces. You can see on this lip, it’s leaving a bit of a trail.
This is actually the worst-case scenario. Usually, we lift this pad up and just fold it up, and it handles it. There we go; we’ve got all that stuff that it missed. So usually, we like to clean a little bit. We will usually sweep around the edges real quick to get it out of the edges. we usually run this, like we said, every day or two depending on the mess.
This does really good to keep things tidy. we still have to vacuum once a week because it doesn’t get everything, but it does a really good job. As you could tell, it cleaned up most of that pile there. Once it comes back over here, it should get the other half. And as you could tell, it does a really good job without you having to do anything. This might be an older model than the latest available, but it does really good even for how old it is. So if we’ve had this for three years and we run it every day or two, that’s a lot of cycles that this has gone through, and it still works really well.
Read more: iRobot Roomba Combo j9 Plus Tests: A good robot vacuum for plush carpets
iRobot Roomba i4 cleaning test
Does work on carpet
It does work on carpet; it works on hardwood. Like we said, it does have some difficulty on that thick carpet over there. We will just show you if we let it bump into me. It’s confused because we weren’t there before, so it’s going to try and go around. It doesn’t hurt; sometimes the dog will just sit there, and it’ll just bump into the dog and go around the dog. And so now we’ve moved; this can’t really do any damage by running into anything. Once it’s done, it will go home, but We will just hit the home button now, turn it off. That is something that we don’t usually do; we don’t usually stop it because if it gets low on battery or if it finishes its cycle, it will go home.
The noise level, it’s not that loud. Our bedroom is upstairs right above the kitchen. And so if we run this at night before bed, if we don’t have a humidifier or anything like that, we will be able to hear it. So you see it just kind of missed the dog food. So it can’t really pick up big stuff. That’s usually something that we get for it, and we just picked those up by hand and just toss them. But yeah, that’s about it. This is a really great product. we haven’t had to replace anything, and we guess our only negative is that that carpet over there, that big one. But because you have this blocking tool that’s usually where we put it.
On smaller carpet
It does really well on smaller carpets. we had that blocking tool right here earlier; We’ve removed it after the review so it could actually do the whole house or the whole floor. we have these carpets here, which is sort of a thinner carpet. And you can see it’s going on three different levels of carpet here, no problem. It handles this really nicely. And then this is the carpet we have for our upstairs; it’s not like a super thick carpet. But it’s pretty soft, and it handles this nicely. we don’t usually run it upstairs; we did when we first moved here. And it has a feature where if it gets to the edge if it detects a stair, it will stop. Usually, we have a dog dish thing here, and it does well, but we don’t want it to pour the water over.
Stairs
This works great if you have stairs; it works on the carpet; it works on hardwood.
