We had resisted the urge of jumping into the use of robot vacuums for many years, but the S7 by Roborock seemed to actually have the right combination of benefits to actually entice us. Not only does it vacuum, but it mops as well.
Roborock S7 is truly intelligent
Like many home automation products, you have the power of cleaning in your pocket – with an app for your smartphone that is. The Roborock S7 uses LIDAR navigation and sensor array technology to plot and follow its path. I can’t claim to fully understand the technology but I can attest to the fact that after zigging its way all around our house, it knew exactly how to find the shortest route back to the charging station and recharged itself.
Adding human intelligence to AI (artificial intelligence)
Granted, the S7 is smart enough to do the whole house with just one tap of the power button, but with the smartphone app, it can accomplish so much more. You can create “rooms” and set different cleaning attributes to each; depending on floor type, carpet pile heights, etc. You can also create “zones” and do an entire zone while avoiding everything else, like we do for the rooms that we use the most.
You can also create “invisible walls” that the vacuum won’t pass. This is ideal at night, when we want the S7 to do the living room, dining room, entry hallway, and kitchen, but we don’t want it to come down the bedroom hallway while we are sleeping. It takes about 5 seconds to set up the “wall” in the app and set the S7 off on its limited cleaning area.
You can also simply tell your friend “Alexa” to ask Roborock to clean. That’s really cleaning without lifting a finger.
Roborock S7 vacuums with quick, quiet efficiency
Sure, you can hear the Roborock when it’s vacuuming, but it’s quieter than any other vacuum we’ve ever used over our 50 years of housekeeping. You can actually have a conversation while it’s vacuuming. But why bother, we just set it to vacuum when we go to bed, and we wake to a clean floor. Next best thing to a genie in a bottle.
Overall, the vacuum performs quite well. When starting it for the first time, it proceeded to plot our entire floorplan as it first went around the perimeter walls and then back and forth in 10’ by 10’ sections.
What was amazing to me was how persistent it was in trying to cover all the floor it possibly could. For instance, it could only go about 8 inches under our sleeper sofa, before encountering the bed frame., but that didn’t deter it.
Each time it encountered our four Hitchcock chairs, it would go as far as it could before getting deterred by the table pedestal bottom beyond. In and out, it tried to reach every square inch of flooring it could get to. Quite persistent and quite adept at not getting stuck.
In our bedroom, it was an even bigger revelation. We have a storage section at the base of our bed, and there are only two places where it was tall enough to actually get completely under. It found them, stayed under the bed cleaning for a couple minutes, and then tried exiting through the couple other areas that were just a ¼” too low. In each case, I thought it was going to get stuck, but it backed itself up, made a quarter turn and tried again. After a few minutes, it freed itself and went back to the original entry point, only to continue cleaning and heading on to the closet area.
There was hardly anything that it couldn’t negotiate, including running up and over a thick glass chair mat in my office, and a 3/8″ transition strip between our kitchen and hallway.
If it would have been me, I would have cried ‘foul’ many times and demanded a little help, but the S7 continued along undeterred. You would have thought it was a robot or something. Oh, wait…
Roborock S7 even mops up hard water spots on laminate
Not only does the S7 mop and vacuum, but it’s also smart enough to disengage the mopping head and lift it out of the way when it proceeds from a hard surface floor to a carpeted area. That’s some technology I’d never seen before.
The mopping is done with a reusable, washable pad and a 300ml water reservoir that only needs to be filled when you plan to mop.
With our laminate floor, it did a great job picking up most fresh spots like these juice spots (on the left), but with dried on hard water stains (center), I found it needed the deep clean, max scrubbing intensity set, which caused it to repeat each area more often.
That did the trick – water spots gone!
Smarter is even better
As if all this wasn’t amazing enough for us, now I see that Roborock plans on taking it to another level, with AUTO-EMPTYING. WTH! That’s crazy cool. Stay tuned…
See for yourself
Check out more on the Roborock home page – I can assure you that you’ll be impressed.
Disclosure: Roborock provided us with an S7 so we could test it and do this review. Our opinions, however, are and always will be strictly our own.