Customer Ratings & Reviews

I’ll start off with this: I’m lazy, and I’m bad at time management, so keeping my floors clean is sometimes difficult. I bought a Roomba to help with that, especially since I have cats...and litter boxes. I got tired of stepping on litter, too. Attached is a photo of my Roomba on its home base, and the “virtual wall” it came with. I purchased this Roomba in store with the help of a knowledgeable employee. So far, I’ve used it about 8-10 times, roughly. I turn it on randomly when I feel my floors need cleaned, whether I use the app on my phone or push the button on the Roomba itself is totally random. It came with a “virtual wall” in it, which acts like an invisible barrier to the Roomba. It won’t go past it, which is great for when I don’t want it getting lost in certain rooms. It runs for 1.5-2 hours before getting low on battery, and it begins making its way back home. It also alerts you when it gets stuck somewhere or when it’s time to empty the bin, which is awesome. Took me a while to learn how to empty the bin but a quick google/YouTube search helped me out. I would say this was a great purchase. There’s always room for improvement! The Roomba does the classic “bumps into everything” while it’s learning your house, which can be funny, or annoying. Give it time. It’s not quiet, though, so if you have sleeping kids or like a quiet environment, look for a different model of Roomba or another robot vacuum. All in all, I love it. There are no downsides for me, personally.

I’ll be honest, I hate doing the floors but with a pittie dog, and with allergies, I have to. This was a really good purchase. I just turn it on and let it go and it cleans my hard wood floors. It saves you time. All you have to do is press clean and it just goes and does its job. I use it every day and it has minimized me doing that tedious task. The only thing is that is a con is that if you have a high carpet or thick carpet as a transition from wood it won’t go and clean the carpet, it will continue elsewhere. For me the carpet area is so small it is not a problem. I still gave it 5 stars because it has really saved me time and and it’s just really convenient. It does a fantastic job in aspirating dog hair and dust. When I empty the trash container I’m shocked by all the crap it sucks up. Also you can turn it on with your app or even program it to do your floors from work. It’s so great. If you have pets this is a great thing to invest in and I highly recommend it.

My back cannot handle the heavy (or light) vacuums. ROOMBAs came into our life and my back is a happy camper! Keeps our main home floor clean with automatic schedules daily cleaning. Also have one at our second home that we run when we have pre-scheduled to run when we are there. It is amazing how much is collected after being gone during the week!

Bought this item with a good discount. Else wouldn’t buy something worth so much. It does the job very well. Except the fact that it runs over the same place again and again, it keeps the house clean.

This is the best purchase I’ve ever made in my whole life. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this thing existed.

This is a great vacuum for picking up the small messes and crumbs that accumulate on your floor each day. It's simple to use and is very powerful, but it often fails to clean a majority of my floor. PROS: - Fairly easy setup, but allow for a few minutes of planning. You'll need to place the dock in an open area where the Roomba can easily access it. Place the barrier device in front of any room or obstacle that you want the Roomba to avoid. Configuring the smartphone app is also painless and allows you to begin and schedule cleaning via the app. - Excellent vacuuming abilities on both hard floors and carpets. I use the vacuum in the lower level of my home, which covers the kitchen, hallway, office, and dining room. After 5 days of use, I have noticed a huge decrease in the amount of food crumbs, dust, and hair on my floors. - Navigates under furniture very nicely, including my kitchen counter, office desk, and stools. CONS: - This Roomba is scatterbrained at best. If you watch it clean, you will notice that it aimlessly bumps into walls, furniture, and other obstacles until it finds its way around them. There is no discernible pattern to its movement. As such, it tends to completely miss some areas of my floor and spends too much time on others. I've learned to run the Roomba when I'm not home so I don't go crazy while I watch it bump into a wall for 5 minutes. - The dust bin seems to get full very quickly. I typically have to empty it each time the Roomba runs. OVERALL: Is this Roomba going to replace your standard vacuum? No, and you shouldn't expect it to. What it does -- at least for me -- is clean up small messes and debris between my regular vacuuming and cleaning days. I no longer find myself stepping on food crumbs and dust on my floor. If you want a more customizable Roomba, you'll have to step up to a higher model at almost twice the price. Those caveats in mind, I'd recommend this Roomba to those looking to augment their regular cleaning routine.

