Roborock Q7 M5+ Review: 10,000Pa Self‑Emptying Power

I have used several vacuum robots, from plain jane to fancy smancy! This one is a mid grade that gets the job done, easy to operate and maintain. The mapping is a breeze, the floors look amazing and I can get other chores done while it cleans. This one has the option to set no-go zones and avoids obstacles on and off the map.

This is my first robot vacuum cleaner. As an owner of 2 cats, this vacuum cleans pet hair in corners better than a regular vacuum. I love that I can run the vacuum from any location, and it will show you exactly where the vacuum is, the path it has taken, and how long it has been cleaning for.

I have carpet and tiled floor; it runs seamlessly on both and self-empties after each use and charges itself for the next round.

This was the perfect addition to my household.

This vacuum cleans exceptionally well. The single disposable dust bag it comes with fills up fast, so buy extra dust bags right away — you’ll need them. Download the Roborock app for setup; it’s easy and essential. Alexa and Google integration work smoothly. On balanced suction it’s fairly quiet; turbo is louder but not unbearable.

Important: if the dust bin fills during a cleaning cycle the Q5+ will NOT automatically return to the dock to empty. It will only empty itself when it docks due to low battery or because you sent it back. So if it gets full mid-run you must manually empty the bin (you can trigger this from the app). The dock will suck the bin contents into the disposal bag when you choose “empty dust bin.” To avoid mid-run fill-ups, set up room mapping and create tasks. Mapping is fast and easy — save your maps, then create tasks so the robot cleans one room, returns to dock to empty, then continues. If you don’t use tasks and try to clean a large area (1200 sq ft in my case), the bin will usually fill halfway through and you’ll need to intervene.

It picks up very fine dust and dirt — better than my upright vacuum — and works well on short pet hair and dander. Big clumps of hair (from dogs) may be left behind but are visible and easy to pick up afterward. It reaches under beds and furniture where it fits. Don’t expect it to handle large debris like wood chips from a stove area — it’s not an industrial vacuum. It will pick up coins without issue.

Battery-wise, with a full charge I can clean about 1200 sq ft and still have roughly 15% left; it will return to the dock when it hits 19% if needed. My routine is to run it using tasks and let it recharge; in the morning I empty the dust bag via the app and run another task for rooms with less activity. Running it daily (or multiple times a day) yields surprising results — I still find a lot of dust even when I vacuum regularly. If you have pets, this is a great choice.

For spot cleaning you might need to experiment; pressing the home button on the unit seems to make it clean within a roughly 10-foot radius and it works in rows, but spot mode can be finicky. There are four suction modes (Night is quietest, Balanced is my favorite), and the robot ramps to turbo on carpet.

Maintenance: the roller brush will collect hair wrap. It’s easy to remove and clean, but you must reinstall the roller brush cover correctly — there are four tabs (two that angle in manually and two that clip in when pinched). If any of the tabs are visible the cover isn’t seated correctly and the dock emptying won’t work because suction is reduced. If the robot refuses empty commands after a loose cover, find the hidden reset hole in the dust bin, press it with a pin while holding the home or power button to reset the unit, then reconnect it to your 2.4 GHz Wi‑Fi (not 5 GHz). Re-adding the unit restores empty commands; maps and settings remain saved in the app.

The disposable bags are easy to change. The “7-week” bag I tried filled in about a week because the unit picks up so much. I didn’t buy the mop combo — I wanted a dedicated dust unit — and it performs exactly as I hoped. I’m getting another for my second floor; it senses carpet and automatically goes into turbo. Expect to run it a couple times a day or split cleaning into tasks so it docks and empties between rooms — nobody is going to clean 1200 sq ft in one pass without emptying. Overall, it’s effective, saves work, and I highly recommend it for homes with pets or anyone who wants consistently cleaner floors.

This Roborock is my third robot vacuum. My wife and I aren’t exactly neatniks, so the idea of a robot roaming the house and cleaning up was too good to pass up. We were early adopters, but the first machine—a very expensive $1,000 Samsung—was a disappointment. It was poorly designed and primitive by today’s standards: it got stuck everywhere and had no base station for automatic emptying. Its promise exceeded its abilities, and after a lot of frustration we finally trashed that pricey investment.

Next we tried a Roomba. It had an auto-empty base and a better physical design to avoid furniture, and as a vacuum it worked fine. But the navigation was terrible—basically a random walk. It would sometimes wander into a cornered dining area and never escape, obsessively pass over the same spot, and the only way to keep it out of certain areas was a virtual wall gadget that never worked right. It rarely reached rooms far from the base, couldn’t be directed to a specific spot, and often had trouble finding the base, running out of power before returning.

Then, based on a glowing review, we tried this Roborock—and this is it. It does everything we’d been hoping for. All the problems from our previous vacuums are solved: navigation, zone control, returning to base, and reliable emptying. It truly does what it claims. I can’t recommend this machine highly enough.

