Customer Ratings & Reviews

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!

The Roomba 205 has strong suction with a flexible app and the Dust Compactor really works! Design The Roomba 205 has a large disc form factor with three wheel. Two are large and in the back, rolling forward and backward. The front wheel is small and turns in any direction. The dust compartment has the "Dust Compactor" mechanism. It's easy to open and empty, and because of the Dust Compactor, it should only need to be emptied every 60 days, or so. One great thing about this is the dock only needs to charge it, so the dock is nice and small. There are two buttons on top. One is Power and one is Home. Cleaning and Dust Compactor This robot vacuum can really clean! It really seems to pull out dust and dirt from rugs and off the floor very well. On the highest of four settings I'm very impressed with how much power it has. Not only that, but it pulled out enough that I could tell the Dust Compactor really works! There was a whole clump of dirt all packed against one side. The first time I opened Roomba 205 and saw the Dust Compactor I was very skeptical of it's usefulness. Now I'm convinced that its a great idea and really does what it's made to. It's easy to empty the compartment with the dust but not necessarily a clean process. It's not bad but I was glad I held it down in the trash can. I also like that it cleans methodically, back and fourth, to cover the area evenly (you can see it in the app). If you do two passes it does back and fourth one direction and then back and fourth perpendicularly to that, giving a nice gridwork of cleaning coverage. Sensors The Roomba 205 has LiDAR sensors that are used to map out rooms and navigate. This seems to work very well. It even did a great job of mapping out a room it couldn't get into because there was a drop off, a small step, to get into the room. If it can go under a chair or a table it will not show anything there and just work its way around the legs. A sofa, or other object it can't go under, will show up like walls. I should mention, it saw the step and never fell down it. It just cleaned along the edge and the rest of the room it was in safely. Obstacles The Roomba 205 handles most surfaces and obstacles well. It got stuck on dish towel that was on the floor, which I expected, but was curious how it would handle it. Removing the dish towel was no problem and it worked fine after that. That's the only thing it has gotten stuck on. One time the horizontally spinning corner brush popped off. It's easy to put back on. I guess maybe I didn't have it on securely to start with but I'm not too concerned about it. It's done a lot of vacuuming before it popped off. We have two rugs with ruffles or tassels on the ends and it has no problem going over those. Please see the pictures of those two rugs for an idea of what they're like. There's also a thick matt in front of the kitchen sink that has edges that are small ramps. The Roomba has no problem going up and over that either. I've been impressed at how it handles obstacles and different surfaces. Battery If the battery gets low while cleaning, it goes back to the base to charge. It will automatically complete the job after it charges. How mush square footage you can cover will be effected by the settings you choose. Two passes over everything or using a more powerful suction will drain the battery faster than a single pass or less suction. It's hard to rate if this is good or not but I think it does great and the fact that it will pause cleaning, charge, and then finish automatically is great. I set rooms with hard wood to one pass and rooms with area rugs to two passes. I use the strongest suction, because it just seemed like a good idea. Roomba Home App With the Roomba Home app, the first thing to do is have the Roomba 205 map out the house. You can name the mapping and you can sectioned off rooms or areas of the house and name those. The app lets you create more areas, like you could do a second and third floor for instance. You can also break up areas it scans into rooms. It will also let you add "Clean Zone", a small part of another area that you may want to clean by itself. For instance, I have a Entryway area that's about an 8' x 12' room. I made the place where the door matt is a "Clean Zone" so I can just clean that if it's dirty and the rest of the room is ok, or maybe one pass was good for the rest of the room and I just need to get the door mat a little more. You can also add "Keep Out Zones" for obvious reasons. There is also a history of previous cleaning jobs. When you open the app, you can swipe up and choose the history option. This will let you view them and zoom in. You can see exactly where it cleaned, when it started, and when it stopped. From the app it's also very easy to select the room, or rooms, that you want to clean. You can drag them up and down in the list once they're selected so you even control the order it will clean them in. As you select rooms and settings for the job it gives you an estimate for how long it will take to complete. Some options are Light, Normal, or Deep clean. You can also go into settings and change the suction from 1 to 4, and change the number of passes it makes from 1 to 2. You can set these and save it that way for each room, so in one job it can handle rooms differently. You can then start the jobs or schedule it for later. The scheduling options are good except for the fact that it's only done in 24 hour time. I'm hoping they add 12 hour time soon. You can also create different schedules, or "Automations" as they call them, and turn them on and off if needed. When you first get the Roomba 205, make sure you get the firmware updated or you could have problems with scheduling. Summary I think the Roomba 205 is a very powerful robot vacuum that does a great job cleaning. I think the Dust Compactor is a very well implemented feature that adds value to the Roomba 205 in that you should need to empty it very often. The app has lots of options and features. I'm looking forward to when the app offers scheduling using 12 hour time, but besides that, I'm impressed with the cleaning and the features of the Roomba 205.