Let me start off by saying this is my first experience with any type of robotic vacuum so I was pretty excited to get this product. In the Box: IRobot Roomba 890, Docking Station with about 6 Feet of Cord, One Invisible Barrier, and One Extra Air Filter. Use: Well lets just say this thing goes wherever it wants while cleaning. There isn’t a rhyme or reason to its madness but it seems to do a great job in larger and even smaller areas but there is a catch. If you want it to cover large areas in one job you must block off other rooms like bedrooms and such as once it leaves the openness of the say living room it aint coming back! If you do this and vice versa it does a great job getting the vast majority of the room. It gets itself out of very small spaces very well although it can take valuable seconds/a minute or two doing so. Don’t be surprised to find certain items slightly out of position from when you last saw them either as the Roomba will push things that are fairly light on the floor. The invisible barrier works great in both its setting so the Roomba won’t touch pet food or for blocking off those bedrooms like mentioned earlier. One thing that happened on the first run was the dust bin full indicator came on and never went off no matter what we did. It’s still illuminated and will not turn off although it doesn’t affect the vacuum at all so I think there may be some flaw. The amount of pet hair it picks up is incredible as well! We ran the robot in the same large area THREE times in a row (after a full recharge) and it managed to get two overflowing bins of hair and another mostly full one before we called it quits. Dare I say it does as good or better than our upright… It will find its charging base about 90% of the time unless you allow it to travel into smaller rooms and even closets. Finally the Wi-Fi connectivity has just gotten controversy as of late with these vacuums, specifically the 9 series IRobots. The more advanced vacuums will create a map of your house and when you accept the terms of use in the app it will allow the company to sell your floor plan and such to 3rd parties. Now although the 890 doesn’t seem able to do this “mapping” I believe the app still gets you to accept fact so it is something to note. Overall: I love this vacuum! Its good fun to have in the house and if you learn how to block off areas it allows the robot to do its job easier and more efficiently than getting stuck and not being able to do much. I would definitely recommend!

Very good vacuum cleaner robot. I own mine for two years and have never faced any technical issues with it. I run it at least twice a week and the battery performance remains very good even after two years of operation. I have replaced only the air filter so far, all other components are still in good shape.

We are both retired and now have retired our sweeper. This unit was on sale and I added to my fleet four roomba. I have one on every level of the house so no more vacuuming required here. No issues with this unit, cleans family room carpet twice a week using the wi-fi schedule.

This model roomba (890) is a good value. The battery lasts long enough to complete the space I have.

iRobot has great customer service. However, this vacuum does not work well for dog hair on carpet. It left rolled up dog hair all over the carpet. I sent photos to the company to show them what was left on the carpet. They replaced the vacuum but even the new one left rolled up hair. I had to re-vacuum with a manual one. I returned the vacuum to the store. I think it is a great vacuum if you do not have pets.

Very convenient, is my vleaning assistant. Very good

The Roomba 890. Great concept though I have questions about the direction of the company making different levels of robots which I will get to later. POSITIVES: *It really sucks… in a good way. It sucks hard on carpet, and sucks even better on non-carpet. When travelling from non-carpet to carpet surfaces, you can hear the motor rev up to do harder work on those carpet fibers. *It’s generally easy to use. 1 button – CLEAN – and away it goes. *Easy to dump dirt bin without dirt and dust getting everywhere. No bags to buy. *Can run via app while away from your home. *Battery is great! After running on tile only, I cleaned a giant room which included a ping pong table, a foosball table, an air hockey table, and a 6-ft long eating table with chairs… it took an hour and still had juice before it decided to dock. NEGATIVES: *Though there are no bags to buy, you do have to purchase new paper filters. Surely that could be resolved with a cleanable filter right? After paying $500 for a vacuum cleaner, I would hope to not have to make a lot of further purchases just in order to keep it working at peak performance. I’m forced to buy filters regardless. In this day and age of bag-less vacuums and washable filters, that’s one feature that should be implemented. *It’s random where it decides to go. It doesn’t get everywhere that you need it to go. If there is a heavily dirtied area, I didn’t see it really focus in on that one area more than others. If a person is to pay this much money for a vacuum, even a robot one, I would think it would do a thorough job and get all/most of the dirt. After all, what did I buy a vacuum for?? – to vacuum 60% of my floor? That means I have to get out my main vacuum and nearly do the entire floor again in order to make sure everything was done. *Once done vacuuming, it’s done. It does not pick up where it left off once it docks (after low battery or cycle just ends). And now I get to my point about different levels of robots. Why, as a company, would you want to make different levels of devices that clean your house? Why would I ever want my house only partly vacuumed? I have NEVER in my life vacuumed a room fully (not a spot vacuum) and not fully vacuumed it. It’s assumed in the definition of vacuuming a room – you vacuum the entire room. These robots are a bit random in their movements, and quite a bit of the room is not even touched one time, especially in a complicated room. However, take the Roomba 980 though, and you have more of a complete robot because it has a camera and tracks its movement to tries to cover an entire room before docking. And, if it doesn’t finish, it will dock, get charged up, then go start where it left off. Why would a person want anything less? For $400 more than the 890, you can get the 980. Personally, I think that’s a lot, but that’s relative. There is a lot of technology in these machines, but to pay $499 for a random floor cleaner vs $899 for a more thorough one… me? I’d pick a manual vacuum and do it myself in ¼ the time and for ¼ the price. Look at it this way, if you wash your car, would you only wash the hood, trunk and wheels? Same applies here. Great concept, iRobot – it TRULY is – however, there should be only ONE Roomba… one that does it all, and at an affordable price. Anything else is just shorting the customer IMO.

