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iRobot Roomba Combo 105 Design and Setup
Out of the box, the Roomba Combo 105 is a smart looking kit. It has the classic circular Roomba design, finished in a tasteful matte black plastic, with a raised LiDAR turret on top that houses the laser navigation system. It’s simple, functional and feels well built.
Compared to older Roombas, the setup process is fairly straightforward, assuming you can easily switch to the 2.4GHz channel of your home WiFi. This is something I couldn’t do with my Google router, which combines the 2.4 and 5GHz networks and has no option to split them. But most routers will let you choose channels – a quirk that anyone familiar with affordable smart home tech will be painfully aware of.
The iRobot app is clean and easy to use, and the initial firmware update only took ten minutes without any interruptions. The first mapping run produced a very rough floorplan, treating the furniture as solid walls and merging two bedrooms into one – RoboVac apparently thinks we should break down a wall – requiring a fair amount of fiddling in the editor to get things right. You’ll need an accurate map to label rooms and create your virtual ‘keep out’ and ‘no pooping’ zones.
iRobot Roomba Combo 105 Navigation and Obstacle Avoidance
When it comes to intelligence, Combo 105 is a tale of two halves. On the one hand, the navigation is great thanks to that LiDAR system. When creating its first map, RoboVac walks into each room for a quick scan instead of finding its way along the floorboards. When cleaning, it moves with a clear sense of purpose, working in neat, orderly lines that ensure complete coverage of the floor space, and moving in tight circles around the table legs. That’s impressive feat for iRobot’s cheapest model, and sends those old bump-and-go robots to the dustbin of tech history.
However, object protection is basically non-existent for anything smaller than a breadbin. Due to the lack of an on-board camera, strange socks, dangling shoelaces, Lego bricks, and phone cables will all be better than the poor Roomba Combo 105. This is a robovac that requires you to pre-clean your floors before you can use it – unlike more expensive options that can recognize and avoid those sweaty trainers you forgot you kicked off after your morning run.
After testing more expensive and more capable robovacs to avoid obstacles, the Roomba Combo 105’s lack of proper situational awareness is the biggest compromise you’re making by spending less. We’re busy, messy creatures, and we get less work done than we think we do, so the extra headache of running around before each cleanup as if you’re baby-proofing the place isn’t worth the cash savings.
iRobot Roomba Combo 105 cleaning performance
When it comes to actual cleaning, the Roomba Combo 105 performs well for the price. The vacuuming suction is powerful, and the edge-sweeping brush cleans thoroughly along floorboards. While the RoboVac’s round body gives it unbeatable maneuverability in tight spaces, the size means it misses a small spot in inside corners.
I found that the Roomba Combo 105 requires two passes to catch larger pieces, which it has a habit of throwing across the room with its rotating edge brush, but a single pass does the job with daily dust and pet hair on hard floors and medium-pile carpets. The robot’s ‘dirt detection technology’ uses sensors to identify more dirty areas and automatically gives them a second pass – a simple but effective feature.
The mopping function is as basic as it comes. Fill the onboard tank with water or an approved cleaning solution, attach the microfiber pad to a plate at the bottom, and the robot easily pulls it around while vacuuming. It’s cheap and fun, with no scrubbing pressure or spin, and with the pad attached, the RoboVac will automatically avoid rugs, carpets, and any area you tell it to. The Roomba Combo 105 won’t deal with any dry spills, but will give the lightest of mopping floors. Then again, the hassle of adding pads hardly seems worth it.