Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Excellent obstacle detection/avoidance
- Detects dirt levels and prioritizes room cleaning accordingly
- Impressive cleaning peformance
Cons
- PrecisionVision navigation feature depends on ambient light
- Many app controls buried in sub-menus
Our Verdict
With its navigating smarts and superb cleaning capabilities, the self-emptying Roomba j9+ delivers a truly automated cleaning experience that should be welcome in any household.
Price When Reviewed
$899.99
Best Prices Today: Roomba j9+
$599
With its new flagship, the Roomba j9+, iRobot has taken the best features of its predecessor and added a new superpower: the ability to identify and prioritize the dirtiest rooms in your home. The result is our new Editor’s Choice for robot vacuums.
The Roomba j9+ is the successor to the Roomba j7+, which itself was a pretty substantial upgrade to its predecessor. The j7+ arrived with a camera that had been moved from the top of the robot to the front to widen its viewing field, thus enabling the robot to see obstacles on the floor.
The iRobot Roomba j9+ successfully builds on past Roomba improvements, and its enhanced intelligence and superb cleaning ability set it apart from virtually all its competitors.
The Roomba j7+ also introduced iRobot’s PrecisionVision navigation technology, which allowed the robot to recognize and avoid obstacles in its path, including pet poop (hence the company’s famous P.O.O.P. (Pet Owner Official Promise) guarantee). Finally, the j7+ came paired with a smaller, more furniture-friendly self-emptying Clean Base.
We mention these j7+ features because they’ve all been carried over to the j9+, which comes with its own innovation: the room-prioritizing Dirt Detective, a trick that makes the new Roomba j9+ a welcome upgrade to its predecessor, not to mention our new Editor’s Choice.
This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot vacuums.
Setup & mapping
The iRobot Home app makes it easy to get the j9+ up and running quickly. Once you plug in the Clean Base and set the robot into its slot to charge, you run the iRobot app to connect the robot to your Wi-Fi network.
The j9+ can automatically detect floor type and adjust its cleaning power accordingly.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
The j9+ builds a map of your home the first time you run it. The map it produced of mine was accurate and the rooms were correctly labeled. It also populated the map with various icons indicating the type of floor surfaces and suggestions for where to set clean zones, such as around high-traffic like my couch. You can edit the map to correct any layout inaccuracies and manually add clean zones and no-go areas.
Once the j9+ has patrolled your space, it provides a “dirt detective overview” in the app that uses a green color gradient to indicate how dirty each room is—the darker the green, the dirtier the room.
From this overview, you can simply press the “clean dirty rooms” button to dispatch the robot to your dirtiest rooms in the prioritized order. If you’d rather control the robot yourself, you can select Vacuum Everywhere from the app’s home screen or tap New Job and choose individual rooms or clean zones.
Cleaning performance
The vacuum uses a three-stage cleaning system with dual rubber brushes, and it can automatically detect floor type and adjust its cleaning power to sweep up dust, dirt, and pet hair.
iRobot doesn’t divulge the suction power details of its vacuums, saying only that the j9+ has “100% more suction power” than its Roomba “i”-series robots. That said, the j9+ did an excellent job on the laminate floors and area rugs in my home, sucking up some pretty heavy pet hair without said hair getting tangled in the rollers.
The j9+ Clean Base includes a compartment for an extra dust bag.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
With a couple of teens in the household, my home is rarely showroom clean, but the j9+ did a stellar job routing itself around shoes, socks, charging cables, and other hazards.
If you opt into image review (the app presents the option during setup), the j9+ will also take a picture of the detected obstacle and the surrounding area and push it to you for review. You can mark the object as a temporary obstacle, not an obstacle, or add a Keep-Out Zone around it. Based on this feedback, the robot can adapt its cleaning of your home as needed.
After completing a cleaning job, the robot docks, and its contents are automatically emptied into the Clean Base’s dust bag. Each dust bag can hold about 60 days of dirt, but the actual capacity will depend on your cleaning frequency and how much dirt is on your floors.
The iRobot Home app keeps a history of every cleaning job, which you can access from the home screen. Recorded details include the square footage your Roomba covered, the duration of the job, the number of obstacles it encountered, and how the cleaning was initiated. It also displays the cleaned areas on the map, so you can plan future cleaning jobs accordingly.
The j9+ can suggest clean zones, provide “dirt detective intelligence,” and snap pictures of obstacles it encounters for you to review.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
Should you buy the Roomba j9+?
The iRobot Roomba j9+ successfully builds on past Roomba improvements, and its enhanced intelligence and superb cleaning ability set it apart from virtually all its competitors.
You likely won’t have to spend much time tending to the robot thanks to its AI-powered obstacle avoidance, and it only gets better at navigating your home and cleaning according to your preferences the more it runs. That’s enough to award the Roomba j9+ our Editor’s Choice.