I purposely delayed the writing of this review to give me some time to get a true feeling and opinion of the Roomba 890 robotic vacuum. I was very excited to receive my Roomba – it’s something I’ve been wanting for quite some time. The unit arrive well packaged and was easy to open. I eagerly downloaded the iRobot App for my iphone, removed the stability tags from the vacuum used for shipping, plugged in the base station and placed near the wall in my living room. I connected the vacuum to my home Wifi and also enabled my Amazon Echo with the iRobot skill. I let the Victoria (you can name your Roomba in the app) charge for a couple hours, then hit the clean button and watched my pets reactions to this new household resident. After several minutes of the vacuum zig-zagging around the room and the dog barking at it – everybody got used to it. OK – let’s get to business. Overall, I’m quite impressed on how much dirt and pet hair this unit picks up. See the pictures of the overflowing dirt bins. I literally emptied 5-6 of these bins the first time it tried to clean the floor! What I’m not impressed with is just how random the unit cleans the room. It literally bounces off objects and may make one or two “cleaning lines” in a room before proceeding to another room if you have a fairly open floor plan like me. Note that the 890 does not say supports multi-room cleaning, whereas the 960 and 980 do. (I’d love to get my hands on a 980 to compare the two a bit more)! The literature says the Roomba knows where it’s been and will eventually clean the whole room – but that could take 60-minutes from my experience. If you have guests coming over or want to clean the floor quick – you’ll be reaching for your old vacuum. I have setup the Roomba to vacuum the main floor of my house everyday starting at 4:00 am. It is supposed to drive around and clean up the floor and go back to its base station for recharging if needed. I can attest that my floors are cleaner, but it has never finished the floor without some form of manual intervention. Either the dirt bin gets full, it gets stuck on something or under something, or can’t find the base station and runs out of battery charge (60 min max). So – I find it, I pick it up, fix the error or take it back to the dock for a fresh charge. I will say the app notification works well - and I can often look on my phone to see what the error is and how to fix it - so that's cool! On longer/thicker carpets, you will notice the cleaning marks it makes – which bother my wife because they are not symmetrical or uniform like you get with a vacuum. Again – my floors are cleaner, it’s fun to watch, it works with Amazon Echo and I’m generally vacuuming less often than before. If you could tell the machine to just clean the living room and it knew the boundaries without having to use the “virtual wall” device that comes with it AND it cleaned in a logical or S-like pattern, I think this would be a much more efficient unit.

The Roomba 890 vacuum robot is the best Roomba I have seen yet, and a big improvement over our three previous 500-series Roomba model vacuum models. Overall, it seems much more powerful (cleaning) and intelligent than its predecessors, it is also quieter. First, and perhaps most important, the 890 appears to have no problem with darker colored rugs (based on my initial tests with a reddish rug and a blue rug that the older Roombas had struggled with due to cliff sensor design) – I was thrilled to see they seemed to have solved that in the new model. Secondly, the Roomba 890 seems smarter, I noticed how without hitting a corner it would make a right turn around a corner without hitting anything (nothing for it to bounce off of indicating the turn – as the older models seemed to require from memory)-- Also it seemed to approach any furniture or walls SLOWLY. It still does come to a touch with furniture, but the touch is slower. The online wi-fi service gave me some problems connecting initially after it paired (there was a delay of 3-5 minutes before first instruction reached Roomba 890) – but perhaps after giving the Roomba fully time to register it seems to now be responding great over the wifi now and since. Even if the network was a problem though, there is a button on the robot itself to just make it go. I personally would not normally use the scheduling feature, only because I know from experience that these things need to be emptied after each run and I'd rather control when they are run. Still, with these easier cell phone scheduling controls, I won't rule out occasionally using the scheduling feature. I am overall very happy with the cleaning job this robot is able to do compared to previous models, and the convenience of cell phone control is a nice plus.

