It’s round versus square in our Roomba i7 vs Roomba s9 whole home cleaning test, which turns the idea of a lab test on its head by comparing which robot vacuum can clean the entire house best.
We love robot vacuums here at Android Headlines. They’re one of the best ways to keep your home clean on a daily basis. iRobot offers some of the most premium robots on the market, with features that you can’t get elsewhere, including a base station that will automatically empty the vacuum’s dustbin when it gets full.
Both the Roomba i7 and Roomba s9 share that common trait but, outside of that, these are some very different vacuums with very different prices.
The Roomba i7 starts at $699 as of this review, while the s9 is well more than 50% more expensive at $1,099. That’s a big, big gulf in price, and it’ll cost even more to get that automatic clean base for each. So is the price of the s9 worth the premium over the i7?
We’re debuting a new kind of cleaning test for this video, called the whole home cleaning challenge. In this test, we set up different cleaning challenges in rooms throughout the house, and then have each vacuum clean the whole house at one time.
While putting the robot in a small area and cleaning gives us an idea of comparable cleaning performance in a specific situation, these robots are made to clean an entire house at a time, not just a tiny area, and the behavior differences between these scenarios could make all the difference in the world.
Our whole home cleaning test will let you know just how big of a difference that can make.
Here’s the test
The test setup starts with the kitchen. Here, we crushed one cracker and put it under the cabinet, while a full tablespoon of coffee grounds were placed in a mound in the middle of the floor.
In the dining room you’ll find 2 crushed crackers placed under two different chairs to account for the chair legs as obstacles.
Moving into the hall, we placed 2 tablespoons of coffee beans along the wall in the middle of the hall, while one tablespoon of hair was spread out in the far corner.
One tablespoon of hair was spread out in a small area in the middle of one bedroom, while the other bedroom has 2 tablespoons of beans against the far wall.
Lastly, the master bathroom was given a treatment of 1 tablespoon of hair spread out in the middle of the tile floor.
Which of these two robot vacuums were able to clean the house best? Find out in our video below, and don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more robot vacuum comparisons, as well as plenty of other tech that we cover!