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★★★★★ 5
Great for large amounts of pet hair
Color: Black04
Unboxed it today and got it cleaning the main part of the house after just charging it to 51%. I am still having trouble believing how good it is, especially in cleaning up clumps of pet hair all over the place.
We have multiple dogs and cats who shed constantly and copiously, and I have black floors to boot (pro tip: pets and black floors are a bad combination). In addition, the beasts keep tracking in mud/dirt from the backyard and leave muddy (when raining) and dusty (when dry) paw marks all over the place.
So I set out to see how the S7 would deal with the worst of it. I decided to not manually vacuum first because I wanted to stress-test it with a week's worth of pet hair clumped all over the place along with a filthy floor.
I installed the Roborock app on an Android tablet (with no Google account on it, got the app off apkpure, natch), created a Roborock account, and used the app to connect the robot to my Wifi and install a firmware update which was available. I then filled the water reservoir and snapped on the mop attachment with the mop cloth on it. Then as soon as the charge level hit 51% I pressed the "Clean" button in the app and waited to see how the robot would tackle the very unclean floor.
The S7 was totally up to the challenge, and right out of the dock it left a strip of unbelievably clean floor. Now I wish I had taken photographs, because this thing just went gangbusters on all the clumps of hair and dust on the floor and I'm still pleasantly shocked by how good a job it did.
The area mapping algorithm is pretty efficient and effective - it divided up non-rectilinear areas into blocks of rectangles, and after systematically cleaning the rectangular area it went to clean the irregularly shaped areas (of which my house has many; I think the architect hated 90-degree angles and liked conic sections). As the robot moves about doing its business, the app shows real-time progress of the robot's movement as well as new areas of the map appearing - if you've played an RPG computer game, the map update as the LIDAR refines the map and shows new areas is very like how games like Baldur's Gate, Diablo, etc uncover new areas of the map as you explore them.
It did most of the main area in 34 minutes, using up 32% of charge. Just as it negotiated the tall bumpy threshold into one of the bedrooms, it decided it needed to return to the dock for charging. Now, that threshold between the bedroom and the main area is quite large, and I was expecting that I'd need to go help the robot back into the main area so it could go dock itself, but after a few seconds I heard it trundling back in and it headed straight to the dock and plugged itself in to charge.
At this point I plucked it off the dock to see exactly how much trouble it had gotten itself into with all the pet hair it had sucked up so far. I expected that the roller would be wound solid with pet hair and that I'd need a session with scissors and patience. It was not needed - the roller was completely clean, and most of the pet hair it had sucked up was in the dust bin. One compressed clump of pet hair was up against a wall, but I think it got dislodged there as the robot cleaned the floor at the wall junction.
The dustbin itself could be designed a bit better because it has a couple of baffles across the top of it (under a removable filter) which make it a little difficult to empty the dustbin of pet hair - I had to pick out clumps with my fingers and pitch them in a dustbin. No biggie, though.
I then checked the state of the mop cloth to see whether the cleaned-up pet hair was felted to the cloth, and again I was impressed by how little pet hair was actually on the mop cloth; I expected lots but found almost none, which was further proof that the robot had vacuumed up whatever it encountered. The water reservoir was about half empty.
Sound-wise, the robot is not that noisy when cleaning - to me it seems to be less noisy than a regular non-robotic vacuum cleaner.
The robot is currently resting (charging) and I've refilled the water reservoir. Can't wait to see how the algorithm handles cleaning when it has to resume cleaning where it left off.
One thing I have to mention: since Roborock is a Chinese company I had some privacy concerns regarding house maps etc (remember the Roomba scandal from a few years ago?) which remain to be assuaged, but the company's product page for the S7 MaxV Ultra (the S7's bigger better brother) states that they have privacy certifications from a well-known German arbiter whose name escapes me at the moment, so perhaps this is not going to be a problem after all.
All in all, I am VERY impressed by this thing and will definitely be buying the AutoDock for it. Next year, I'll buy its bigger brother the S7 MaxV Ultra (with double the suction power, and a snazzy self-cleaning AutoDock) when I have some money to drop on it.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2022