I WILL volunteer to vacuum. Of course, I haven’t developed my wife’s skills or strategies for coping with our home’s diverse floor landscape. All those transitions to wood, tile, various carpet types and back again, through a forest of chair legs, blind hallways, low hanging sofas, beds and chairs, and scattered debris, most of it mine. I’m a work in progress. Which brings us to this iRobot Roomba 890. Kudos to the teams of skilled designers, engineers, of focus groups who built and tested a robot that so successfully accomplishes that which has confounded me for so many years. My wife, our specialist, will have the final judgment on the Roomba. Setup requires a minimal amount of planning. The Roomba’s charging station needs to be located where the Roomba can find it, be plugged in and docked. At this point, after a few hours to fully charge, you have a working automated, intelligent vacuum. Hate technology? Don’t need it. Press the CLEAN button (x2) whenever you’re ready to vacuum. For me, it’s as I’m heading out the door. And I love technology, just not vacuuming tech. Most others will want to take advantage of the Roomba’s ability to schedule vacuuming sessions, get notifications, and monitor cleaning cycles from the app. Once it’s on your home Wi-Fi, a connected Roomba will work with Amazon’s Alexa. I’m not going to detail the Wi-Fi connection process. It’s not that it’s lengthy but it requires your close attention to details. My efforts required some restarts, but then, I’m notorious for trying everything first with minimal scanning of the instructions. Don’t try that with the Roomba. Also, you may be jolted by the “unsecured network message” (on the iPhone), but that only indicates a temporary setup condition while configuring the nearby Roomba. Roomba’s online support provides easy-to-follow help if you get into trouble. Don’t be reluctant to reset or restart, as this solved all my issues. How does this Roomba 890 work? Navigation is effective, as it deals with obstacles, drops, rises, and transitions without problems. Watching the Roomba negotiate my tangle of wires, sneak under our low sofas (low even for our manual upright), and easily climb over our various throw and area carpets is impressive. In places we were sure it would get stuck, it either solved the predicament or avoided it. The combination of sensors, thoughtfully designed rollers and spinners, and logic makes these Roombas special. Oh, and it is surprisingly quiet. We didn’t have to adjust the TV volume, even as it maneuvered around our chairs. At just shy of 90 minutes it found its way back to the charging dock. My wife’s evaluation? She’s quite willing to leave our home in the tireless, relentless, fastidious care of our new robotic housecleaner. The iRobot Roomba 890 is pretty competent. I think you know my feelings.

This is my first experience with a robot vacuum cleaner and I must say I'm a bit underwhelmed by it overall. There are some neat aspects of the Roomba 890 though. First, the cool and neat bits. The setup of the Roomba 890 was a breeze. Once it's out of the box, just flip it on its back and remove the yellow tags. Then you connect the charging cradle into an outlet and place the Roomba on top and it will begin to charge itself. Very simple and easy. The Roomba is programmed from a smartphone app and this process too was very simple and easy. I downloaded the app from the Google Play Store, quickly registered a new account, created a Wifi connection to my home network, and gave it a name. From within the app, one can set a cleaning schedule, look at its cleaning performance and history, and access troubleshooting tips and help. Actually using the Roomba 890 is super simple as well. You can start the cleaning process by either pressing down on the big "Clean" button on the top of the machine or by starting the cleaning from within the Roomba app. The robot then undocks itself from the charging cradle and begins vacuuming. As for its vacuuming performance, I would say it's pretty good. I doesn't pick up as much as my >$700 Dyson unit but that was expected. After all, the Roomba is much smaller and lighter and it will never be as heavy-duty as a Dyson. With that said, it still managed to pick up an impressive amount of dog and cat hair as well as some fine particles. The bin you empty after a cleaning session is fortunately very to easy to open and clean. Just gently squeeze down and pull it out from the main housing. Pop open the lid and shake all the dirt and hair out. To prevent the Roomba from thinking that the bin is still full, I had to use a dry napkin to clean all four sensor areas. Until I did so, the Roomba kept blinking its red light telling me to empty the bin even though the bin was empty. Now for the underwhelming parts. The robot is pretty dumb. According to LG's grading of a robot vacuum's intelligence level, there are 3 levels - a dolphin, an ape, and a child. The Roomba 890 falls between a dolphin and an ape. I say this because even though it is great at gently and deftly navigating around obstacles and gently slowing down before hitting a door or a wall, its cleaning pattern is all over the place and it never properly finishes cleaning a living space before moving on to a new room. The Roomba vacuumed only around 30% of my living room before moving on to my bedroom. It finished vacuuming about 50% of the bedroom before moving on to the other room where it got stuck cleaning the same areas over and over again until the unit stopped because it ran out of battery. Second, because of its haphazard cleaning pattern and very "short-term memory," cleaning takes a long time. It is much faster to use a traditional vacuum cleaner. What takes 10 to 15 minutes to vacuum manually, the Roomba 890 needs about an hour. I'm hoping with future firmware updates, the Roomba 890's cleaning algorithm will be improved upon so it will properly finish cleaning one living space before moving on to the next. If future updates does improve its performance, I'll be certain to update my review and score. All in all, the techie side of me is entertained and somewhat fascinated by this kind of technology but I'm ultimately underwhelmed and slightly disappointed that this Roomba 890 wasn't more efficient, "self-aware," and intelligent. I would not recommend this to family and friends at its current state.