Yo quería el modelo con mopa pero me equivoque en la compra.
Decidí quedármelo y probar.
Me gusta, deja el suelo limpio.
Lo malo es que el cabello de mis gatos (persas) se enreda en los mecanismos giratorios y mi cabello es muy largo,80cm aproximadamente. También se atora horrible, pero se puede quitar sin problemas y sigue funcionando muy bien.
Si es necesario, daré una actualización más adelante.

You’re paying a premium for two features here : vacuum intelligence and in-app mapping. Those two features were important to me so I didn’t mind. If you don’t care about those things, go for a cheaper model like Eufy.
If you mind, the S4 is a damn good choice. The mapping is outstanding, controlling this vacuum from my smartphone is surprisingly convenient, you can also point it to a place so it only goes there, was useful to me as i cook a lot with flour. The S4’s map makes it smart and efficient, it will do the contour of the room, then zigzag in straight lines as much as it can. It also doesn’t care about most carpet, only struggling with the highest ones we use as a welcome mat. It had issues with bar stools, as it tried non-stop to climb the rounded sides, but I was able to setup a no-go zone in the app so it ignores the bar stools.

Great mid-range vacuum. If you wanna spend the money to get past entry-level products, this is a great choice.

We have this robot’s dock in our kitchen, and off of the kitchen, 12 feet or so to the left of the dock, there is a step down into the family room. Even though the dock has been in the same location since we first unboxed this robot, and the robot knows it has not moved from the dock since it last “went home,” the robot does an “establishing location” every time it leaves the dock for a new mission. More than half the time when it does this, it makes a beeline directly towards that family room step, and careens off of it. We’ve set up “no-go” zones, and an invisible wall, and everything else we can to make it avoid this hazard. As soon as it leaves the dock, it announces “establishing location”, and proceeds to launch itself directly over the step. My wife has commented that we don’t know why it’s lost its will to live, as it certainly seems to attempt to self destruct regularly. I’ve had to rescue it from the bottom of the step so many times, emptying the dust bin on the cheap robot honestly feels like less work. When it does stop at the top of the step, and realizes it where it is, it announces “invisible wall or no-go zone detected. Please move robot.” We’ll take the robot back to the dock, restart it, and…there it goes again right off the step.

Our other complaint is how buggy the phone app is. Often times we’ll have to completely close out of the app and reopen it multiple times to get the control screen of the robot to load, and things like selecting 1 or 2 passes, or the vacuum level, requires you to swipe to a different screen and back to be able to adjust the settings. Modifying the map to add no-go zones, pops a box somewhere far off the screen, requiring you to zoom way out, find it, and carefully drag it to the location you’d like it. If you happen to accidentally tap outside of the box, the box locks, you’re no longer able to edit it, so you must delete it and start over again. It’s like playing the old Operation board game. The Tuya Smart app that the cheap robot uses always worked flawlessly. You also can’t disable its tendency to try to “jump” obstacles. We have a stationary bouncer for our child, with a flanged outer ring on its base. The robot will run up on this ramp and get stuck. It will then back up and Dukes of Hazard itself over the ring into the inner space. Once there, it can’t get out, due to the vertical inner edge of the ring, so it cries for help after moving around under the bouncer for 20 minutes, trying to find an exit. I’ve established no-go zones for this, but we tend to move the bouncer to different areas in the house, depending on what we’re doing, so we’re left with sections of floor that don’t get swept, and a stuck robot.

A firmware update to make the robot trust that the dock location, which is saved in the generated map, is valid until proven otherwise when leaving the dock would alleviate 99% of our frustration. The robot knows if it’s been picked up or moved. Why it has to establish its location every single time a new “mission” is initiated, when it returns and leaves from a fixed point on the saved map every time makes zero sense. When my wife’s frustration leads her to donate this to the local thrift store, we’ll be looking at a different manufacturer than roborock.

For context, my house is a battlefield between white tiles and two animals who shed like crazy. It doesn’t help that it often rains and gets muddy where we live, and I love cooking and baking, which creates all sorts of messes in the kitchen. This is an environment for a professional cleaning crew coming in every other day (or every other hour) rather than a $400 vacuum-mop combo. Perhaps I should not have expected this robot to leave my house sparkling clean. This model may be better suited for less demanding homes, but it still performs an acceptable job with everyday cleaning.
Pros: very, very quiet compared to our old Roomba. Self-emptying dust bin function during vacuuming (very helpful with all the pet hair). No issues connecting to wifi (Roomba decided to be feral and never connected). Once my geriatric millennial mind figured out the app, dividing rooms, and different cycles, it was easy to use. It does a decent job when it comes to everyday cleaning.
Cons: battery life — at full charge, the robot will mop in the deep clean mode about 100m2 (1076 square feet). It also needs to be fully charged to vacuum the same surface in balance mode. This means I cannot vacuum and mop in one go. It’s okay for mopping casual messes, but I still need to use Swiffer for any tougher stains. No alert that the water tank is empty.