iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum - Black

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Great Roomba Cleaning with a Few Issues

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  I looked forward to trying out this new iRobot Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum. I have had a few different versions in the past and all work(ed) great. This one threw me a couple of curve balls. The first issue appeared at setup. After setting the unit up to charge, I went to the iRobot website to register and download the Owners Manual for the 205 DustCompactor and was faced with having to figure out what category this model was in before I could find the manual. I did a site search and got a sales / feature page for this model. It did not have a link to the Owner's Guide. Then I looked all over the packaging to find out the category and that was not helpful. Finally, I just looked in every category and finally found this model's name in the Classic category. The 205 was lumped in with multiple other Classic models without a clear link to the actual Guides, while all the other non-Classic models on the page had very clear links to the Owner's Guide and a Quick Start Guide. It was very frustrating for something that should be so simple. I gave up the first day and on the next day, I finally figured out that you needed to "Click here to access more Owner's Guides" and that the 205 was a few models down. So with Owner's Guide in hand, I finished registration and followed the Guide to setup. It insisted that I needed the new iRobot Roomba Home phone app to do the setup. I already have the old iRobot application that works fine with my higher end model iRobot, so I was a bit annoyed. When I went to download this new one, the Google Play site warned that "Recent data from similar devices shows that this app may stop working on your device". I hesitated, then downloaded the app anyway. The app presented a few issues in setting up the wifi and then doing the floor mapping, but I got through it. But then I ran into another issue. When I started the Roomba to do the floor mapping, it moved off of its lightweight charging base and totally moved the base out of position. I quickly put it back where I thought it had been and then worried that the Roomba would not be able to find it when it came back. Luckily, it was able to find it after mapping, but I worry that this will be an issue in the future. With its LIDAR mapping, the 205 did a great, fast job mapping my cluttered set of rooms. Once it was back on its base, I ran the clean cycle for all the rooms. The app burped a few times, then I was able to get to go. It was very powerful and did a very thorough job on the carpets and bare floors. It first went around all of the perimeters of the rooms and furniture and then came back and did a tight overlapping straight pattern to clean all of the interiors between the perimeters. Very nice! I was a bit disappointed that when it declared that cleaning was complete, it went the long way around to get to its base, thus obscuring some of the nice neat pattern on the carpet. All-in-all, the iRobot Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum does a wonderful job at cleaning. It is up to iRobot to clean up some of these other issues.

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  Posted 3 weeks ago by NatureLover2

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  How did we ever do without this?