Set up was a bit contentious. It doesn't work on a guest network. We installed/un-installed app and set up 15 times with the help of Tech support over a week and a half. They were not so helpful countering what was on the website & FAQs. It will work on its own without the setup connecting it to your phone/Alexa by pressing the button on top. You can start, pause, return home or stop w/ Alexa too. Overall does a very good job for light vacuuming. It doesn't replace your regular vacuum or vacuuming. Impressed with the amount of dust and pet hair it picks up and hair not wrapping up on brushes. The suction packs a lot in the dust bin which is at capacity by the time the battery is low and returned home. Electrical cords and small rugs can be an issue; pick them up or block that area. It's wondering path does a good job of vacuuming while not appearing efficient. Covered the entire first floor in/out of every room in two cleaning cycles. Impressively returns home most of the time without issue. The APP notifications tell you whether job complete or stuck as well as return home option in the middle of cleaning.

This was my first robot vacuum, and overall it exceeds my expectations. Yes, the pattern seems random, but it does seem to cover the entire room. We have a large home and two large dogs, and with the dog hair, as expected, the bin fills rapidly. It requires emptying every 15 minutes or so, which means setting it to clean when you are not home is not an option. It will fill and eventually stop until emptied. So on the plus side we don't spend 1-2 hours per week manually vacuuming the main floor. The down side is we have to get up regularly to empty the bin. It's a trade-off that in one month of use seems worthwhile. We've also learned to use the virtual wall unit (which came damaged, btw, but works fine) to clean one section of the house at a time. This ensures each section gets fully cleaned before the Roomba needs a recharge. It takes three charges to fully clean 3,000 sq. ft. All in, for $400 it was still expensive, but it gets the house clean enough that running the upright is rarely necessary.

My first robot vacuum, so I’m still adjusting to the quirks they have. I really like being able to program a schedule with smartphone. I have it scheduled 3 times a week for main floor and I am still amazed at the dirt it picks up every time I empty it. We have solid floors throughout. You will get notifications when there’s an issue, which is great, BUT for me, it happens every time. I have removed obstacles and blocked off areas which were problematic, but it still finds a way to either get stuck or “needs attention”. I was hoping to have it run during the day while at work, because it’s pretty loud. But then it alerts me while at work and then it won’t finish job. So, now back to babysitting it while it runs so I can learn what traps are still hindering its performance. I am open minded about expectations of these things, I know I am not getting rid of my upright. I did some research, and MAYBE a more expensive model has better luck (camera, or LIDAR navigation)?? I just didn’t want to spend that much while still needing an upright. I will say, when I take it to the basement on the weekend, it runs flawlessly! I also run it on 2nd floor but it’s got a problem with the rug in our master bedroom. It is neat to just bring it to an area and hit start though! Now I can attempt another project around the house while it cleans! It’s pretty light weight and has a nice recessed handle for carrying around to other areas. In summary: GOOD - great cleaning (when you set it up for success) - convenient - smartphone communication -lightweight, easy to carry to another floor - easy to empty - still needs attention every cycle - which kinda hurts the convenience of it - Loud (maybe run it during a workout or some chore that doesn’t need mental focus?) - still expensive because you will need an upright to get what it can’t - takes awhile (almost an hour—I’d be done in 15/20 min with upright