iRobot Roomba 896 robot vacuum test and review: Cleans up in chaos

Test results

Dur­ing the test clean­ing, the iRo­bot Room­ba 896 moved around the room in a com­plete­ly wild way, was not afraid of any obsta­cles and sucked every­thing in its path with incred­i­ble pow­er. How­ev­er, the whole clean­ing process took him quite a long time, which is explained by his chaot­ic nav­i­ga­tion. How­ev­er, the com­bi­na­tion of an exten­sive list of equip­ment and excel­lent con­trols pro­vide this mod­el with good final scores and a place in the mid­dle of our rat­ing of robot vac­u­um clean­ers.

iRobot Roomba 896 test results

Just goes to clean up

Com­mu­nica­tive, smart, sim­ple — that’s how iRo­bot describes the new vac­u­um clean­er from the Room­ba fam­i­ly. And this is true — con­trol­ling a robot can hard­ly be eas­i­er. For exam­ple, to send the robot to vac­u­um, a short press on the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton is enough.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can set a clean­ing sched­ule in the free Android or iOS app by set­ting Room­ba’s dai­ly and hourly sched­ule. The robot sup­ports WLAN, which means you can con­trol it direct­ly from the office. In addi­tion, Room­ba 896 rec­og­nizes voice con­trol using Ama­zon Alexa.

A report on how the clean­ing process is pro­gress­ing, as well as infor­ma­tion about emerg­ing prob­lems, can be obtained through the appli­ca­tion or using voice alerts direct­ly on the device. The only draw­back: they are dis­played only in Eng­lish — at least dur­ing test­ing, we did not find set­tings that change the lan­guage of the robot. Man­u­al con­trol in this price cat­e­go­ry is not pro­vid­ed.

Chaotic cleaning

Unlike a log­i­cal and order­ly appli­ca­tion, the Room­ba 896 itself is com­plete­ly unpre­dictable. When clean­ing, he does not build his way, but sim­ply goes straight through the room. As soon as the ultra­son­ic sen­sors detect an obsta­cle or the sup­plied light bar­ri­er, the robot changes its direc­tion. And so it con­tin­ues as long as the vac­u­um clean­er has enough bat­tery pow­er. Dis­charged to a dan­ger­ous­ly low lev­el, it goes to the charg­ing sta­tion on its own.

In this chaot­ic nav­i­ga­tion, one can only hope that even­tu­al­ly Room­ba will pass over every sur­face at least once. Dur­ing test­ing, he suc­ceed­ed, and the robot almost com­plete­ly cleaned the room. The dis­ad­van­tage of this uneven nav­i­ga­tion is the long dis­tances that the robot has to cov­er: it takes Room­ba 896 almost an hour to clean one room, while devices with a more log­i­cal approach to nav­i­ga­tion cope with the same area in just 20 min­utes. There­fore, this mod­el is not suit­able for clean­ing sev­er­al rooms at once.

We were pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by how iRo­bot han­dles cables and obsta­cles in its path. He con­fi­dent­ly bypass­es all obsta­cles, does not get con­fused in the wires and con­tin­ues his move­ment again and again. The vac­u­um clean­er eas­i­ly copes with door sills, the height of which does not exceed 17 mm. The Lego Room­ba 896 cubes scat­tered by us are either “eat­en up” or com­plete­ly ignored — this is a good result, because it is on this test that many (and even expen­sive) mod­els of robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers stum­ble.

Better than related model

In terms of clean­ing per­for­mance, the test­ed mod­el proved to be as pow­er­ful as all the famous Room­ba vac­u­um clean­ers. Of the 220 grams of quartz sand we scat­tered around the test room, the Room­ba 896 col­lect­ed 44 per­cent — not impres­sive, but very respectable, sur­pass­ing most of the com­pe­ti­tion. Cru­cial­ly, the Room­ba 896 out­per­forms its sis­ter iRo­bot Room­ba 980, which costs twice as much but was only able to col­lect 42 per­cent of the sand.

The device is equipped with rub­ber­ized “main” rollers and inte­grat­ed pol­lu­tion sen­sors. They auto­mat­i­cal­ly rec­og­nize espe­cial­ly dusty places, and the vac­u­um clean­er inten­sive­ly cleans them in Spot mode.

While iRo­bot was run­ning, we mea­sured a noise lev­el of 0.7 sone — it’s not loud, but it’s clear­ly audi­ble. Our tip: Pro­gram your robot to clean while you’re away. Then nei­ther the noise of his motor, nor the long dura­tion of clean­ing will pre­vent you from putting things in order.

You will find all test­ed robot­ic vac­u­um clean­ers in our big rat­ing.

Alternatives

Neato Robotics Botvac D3 Connected

The fact that clean­ing can be log­i­cal says Neato Bot­vac D3 Con­nect­ed, which even­ly dis­trib­utes its efforts across the room. This vac­u­um clean­er moves sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, has high suc­tion pow­er and picks up most of the debris. It has some trou­ble climb­ing obsta­cles, but it’s still way ahead of the Room­ba 896.

iRobot Roomba 681

If you want to spend as lit­tle mon­ey on a robot vac­u­um as pos­si­ble, check out the Room­ba 896’s “lit­tle broth­er” — a mod­el called the iRo­bot Room­ba 681. It also uses chaot­ic nav­i­ga­tion, but offers even high­er suc­tion pow­er and a low­er price. This vac­u­um clean­er is much loud­er than its sis­ter mod­el and does not come with a smart­phone app.

Features and test results of iRobot Roomba 896

Pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies