iRobot Roomba Combo 708 Vacuum Cleaner with Auto Wash Dock & Heated Roller Washing & Drying

Uses a newer "Rooma Home" app, than the older models that use the "iRobot" app. So keep that in mind if you have previous model(s). You can't turn off the status lights under the app, like the previous one could. Yet they are smaller lights (rather than the old light rings). It's like the app is new and therefore doesn't have as many features (which might be added later down the track?)

Room mapping is excellent! It figures out the fridge, sofa, bed and table, etc. Nicely goes around the house, switching from mopping the kitchen tiles to vacuuming the carpets. It can take 4 hours to dry the mop, but you can setup the automatic tasks to mop l...view more Uses a newer "Rooma Home" app, than the older models that use the "iRobot" app. So keep that in mind if you have previous model(s). You can't turn off the status lights under the app, like the previous one could. Yet they are smaller lights (rather than the old light rings). It's like the app is new and therefore doesn't have as many features (which might be added later down the track?)

Room mapping is excellent! It figures out the fridge, sofa, bed and table, etc. Nicely goes around the house, switching from mopping the kitchen tiles to vacuuming the carpets. It can take 4 hours to dry the mop, but you can setup the automatic tasks to mop less often than vacuum.

I got this mostly for the dog, who has a double coat and is currently shedding a lot. It brings up the pet hair to the carpet surface, but currently doesn't vacuum it all up. Two carpeted rooms tend to do this a bit. Under the app I figured out to do 2 passes on those rooms and optionally can also turn up the vacuuming power from standard to high (not needed, if doing 2 pass). Firstly pet hair fill up the robot quickly so needs regular passes and returns to base. What to check if not full however is the carpet type and static. iRobot suggests uses some anti static carpet spray (Static Guard for the carpet)? I have yet to try that. It however detects the pet and his toys, happily avoiding and my dog isn't bothered by it at all.

For a "premium" priced robot, you'd expect it would work well in a house compatible with the price point. It does not like complex angles and glass doors. The app is buggy, clunky, and there are issues with mopping with the robot. I guess this is the price you pay for being a semi-early adopter, because they had about 6 months to improve on the 705 Max. It's not clear what the difference is between the 705 and the 708 and from the website, there is none! Perhaps the difference is that AI won't include negative reviews of the 705 in the 708 search results.

But at the end of the day, YES MY FLOORS ARE CLEAN. It vacuums and mops at the same t...view more For a "premium" priced robot, you'd expect it would work well in a house compatible with the price point. It does not like complex angles and glass doors. The app is buggy, clunky, and there are issues with mopping with the robot. I guess this is the price you pay for being a semi-early adopter, because they had about 6 months to improve on the 705 Max. It's not clear what the difference is between the 705 and the 708 and from the website, there is none! Perhaps the difference is that AI won't include negative reviews of the 705 in the 708 search results.

But at the end of the day, YES MY FLOORS ARE CLEAN. It vacuums and mops at the same time, which is great. I like that I can set it to clean a specific zone, e.g. the kitchen, a high use area and quite dirty after dinner. I also like that it auto empties and does all that stuff but this is now expected of these robots, and the other brands have been doing this for years now. So I suspect this portion of my review would apply to many other robots. I would give this a 2 starts but again since it actually cleans for the most part unattended, and once you "deal with" the app, you don't have to deal with it much, then the only issue now this early on is the water/foam/stain streaks from the mop. I will try to vacuum then mop and see if that fixes it, or maybe some other settings.

But I don't like that I can't just save this kitchen routine and rerun it... though they must have updated the app recently because I now see a "recent" routines available. I usually have to re-create this routine and run it on demand because I'm not scheduling an automation for cleaning the kitchen as it's not always needed and exactly the same day/time. I've since created a new routine, we'll see if they can remember more than 1 routine in the recents list.

Why did I buy this? Black Friday Sale. I was also more keen on the roller brush instead of the two mop pads. I've been looking at the 705 for a while, waiting for reviews, hoping iRobot did something right. I have a 980 roomba which has been amazing since 2017 and it's still going! But I needed something that could do a larger house and mop. I was going to buy the Dreame X50 but it was out of stock, probably because Black Friday. Also, I thought maybe I could trust iRobot more with my data than Dreame but I have no proof that's true. Ultimately I want a robot that doesn't connect to the cloud.So long as Capitalism resign supreme, good luck! But hopefully someone who has more free time than me can make the 708 Max availabble via Valetudo. There weren't (still aren't) many reviews of the 705 and 708, so hopefully this helps someone. If I had a spare $3k I'd probably try the Dreame X50. Oh and because Amazon didn't buy iRobot, I was giving them another shop. Had Amazon bought them, I definitely wouldn't trust them.

# Setup
- I could not set this up because presumably the macron in my wifi is considered a "Chinese character" as the instructions state you can't use wifi with Chinese characters
- I immediately had to hard reset, at which point it told me it couldn't because it was updating software
- changed my wifi name, then set it up, at which point it had to update its software again

# Home scan
This thing can't deal with complicated homes. It thinks decks outside a sliding glass door is a part of the house and makes it a room. You then have to remove those "rooms" from the cleaning... unless of course you want it to clean your deeeeck. It doesn't do complex angles. Yes you can rotate the lines for splitting rooms, but you can create zones that aren't rectangles, and you can rotate the rectangles. This pretty much makes that feature useless for about half of my house.

# Cleaning
- SPOT CLEAN - Good luck trying to spot clean. You can't place this thing anywhere and hit a button. You have to use the clunky app. If your house is large, good luck trying to place a small square on a non-zoomable map! I think you'll do better at the circus throwing balls into clown's mouths.
- MOPPING - it often leaves film, dirty, and or soapy water streaks behind when mopping. These then dry as stains, which fortunately for now are removed with a proper mop. I've tried to set the settings to use less water (which is better for some wooden floors) and I thought that fixed the problem, but it did not. I also set it to more frequently clean the mop, that also didn't improve things.
- SMART DETECTION - not really smart. it's eaten books and other pieces of paper left on the floor

# App
- Making changes are slow. It's like this thing has the cheapest wifi antennae one could imaging.
- You can't save settings while the robot is cleaning. Not sure why.
- The UX for editing the map is a bit clunky. Resizing the map is weird and difficult. Editing rooms often doesn't work, says "error" but sometimes when you exit the map and go back it shows that the room was edited
- You can't zoom in when doing spot clean or creating exclusion zones. So if you have small things in a large house you want it to avoid, good luck.
- If your house has non standard angles, good luck!

# Other
- Sometimes it can't get out of the dock and starts cleaning the dock. Probably because of where I positioned it, hiding in a space under the cabinetry which I think it doesn't want you to do
- Emptying is super loud. Like super super loud. But cleaning is quieter than my 980.
- Sometimes the live maps gets all stuffed up like it's not where it says it is.