Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This review is long, but if you’ll take the time to read it, I think you’ll find a lot of useful information about the Roborock E4. It is a good alternative both in price and performance to the random navigation robot vacuums, which just bounce around. Budget robots feature random navigation as do the less expensive models of Shark and Roomba. The E4 uses internal navigation to move around your home leaving straight lines and covering 99% of a room. Cleaning ability on medium pile carpet and tile: 5 stars Battery Life: 5 stars Navigation: 4 stars Customer Support: 5 stars App quality: 0 stars Total score: 3.8 (4) stars Pros: 1) The battery life is amazing. There are few, if any, manufacturers out there that use a 5200mAh battery in their bots. If the E4 manages to make it to every room, it can do our whole home (a little less than 1700 sq. ft.) in a little less than 2 hours on the Balanced mode, which I find to be sufficient. Our home has a lot of medium-pile carpet. I have the carpet mode turned on, so it will increase suction when it detects carpet. If you have a smaller home than I do or don’t have much carpet, I feel reasonably confident that it will be able to clean your whole home. 2) I have long hair, and we have two short-haired dogs. I’ve had the vacuum a week and a half, and it hasn’t had one hair get tangled in the brush. I don’t know how it does it, but it is amazing. 3) As mentioned before, it employs an algorithm that allows it to vacuum a room in mostly up and down lines, which ensures that most areas are cleaned, and the straight lines are pleasing to the eye. (Photo attached) 4) The bot can be controlled by the buttons on the top if desired rather than from the app. 5) The suction is rated at 2000Pa. There are only a few other vacuums out there that have a stronger suction of 2500Pa. It cleans VERY well. 6) The side brush is a silicone brush. It doesn’t have bristles, which I have read can get tangled with hair, so if true, this is an improvement. 7) I’ve had to contact CS through email support several times. Because the headquarters are in China, I would receive a message from them the next day, but they always responded to my emails. I might add that they were extremely helpful in providing solutions to the app issue explained later. 8) We have an entryway threshold that is ¾” high. The E4 will try to go over it sometimes and does get on top of it, so it appears to have good climbing abilities. Cons: I dislike using this word, because this bot is what it is. It’s not a “smart” robot per se, since it doesn’t have cameras or radar (Lidar) and can’t do some of the things that people think it might, but here goes. (And a few are definitely cons…): 1) Because it doesn’t use cameras or radar (Lidar), it is more or less blind. Like I said earlier, it uses internal sensors (gyroscopes and an electric eye) to detect objects, and it does a pretty good job of that. It makes a “map” of your house, but the map is kind of useless, since you can’t set no-go zones or section off/name rooms. You can’t tell it to go clean a certain room for example. And it will miss cleaning some rooms of the house and clean others twice, so... 2) It is supposed to be able to sync with Alexa, which you can use to turn it on or off; that’s my understanding anyway. We use Google Home, and at this time, it is not compatible with it. 3) It’s supposed to clean the internal part of the room first and then clean the perimeter. I have yet to see it do this. It mainly just cleans up and down but does go around most parts of the perimeter while in the room. It will sometimes clean the same path a few times, but I think it’s because it’s trying to decide where to go. 4) This is a big con for us. If the battery gets below 20%, and it doesn’t think it’s done cleaning, the bot will go back to the dock to recharge and then resume cleaning. Because I manually block some areas of our home with dumbbells, pillows, etc. to keep the bot from going there, I need to remove them at some point. With two dogs, they can also get their toys out or drip water on the floor after getting drinks, so I wish there was a way to turn off the charge and resume feature, as I only want the robot to clean when I know it’s safe for it to clean. I have to check my app occasionally to see how much charge is left, and done or not, when there’s about 22% of the battery left, I send it home to dock. It will not resume cleaning if you do this. You can buy a magnetic strip to make no-go zones, but I don’t want those strips all the time in the areas I need to block. 5) Because of connectivity issues, the best place for our dock is in the room with our router, which is a far bedroom. The E4 cannot find the dock many times and wanders around aimlessly looking for it, until the battery reaches 10%, and then it stops where it is and states that it has Error 12. I have to pick it up and set it manually on the dock. The funny thing is, is that it can be near the room with the dock, and when I send it home to dock or it thinks it’s done cleaning, it will turn and go the opposite direction. If I was able to keep the dock in a central area of the home, it might not have this problem. So I now just keep my eye on the battery indicator, and when it reaches 22%, I manually pause the E4 using the power button on top, pick it up, set it in front of the dock, and then hit home. 6) I had an issue with the app two days after I got the E4. The remote function stopped working and then the next day, nothing worked on the app except the battery life indicator. The vacuum settings and voice settings showed strange screens when I selected them. This is when I contacted CS. While in contact with them, I tried all sorts of things...clearing the cache on the app, deleting the app, and reinstalling the app. I finally decided to move the dock into the bedroom where the router is located. I deleted the E4 from the app, and then re-added it. When I did that, all the screens returned to normal, and all the functions worked. Flash forward to two days after I thought I got it fixed. The bot started cleaning using the clean command on the app, but nothing on the app would work after that except the battery indicator. I did everything I did before including deleting the device from the app, but this time, it said there was a wi-fi connection error. WTHeck. Good thing I only need the app to see the battery life (which it does show), because if I needed it for more than that, I would be SOL. The E4 cleans amazingly well, so I am going to keep it, since that’s why I bought it, and I can do everything I need to do from the buttons on the unit. I did contact CS about this again, and through a process on their end, I was able to let them have control of my app to see what the issue is. In the meantime, I was able to get the app working again by sheer luck. Customer service has continued to work with me on this issue, and they get a 5-star rating from me for their continued support. Other Observations: 1) It will sit and spin when it’s deciding where to go so no worries if you see it do that. 2) Spot cleaning works well. But by the time you use the remote control feature on the app to direct it to the spot, you could have gotten a regular vacuum and gotten a mess cleaned up in the time it would take you to start the navigation of the robot. So I find the spot clean feature to be more of a novelty. 3) The remote control feature has a delay in time from when you touch (and briefly hold) the button to when the bot receives the command. 4) Whatever direction your dock is facing is the direction it will clean for the most part. For example, if you have the dock on a north wall facing south, the bot will mainly clean in a north/south direction. So you may have to move your dock to face different directions until you find the best place for it so that it will clean the majority of your home. My final observation is that its best use is to just turn it on and let it run. Forget the spot cleaning, forget about trying to direct it somewhere, and don’t worry if it misses a few areas--it may go back at some point during the cycle and get them or get them the next run. I bought the E4 at the introductory price of $242. I had some Amazon gift cards and reward points that I used, which brought my price down to $157. At the price I paid, it is worth having even if it only lasts a year--that’s $3 a week to have clean floors. And if it lasts longer than that? Great! Other budget vacuums in this price range or a little cheaper have half the battery size and vacuum in a random pattern, so those are big turn offs for me. (Eufy or Coredy seem to be the best budget random pattern vacuums according to Vacuum Wars on YouTube and according to the reviews.) So for right now, the Roborock E4 is the best one out there for what I’m willing to spend.