There's a lot more to keeping your Roomba clean than simply emptying its bin now and then. Take a closer look at your Roomba's brushes, for example, and you'll probably see they're tangled in hair. A Roomba's cliff sensors, which help to keep it from tumbling down the stairs, can likewise become blocked by a layer of grime, while its dust filter will gradually become clogged with debris. If you give your Roomba the occasional deep clean, you'll not only extend its life, you'll also boost the quality of its cleanings. Our Roomba cleaning guide will take you through four primary areas when it comes to keeping a Roomba spic-and-span: cleaning its brushes, cleaning its wheels, scrubbing its sensors and charging contacts, and cleaning its dust filter.

If you've just been dumping dust, dirt, and debris from your Roomba's bin into the trash and then slapping it back into your trusty robovac, you're doing it wrong. It's easy to ignore, but there's a filter inside the bin compartment, and if you're not cleaning it regularly--and replacing it once in a while--your Roomba will get less and less efficient as it sweeps your floors. If you haven't been taking care of your Roomba's bin filter, it's never too late to start. The procedure for cleaning your Roomba's filter differs depending on which model you have. For the popular 600 series (I have a Roomba 675, for example), there's a curved filter that sits in the bin itself, while 800- and 900-series Roombas have a rectangular filter cartridge that fits into the top of the bin.

I thought I'd been doing a good job keeping my iRobot Roomba 675Remove non-product link clean, carefully pulling clumps of hair off its brushes and wheels and emptying its bin after every cleaning. Little did I know that dust and gunk were building up in places where I wasn't even looking. First, consider the metal charging contacts on the Roomba's base station. When was the last time you gave them a close look--or looked at them at all, for that matter? I sure hadn't, but when I did, I saw that instead of being completely silver, one of the two contacts had a rust-colored ring around it, while the other was almost completely discolored.

When I first began reviewing robot vacuums, there was a sharp demarcation between budget robovacs for $300 or less, and the primo powerhouses that left your house sparkling clean. They were great for a quick tidy-up or to film your cat riding on them, but they weren't that powerful or efficient. This yea, you can get a whole bevy of features for a lot less. You can see most of them in the Roborock E20. The E20 is the more affordable version of their flagship mop-and-vac combo, the S5.

Robots like the 900 series Roomba, which have the ability to make detailed maps of your home while they do chores, are poised to become much more useful than they've ever been. These maps are in the process of enabling all kinds of new features, most of which we can only guess at, but iRobot will be giving us a peek at what they're working on with a late Christmas present: a new beta program for Roombas. In a next step to make the smart home smarter, iRobot today announced a new Beta feature that allows customers to view a Wi-Fi Coverage Map created by Roomba. The Wi-Fi Coverage Map feature is the first to be available as part of iRobot Beta, a program that enables a limited number of iRobot customers to trial unreleased product features for the company's consumer robots. Wi-Fi Coverage Mapping is a Beta feature that enables Roomba 900 Series vacuums to detect WiFi signal strength throughout a user's home to highlight areas that may have poor connectivity.