Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Although we have several vacuum cleaners already, I decided to get a Roborock so we wouldn’t be bothered by having to push it around. Our house is about 3500 square feet, mostly travertine and hardwood floor, all on one level. We have two cats and two Australian Shepherds, all of which shed. The Aussie fur is specially designed to pick up dirt when outside, and drop it indoors. So a clean floor one day does not translate to a clean floor the next. The Roborock is amazing. The first time you use it, it goes about mapping the house as it cleans, and remembers the map. It distinguishes separate rooms and color-codes them on the map it creates. It also takes note of furniture and obstacles, such as table legs, chair legs, and sleeping dogs. It has a systematic approach to cleaning, going around the perimeters of a room, then doing a back and forth pattern like mowing a lawn. It’s short enough that it can clean along the baseboard underneath a kitchen cabinet overhang. The app is great, but takes a little getting used to. You can see the house map that it creates, including rooms, walls, and obstacles. You can label the rooms so that you can direct it to clean only a certain room or rooms. You can create rectangles on the map where you don’t want it to go, such as under a dining table, and can a virtual barrier to prevent it from going into a certain room. It displays its path it makes on the app so you can monitor it. It will even make announcements on your phone, such as the dustbin being full, or returning to dock. The vacuum cleans really well. Even when we think that the floor is relatively clean, the dustbin is usually full of pet hair and dust. The dustbin is not particularly large, but it is really easy to remove and empty, so we empty it after each cleaning job. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a while the vacuum gets stuck in a situation and needs a rescue. Sometimes it gets into a fight with a shoelace, and other times the wheels can’t get enough traction to escape its trap. I’m hoping for a software upgrade that would send a help call to the app when that happens. I’m including a video of the Roborock negotiating a dogstacle. Then it gets hung up on a sliding door track. I’ll fix that by putting a virtual wall there. A screen snapshot of my app shows the path it took around Ozzie. Another snapshot when it finished shows the complete cleaning path it took, avoiding Ozzie and a no-go zone. The photo shows the contents of the dustbin after cleaning about 700 square feet in about an hour.