When it comes to robotic vacuum cleaners, only one brand pops into the minds of most people: iRobot. The company’s line of Roombas has dominated the market by being the most technologically advanced (for each generation’s time) robots. In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at the Roomba 675 – a budget-friendly robotic vacuum cleaner initially released in the third quarter of 2018 but remains relevant to this day. How, you ask? Keep reading to find out!
Cleaning Performance
The 675 uses the same cleaning, filtering, and navigation system as the 690. It uses a soft-bristle brushroll with one side brush, Aerovac filter and suction, and basic dirt detection and navigation. The 675 excels at cleaning hardwood, laminate, and tiled floors; it has an effectiveness rating of over 90% for large debris (cereal) and fine grains (rice, sugar, and dust).
On carpeting, the 675 may require making multiple passes in order to pick up every speck of dust, salt, and grain on your floors. This is actually quite surprising since the 675 delivers 600-Pa of suction power at most. To put this into perspective, the average handheld vacuuming unit can produce 2,000 Pa.
Basic Navigation
As you can imagine, the budget-friendly 675 isn’t packing the latest and greatest pieces of robotic vacuum technology. One area where this is noticeable is the navigation system which dictates how the robot detects obstacles and how it goes about cleaning your floors.
The navigation system is a lot better than older Roomba models, but mishaps do occur every now and then (getting trapped under low-hanging couches or in piles of clothes).
Stiff-Bristle Brushroll
A stiff-bristle brushroll is a great general-purpose cleaning mechanism. The bristles aren’t so still that they’ll leave marks on laminate and hardwood floors, but they’re rigid enough to dig deep into carpet fibers to extract embedded crumbs hiding in the fibers. However, they are prone to becoming tangled when it encounters long strands of human and pet hair, but a pair of scissors can straighten the problem out in a jiffy.
Battery Life
Since the 675 isn’t the latest Roomba model to hit the market, you can expect that it doesn’t have the best battery life. That’s not to say that the 1,800-mAh battery is bad – in fact, the average runtime on a full battery is 1-1/2 hours for every 3 hours of charging.
The good thing is that upon sensing a low battery, the 675 will make head back to its charging station to refuel automatically. The bad news is that there is no auto-resume function, so you’ll need to manually instruct the 675 to get back to work (starting the cleaning cycle over from the beginning).
App and Voice Control
Even though there is no auto-resume function, this doesn’t mean it’s not a convenient robot to have around. The 675 can connect to your home’s Wi-Fi router, and by downloading the iRobot HOME App on your smartphone, you can tell the robot what to do. There’s even a programmable schedule that you can set up for each day of the week.
Don’t feel like using your smartphone or tablet? Just set the 675 to your Amazon Echo or Google Home and have Alexa or Assistant relay your orders to the robotic vacuum cleaner. Hands-free is definitely the way to be.
Virtual Wall
The number of programmable options in the iRobot HOME App for the 675 is limited at best. For instance, there is no selective room cleaning (a newer feature implemented in later Roomba models), and you can’t create no-go zones through the app.
Instead, to prevent your robot from wandering into no-robot territory, you’ll have to set up a virtual wall – a miniature obelisk that shoots a laser telling the robot not to pass. Sadly, the 675 only comes with a single virtual wall.
HEPA Filter
One of the more extraordinary things about the Roomba 675 is that it uses a True HEPA Filter to trap microscopic particles and organisms within the dustbin with no hope of escape.
True HEPA Filters have an effectiveness rating of 99.97% at trapping pollutants as small as 0.3 microns in size. Dust mites, their waste and eggs, dander, pollen, and basically any common allergen will never escape the clutches of the 675’s HEPA filter.
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Roomba 675 Robot Vacuum
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Comparison Articles
Roomba 614 vs. 640 vs. 652 vs. 671 vs. 675 vs. 690
Roomba i7+ vs. 980 vs. 960
Roomba e5 vs. e6
Roomba 675 vs. 690
Verdict
Overall, if you’re in need of a robotic vacuum cleaner but don’t want to spend a million bucks on one, then the budget-friendly iRobot Roomba 675 is arguably the best robot you’ll find, at least in this day and age.
There are a few drawbacks of the 2018 model – lack of mapping technology and app features – but as is, there’s really nothing to complain about, especially if you take into account its magnificent overall cleaning performance, runtime, and filter.
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