Roomba 980
IS IROBOT’S PREMIUM VAC CAPABLE OF CLEARING A PATH TO A LESS CHORE-RIDDLED EXISTENCE?
UNLESS YOU HAVE exorbitant amounts of cash to burn, $1,449 is a lot of money to spend on a vacuum cleaner, but if that grand price tag includes the cleaning itself, then it starts to seem like a justifiable lifestyle investment. The Roomba 980 is the top-of-the-line automated vacuum cleaner from America’s top selling robovac company iRobot, and if you live in a single-level apartment or house, then this staircase-avoiding robotic cleaner is more than capable of pulling its weight.
Guided by its iAdapt 2.0 floor sensors and a series of bumpers, the Roomba 980 is a capable explorer that will do its best to navigate around obstacles in the rooms it’s cleaning. While the ‘cliff detection’ mechanism works well (stairs are apparently cliffs to an object destined for menial chores), the pre-programed obstacle avoidance can be a little precious. During our test runs, if chairs partially obscured a passageway, the robot would often avoid cleaning those particular areas, even if there was enough space for it to pass. That said, it does get progressively better at recognising the cleanable floorspace using its ‘vSLAM’ mapping technology and reduces the random paths it takes to make more precise floor schematics. If you keep things out of the way and roughly in the same positions, it’ll cover about 95% of the available surface area pretty reliably after a few exploration runs. This unique mapping system also makes the Roomba 980 better at finding its home base, more adept at avoiding jams and much faster than other robovacs we’ve tested.
If you want to cordon off particular areas — either they’re messier than the vacuum will be able to deal with, or it contains low lying things you’d rather weren’t collected — the package comes with two virtual barrier towers that will create no-go zones.
The iRobot app keeps things nice and simple offering a single ‘clean’ button on the app’s home page that initiates a vacuuming cycle, but there’s also a series of tabs for tweaking cleaning settings, looking through cleaning logs and scheduling automated cleaning routines. The Roomba 980’s settings allow you to configure how many times it’ll clean a particular area, whether or not it boosts suction for carpet and how thoroughly you want it to clean the hard-to-reach edges of a room, all of which make noticeable differences to speed, energy usage and overall cleanliness. The History tab lets you analyse cleaning logs with start and finish times, detailed stats on dirtiness, time and total cleaned surface area, and a floorplan of completed jobs.
While the 980 is only the size of a dinner plate and just 20cm tall, it actually has a reasonable dustbin capacity. The two-hour battery life is more than enough to cover the 48m2 cleanable surface area of our office, which takes only 35 minutes, but as long as it’s not excessively dirty, you could conceivably clean hundreds of square meters per session. It’s worth noting that this space is also entirely carpet covered and we left the carpet boost and edge cleaning settings on, which will drain more power and slow the cleaning process down.
Vacuuming is a little loud, so you’ll want to schedule runs when you’re out or at work, as you wouldn’t want to hear the consistent drone and occasional navigational thud while you are trying to sleep. You’ll have to make a few tidiness concessions if you want to make the most of the Roomba 980 and, even then, you wouldn’t trust it on its own before a dinner party. But as an everyday solution that’ll break the back of your household chores, it will (eventually) earn its keep.