Vacuum mode is great on hard floors
[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] I have laminate flooring throughout most of my house with a mix of different sized areas rugs. Two of the rugs are the thin, washable kind and aren't held down with grippers, so I was pretty sure this thing would bunch them up the way my upright vacuum does. It doesn't. That was probably my biggest worry going in. Set up was easy, and it mapped my house accurately on the first try. The automated schedule makes the vacuum run on its own. I just have to make sure I pick up all the pet toys so they don't get wrapped around the brush. The Roomba does stop running when that happens, to prevent further tangling. I set the dock on laminate, and the Roomba has to immediately climb onto a thicker rug to get going. It fumbled with that a little at first, but now does it without hesitation. It transitions easily from laminate to rug and back, as well as over transition strips between rooms. The side brush does a decent job getting along walls and furniture edges, too. Vacuum performance is good on laminate, where it picks up pet hair and dust as well as my upright vacuum. On rugs, it's okay. When the mop pad is attached, it drags across the rugs, and pet hair sticks to it. It might not clean as well as I do, but it's nice to wake up to cleaner floors than when I went to bed. My main frustration is with the app, not the vacuum itself. Once it learns to route around a piece of furniture, it doesn't adjust well if that item gets moved. Right now, the best fix I've found is to build a whole new map, and that doesn't seem efficient for things that get moved often. There is a spot clean mode that will cover a small area, but by the time I pull up the app and send the vacuum over there, I could have just cleaned the area myself. It is loud, and when it goes back to empty its bin, that noise can catch you off guard if you're not expecting it. It "talks" to tell you what it's doing, but honestlythe vacuum is too loud for me to hear what it's saying most of the time. Though loud, the self-emptying feature is one of my favorite things about the Roomba because I don't have to constantly deal with emptying the vacuum.