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.

When I saw that this vacuum had a much smaller docking station than many robotic vacs I wanted to try it. I have a family room that is a step down from the rest of the house and my other robot can’t reach it. That same room leads to both our garage and patio so a fair amount of dirt gets tracked into there. I don’t need a big docking station taking up space so this seemed like a good fit and with the dust compaction I may not need to empty it for quite some time. I added the Roomba Home app to my phone, unboxed the machine, plugged in the docking station, and placed the machine on it so it could charge. After I added it to the app and configured the wifi it asked for a software update. That update didn’t appear to finish so after about 20 min I rebooted the robot thru the app and removed the machine from the charge dock so I could power cycle it. Placed it back on the dock and turned it on. The update appeared to complete after a couple minutes so I attempted to have it map the room. The start mapping button was grayed out and I couldn’t select it so I went to the internet for a solution. Didn’t find much but one person had suggested to just let it run a cleaning cycle and it might map then. I tapped the power button on the machine once and it ran a cleaning cycle and showed me a map when it was done. So if you have a grayed out map button just tap the power button once and let it run. It runs pretty quiet and was able to find its way back to the charge dock. We’re in the middle of a remodel and there’s a bunch of stuff piled in there so I’ll need to remap the room after it’s all cleaned out but it did a good job working it’s way around everything. Too early to tell how many cleaning cycles we’ll get before it needs emptying so I can’t speak to that yet.

I live in the country with finished concrete floors and we sure do have a lot of dirt and dust! I was excited to try this Roomba with the dust compacting feature since we have a lot of dust and dog hair. WARNING: when you open the box, do NOT discard the little piece of cardboard that surrounds the robot. Like many companies, they no longer include an owner's manual in the box, but for this one, you have to scan a QR code. Reading a manual on a phone is really difficult. I wish they would include a tiny url for this so you could type it into a tablet or computer.. The only part that needed to be attached was the little sweeper arm. Easy! Then charge batteries and you are ready to go. The only way to access the robot is by your phone. Again, a web interface would be handy as well for when you aren't home and someone else needs to use it. When adding your robot to the phone app, it will likely download software updates. Sadly, when I did this, we had a power outage! Hope that doesn't happen to you. I had to reboot and reset the robot and was finally in business. First step is to let it map the areas in your home. I was not really impressed with this robot as it did not go under all the furniture which sits high off the ground (sofa, dining table). the good news is that you can rename the rooms (robot numbers them) to good things like kitchen bedroom, etc. That way, when you want to clean a specific room that is not part of your scheduled work, you can send it there. The robot cleaned fairly well. I know I have a tough job at my house on the farm! After it had rund for about ten minutes, it got very loud. I thought it had something wrapped around the roller, but it was a small stick inside the dust bin. This compacter bin has a spindle with a whirly thing like a propeller, which I assume is how it compacts the dirt? Mine hasn't really compacted yet, so I cannot report on that. On the dust bin, I do not like the design very well. It is extremely hard to open it to empty it, risking the chance of spilling all of that lovely dirt and hair all over the place. Be careful! But, you ask, how did it clean. Well, it did alright, not perfect. I've had other robots, both Roomba and other brands, and they all seemed to clean fairly well in the corners. Notice the picture I included next to a dresser-- it's like it took a glancing vacuum at the corner. Most of the places it cleaned fairly well, but I found it curious since it did the perimeter of the rooms first in its mapping. Once it's done, it goes back to base, which is very small and lightweight. (Maybe tape it to the floor?). Overall a decent floor robot. The app has some nice features, like telling you how many hours of use are left on the roller or sweeper.

