Just an update for anyone in the market for one of these. We have had our Roborock Q7 max+ for about 3three weeks now. as a little bit of background, we (regularly) have 4 dogs (3 mutts and a Mostly 80% German Shedder, errr Shepherd), and three cats. Needless to say the Shepherd and one of the mutts, a wire-haired Pitt bull mix, shed like crazy. We had a Eufy robot vacuum before and to say it was cheap junk is not an overstatement, so the bar was pretty low for this robot. We have really been blown away by how well this thing works!
We have it set to vacuum the main area of the house (2300 sq. ft.) every day at 0900 and 1900 (just to stay on top of the hair). We could probably just go once a day. We also have it set to vacuum our bedroom 2X a week and the Guest room and my wife's office once a week. This thing overall does s a great job (except for identifying and avoiding poop, yep that happened, and it took forever to clean it out ). The self-emptying base works really well. I was skeptical it would be able to get all the hair out of the dustbin, but it really does a pretty good job of that. I think I've had to go back and manually empty it maybe three times. They say it should go 7 weeks between changing the bags in the base, but we figured with all the dog hair we would be at about 2 weeks. I checked it last night, 18 days in, and I'll probably need to change the bag in the next few days, a little better than I expected! It also does an amazing job of figuring out how to get over flooring transitions. we took out the carpet in three rooms and replaced it with LVT, As a result, the transition between The wood Floors and Tile is pretty sizeable. At first, we thought it would get stuck, it struggled for a few minutes, but now it just runs right up to the transition, spins around, and backs out. this thing never gets stuck anywhere! I couldn't say that about the Eufy. It got stuck on the open floor in the middle of the room.
My wife and I were both doubtful it was worth the money. But we are really finding that it was. It. it is doing a far better job controlling the hairballs than we did sweeping three or more times a day by hand. If you are looking to buy a robot vacuum, don't go cheap, you get what you pay for. This Q7 Max+ is really the middle of their product line, but If you have pets, I can highly recommend this vacuum, you won't be disappointed!
You've got me looking at one of these. Their top of the line one is like 1500!! JFC.... by the q7 max plus is at 500 so it may be doable for us. Our eufy's suck
Yep, I was thinking about it for a while, the price was holding me back. Would have loved to get the S8, but wow I couldn't stomach that. I haven't tried the mopping out yet, and on the Q7 max+ you do have to set that up manually each time. I might play with it when I go home today. The biggest issue I have seen with the self-emptying seems to be if it sucks up something larger like a piece of debris or something, that seems to keep it from sucking everything out of the dustbin.
Just throwing my two cents into the ring here, I recently resurrected a project to get my Roomba working via local control.
Cutting a long story extremely short, I set it up with koalazak's rest980 package from github:
I have that running under Node.js on the NAS which is my "always on" server. That way, control of the Roomba is just an http:// call away, which means it'd be trivial to set it up to use Rule Machine. No drivers, no muss, no fuss. Assuming Rule Machine can send POST requests with a specific payload - see below.
Most of the calls are a simple http:// GET with the endpoint specifying what to do. Cleaning a room is the one exception, that uses a POST. with a JSON payload to specify the room.
To actually get the JSON, just use the app to send the Roomba off to the room you care about, then close the app completely, and issue the following command:
assuming you have jq (+) installed. If not, the output is a huge JSON blob, of which you only care about the lastCommand object, and from that you only need the pmap_id, user_pmap_id and regions elements. Just take those three elements, put them in a JSON object and that's the payload of the POST request.
If you are interested in something fancy. @dkilgore90 's iRobot Scheduler App also uses dorita980/rest980 as its backbone. It goes well beyond just start/stop control, its pretty interesting.
So far it seems pretty good. I like the mop as well. I also have a German Shedder... Seems to do well with the hair... Wires, legos, nerf darts, candy wrappers, etc will stop it in it's tracks... Sadly that's what having kids does....
We have a Roborock S7 Max Ultra. It looks after the whole ground floor of the house for us and copes well with dog hair, an important requirement as we have a large German Shepherd called Sam who sheds something fierce at least twice year.
I have set it up to mop and vacuum 4 times a week and Alexa's verbally remind us 10 mins before it starts, giving us time to put Sam's toys and bowls up out of the way. One of the great things is that Sam detests our upright vacuum but ignores the Roborock completely.
I'll offer a few new tidbits of advice on the Roborock Q7 max+. Make sure the dock is where you want it before you map. if you move the dock once you have mapped your house it will completely confuse your vacuum and it will think it's in rooms it's not in and get stuck in weird places. This really surprised me. I even had it clean the room it was in and returned to the dock a few times. I thought that fixed it. No go. the next day it was lost again. we ended up picking everything up again today and completely remapping the house. Not a huge deal. it probably was a better map than we originally had. But still a bit of a hassle. Also, while it does a great job with pet hair (we have multiple dogs, two being hi-shedders) and dust and smaller solid dirt, it is terrible with identifying and avoiding poop. unfortunately, we have a foster that isn't housebroken at the moment, and she has managed to leave traps for it twice now. if it does get into poop, you will learn really well how to disassemble and reassemble your vacuum. it is particularly tough to get the poop out from the wheel wells.
Other observations:
While the self-cleaning dock does a very good job of emptying the dust bin. I would still check it every now and then. We picked up a piece of plastic that partially blocked the port where the stuff gets sucked out so it wasn't being completely emptied. I manually cleared it and it hasn't been a problem since, but now i check it every few days just to make sure.
So my couple of weeks with the Q7 Max+ has been decent. It definitely keeps the place cleaner. Anything it runs into though stops it cold.... (We're trying to get better about picking up large stuff the kids leave around)...
Had this issue with a toothpic, bread tie and a lot of dog hair lol... Completely blocked the base tube. Had to remove the charging base bottom but as it is using metal threads all the way around instead of just going into the molded plastic, it was pretty easy....
I haven’t had too many problems with it being stopped. When I hear it starting up I usually do a quick run run make sure bigger stuff is picked up. Socks, dog toys bottle caps are our worst offenders. Staying on top of those things helps until teslas releases their servant robot!
I’ve only had that issue once. Dog hair. Or have one of those push button flex shaft grabbber tools, that worked decent to clean it out. We are running about three weeks on replacing the Bags.
Interesting. I haven't had mine clog up that bad yet. One thing I’ve been noticing lately is I’m having to wipe the sensors more freq than I did the first few weeks. Overall we are pretty happy. And it having the added benefit of making us keep stuff picked up. We are going to add a ruggable to the mix this morning, we’ll see how it handles that addition.
So far the biggest negative (and it’s not that bad) is if you move the dock you really need to remap everything.