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  Before getting this Roomba vacuum, I was aware of what it was but didn’t think it would work well in our house and would be more of a “toy” than a useful appliance. I was certainly wrong about that and have been thoroughly impressed by what it does and how well it works. This version is part of the newest series of Roombas that used LiDAR – the same technology as used by some self-driving cars – to accurately map your house and divide it up into separate rooms that can be cleaned on demand or by a schedule. This model is the 205 DustCompactor that vacuums but does not have mopping capabilities; there are other models that support mopping and other functionality. Some Roombas that support features like self-emptying dust bins come with a sizable home station. However, the 205 has a feature that compacts the collected dust so that frequent emptying is not required (the company claims up to 60 days worth!). As a result, the home base just has charging pads and a place to dock and is small and compact. After plugging it into a wall socket, you can place the Roomba so that the charging pads on the bottom are making contact with the base and it will confirm it by saying “Charging”. The Roomba does require an app to configure and control it. When installing, make sure that you get the variation that supports this model; older ones use a different app. There is also a QR code that you can scan to take you directly to the appropriate app on the Android or Apple store. Once installed, you can set up an account, then connect to the Roomba and configure a few things such as connecting it to your home WiFi. Once that is done, you’re ready to map a particular floor or section of your abode or other building. This is where the cleverness of this device really shows. To prep the area, all you have to do is to close the doors to any areas that you don’t want included, perhaps certain closets or bathrooms, and remove any loose items from the floor, especially cords and cables. Then, using the app, you just tell it to start mapping. As a retired software engineer who worked in the robotics industry, I have to say that I was really impressed with how it did this, going from room to room, scanning the dimensions, and even poking around in various corners. I mapped our 2nd floor with 4 bedrooms and a hall, which took it about 10 minutes or so. I was a bit concerned about the open stairway, and indeed the Roomba saw that as an opening and tried to go there, then sensed the edge and pulled back. After repositioning and trying again in a couple places, it gave up and went on into another room. When it’s finished, it returns to the dock and resumes charging, then lets you know when it has finished creating the map and it’s ready for editing. Our map was pretty accurate overall but the Roomba wasn’t able to determine the exact boundaries of each room. For example, it showed our central hall as an extension of one of the bedrooms. This wouldn’t be important if we were going to vacuum the entire floor each time, but it’s convenient to define the rooms so we could choose to vacuum a specific room or set of rooms. So some editing will generally be required. This is where I think that some improvements could be made. The editing had to be done on my smartphone screen, which was a problem due to the small size of the screen and the size of my finger. Adjustments to the layout have to be done by a combination of merging rooms together (easy) and positioning a divider to split a room into two rooms by dragging the endpoints of a line around (harder). I often found myself having to split off a piece of a room and then merging the split-off piece with an adjacent room. Nothing too difficult but not easy to get any precision. Once finished, you can assign meaningful names to each room. The next important editing step is to assign “Exclusion Zones”, if any. These are areas that have been mapped but where you just don’t want to robot to go. For example, I excluded the area under my computer desk, which has the usual “basket of snakes” of charging and data cables. Again, it’s hard to size and position the area on the screen but it can be done with some patience. When finished with the editing, you can save the map and give it a name such as “Second Floor”. The 205 has the capacity for saving up to three maps to cover multiple floors and other special cases. Once that’s all done, it’s ready to do some cleaning! How does it do at that? Again, very impressive. With the Roomba at a starting position (usually the dock), you can select a map (floor in most cases) from the app and then either have it vacuum everywhere or create a routine consisting of the room(s) that you want it to clean, and away it goes. Although there will always be some nooks and crannies that it just can’t get into – and it really tries hard to find a way in – it certainly does a nice job of the routine vacuuming that you are likely to need most of the time. One particular benefit that I hadn’t thought of before seeing it in action is that it went right under the beds and bounced around under there for a while to completely vacuum the carpets; that’s where a lot of dust used to accumulate since we only move things to get under there a few times a year (if that often). It is also very good at getting around things like the legs on the beds or chairs; once it bumps into them it will eventually circle right around them. If it runs low on its charge while cleaning, it will return to the home dock and recharge before continuing. I haven’t tried it yet but I think that it will clean our entire upstairs on a single charge. As it cleans, you can follow its progress in the app as it leaves a trail on a graphic of your map. When finished you’ll get a notification and it also stores the final track for later viewing. There are a number of cleaning options that I haven’t tried yet, including levels of cleaning (1-pass vs 2-pass), scheduling, and others. I also have not had it long enough to see how well the “compactor” feature works to reduce the frequency of having to empty the dust bin, but the company claims that it might hold up to 60 days worth depending on how often it is used. In conclusion, we started out thinking that this was more of a gimmick than a useful appliance but now think that it’s one of the most useful tech products that we’ve obtained in the last few years. We’ll definitely be keeping up on the vacuuming more than we were able to in the past. I highly recommend this product!

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  Posted 3 weeks ago by Doug G

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Good cleaning, poor obstacle avoidance

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  This robot vacuum I've found challenging to test, because it holds very little regard for stray wires hanging down or laying on the floor. If it encounters any wire on the floor, you can all but guarantee it will plow over it with reckless abandon. I suspect this is because it does not have LiDAR (advanced method for detecting objects), so it's limited to what it can see and interpret with what I believe to just be a pair of front-facing cameras. It can map a space quickly and accurately, and quickly finds its position in that space, so despite the poor small object avoidance, it can navigate around a room pretty well. The key feature here is its compactor. Living with 2 German Shepherds means I have a lot of dog hair, which clogs up a lot of vacuums, robots and uprights alike. But that's because hair takes up a lot of space, but can easily be squished. But, I'm not sure this robot really "compacts", as it does move the dust around so it's not restricting the movement of air, or blocking the dust bin opening. That, combined with a comparatively large dust bin, means it can do a bit more vacuuming between emptying's. So, I like its concept, the gimmick seems to work, but make sure you pick up wires and small things before you send this on its mission.

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  Posted 3 weeks ago by ILikeVideoGames