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.

The iRobot Roomba 205 DustCompactor vacuum employs a new feature (to me at least). Rather than requiring an empty once or more during a cleaning, it has a wiper arm of sorts to compress, or compact, the dust and "stuff" into a more compact form. We have three fur babies, so it will have its hands full! A few key points to kick things off: (1) this robot will vacuum or vacuum AND mop; (2) the aforementioned compacting function (which iRobot claims reduces the need to empty the bin up to 60 days); (3) navigates with the use of LiDAR; and (4) detects carpet so that any mopping function doesn't wet the carpet. So the bin is gone! And iRobot claims a 70x more powerful suction (with the footnote "As compared to Roomba® 600 series robots"), so your mileage may vary. Like other Roomba models, the app can be configured to schedule cleaning to meet your needs. Areas can be designated to automatically receive two or more passes to ensure an acceptable level of cleaning. Keepout areas can be designated, also as with other Roomba models.

This review is for the iRobot – Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum. I would call this an entry level robot Vacuum. But still packed full with features. Unboxing and setup set up went very quickly. You will find a QR code to scan which took me to a new app I needed to download. I have several other Roomba’s, But hey new Roomba new app no big deal. After setting up and connecting to Wi-Fi and fully charging, You will be ready for your first task. And that is creating a map of your home. Before you can use the Roomba it needs to make a map of your home. So open up all doors and pick up the floors some. This only took about 10 minutes. I was impressed with how fast and how accurate this process was. And when it was done mapping, it returned to the docking station to continue charging. And in the app you will get a lay out of the mapping it just did. Here you can edit the map some. Make no go zones or slit up a room. When you are done editing the maps. It’s time for your first clean. You can pick individual rooms or just let it clean them all. You can even set different cleaning instructions for each room. You can set the suction to max in high traffic areas and then back down to medium for rooms you don’t use as much. You can also pick how many passes it does in each room from 1 or 2. So the higher traffic room can get cleaned twice and other rooms only once. I enjoy how customizable this app is. We have 3 kids 5 and under so our floors are never 100% clean of toys. But so far this Roomba has be able to clean and make it back to the dock about 95% of the time. The one thing I would recommend is getting some double-sided tape for the docking base. It is so small and lightweight it gets moved very easily. So, after finding where I wanted mine to live I taped down the base to keep it from moving. And with the kids you can also disable the two buttons on top of the unit. This is a must have feature with small kids. I can’t talk much about the compactor as I haven’t had the unit that long that it would be full yet. And hey it also does a good job of vacuuming

I was eager to test Roomba's new 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum. One of the main reasons of wanting to test the iRobot vacuum was due to its DustCompactor functionality. I've owned a few robot vacuums and they have all failed on me in such a short period of time. With the competitor vacuum’s, the battery life depleted in such a short amount of time, or the vacuum being unable to perform reasonably well. I can report after a week’s worth of testing the new Roomba 205, it passed most if not all the tests I threw at it. Unboxing Roomba After unboxing the Roomba and installing the edge sweeping brush, I was able to connect the vacuum to WIFI. Once the device connected to the internet, a software update was performed. This took about 5-10 minutes to complete. I then was able to map my downstairs rooms. To my surprise, the vacuum properly identified each room which was a total of 5 rooms. Once the map was generated, I was able to update the names of each room. This was impressive due to the fact that I have an open floor plan and the vacuum still identified each room. Suction Power of Vacuum I regularly vacuum my carpet in my home at least twice a week, so to perform the test I didn't vacuum ahead of time. I wanted to view the suction power as well as test the speed and accuracy of the device. The Roomba performed beyond my expectations. I noticed the carpet was softer from the suction of the vacuum pulling the carpet fibers. The bin had acquired so much dirt and debris. I opted to empty the bin on day one since the other rooms in my house needed vacuuming as well. How this vacuum will perform over time is still yet to be determined. The Roomba app allows complete control of the Roomba. Setting schedules, automating cleaning schedules with cleaning profiles and having the ability to clean certain rooms versus the whole floorplan is really neat. The charging dock is space saving and allows the vacuum to be placed anywhere in the home. I can’t find many gripes with this one and can’t wait to continue performing test and see how the Roomba holds up over time.

I just got my Roomba on Sunday and so far it has been SO impressive! Really clean look and super easy setup (4 pieces to put together) plus this one doesn't require an auto evac dock so it takes up almost no space in my room. I have had 3 Roombas in the past and I was floored at how quickly the new robot mapped out my room. It bounced around the room for about 3 minutes and then had a map all ready for me to run my first cleaning session! I have 2 dogs and a cat so I was a little nervous about the cleaning power on the robot but it did an INCREDIBLE job. My upstairs is shining! The compactor feature is new to me so with all my animals I was a bit nervous that I would be emptying it all the time but I'm happy to report that no emptying required yet! Overall I couldn't be happier with the quality of this product.

The Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum has something that no other robot vacuum has had before. I honestly don't know where the dog hair goes. I have two golden retrievers that shed like crazy and I have to empty my other vacuums after each use. This one has been going for over a week and it just chomps up the hair and dirt. It's crazy how there is so much hair in my other vaccums and this one - there is barely any after a week. And I know it has cleaned. The dog hair is gone. It says that it will will do continuous compacting for 60 days. I would have enough hair for another two dogs in 60 days from my other vaccuums. This Roomba was very easy to set up an the the app is easy to use. I have only had an issue one time and it was my own fault when I left my phone charger cord laying on the floor and it got caught up in it. Other than that - it has done a great job going from carpet to tile and going under beds, and under furniture and not getting stuck. I have it scheduled to run every day when I am at work and it is always in the dock/charger when I get home from work. This is a great vaccuum for anyone who doesn't want to have to empty it every day.

Excellent product, very effective vacuuming, cleans my entire house and returns home without any help. It saves me hours of vacuuming. Very easy to empty. I love it! Thank you.

Easy set up. Pattern is efficient. Saves a bunch of time not vaccuuming.

A great buy for the price. It has a large bin that doesn't have to be emptied daily; I empty it every three days (because of a lot of dog hair). Other models I owned had to be emptied every day. In addition, my older models would just shut down when it needed to charge. This one goes back to dock when battery is low, and charges then goes back to complete the job.

I bought this to replace my old roomba that lasted me 7 years. Perfect for using on hard surface and carpet. Picks up cat litter and pet har easily! The mapping feature is also awesome - that way I can run the rooms that have more traffic!

I like this unit because it does not have a huge dock. It can hide it under the couch so its only seen when its needed. The suction could be better but this works for the inbetween times the real vacuum comes out

I love it and it does a great job at getting my cat hair but does not do well with elevation. Very intense to get caught on a chair and stuck until the battery dies.

Great machine does what its supposed to do and is surprisingly quiet. The wife loves it and thats all that matters!!

So far, I really like the Roomba 205. It is quieter and cleans corners better than my old Neato. I did not like that I had to operate it from an app on my phone, but my son helped me get the app and figure it out.

This little robot does an amazing job. My carpenting has never looked so nice. There is not even a smidge of dust on my hard wood floor in the kitchen. Thank you