★★★★★ 1
Don’t make the mistake I did, Roborock is Garbage…
Less than 10 months after purchasing a Roborock Q7 it is dead, completely. It fails to power on, won’t connect to the app, and is for all intents and purposes a paperweight. This happened after a ‘firmware update’, and this in my experience has been one of, but not nearly the worst of the experience with Roborock. Firmware updates all seem to cause massive problems for the vacuum, from deleting maps, removing features, and now outright bricking the vacuum. Once the device failed I did what any customer would do and contacted their support. When I tell you that Roborock has the worst, capital W, Worst support I have ever utilized, I absolutely mean it. Roborock support is only after hours, meaning if you are located inside the United States, you will only be able to meaningfully communicate with support at night. They have a 24x7 helpline where Tier 1 technicians provide basic, extremely limited support. In my case it was “Press the power button, does it turn on?” After that I was told the Tier 2 support would need to be involved. Tier 2 support is only via email, and expect at a minimum 24 hours between messages. Roborock confirmed that they do not have interest in allocating the resources to allow customers to communicate with Tier 2 support. They do not see the value in it. So I waited patiently for a response. The device is after all only 10 months old, certainly they would just ship a new one and refurbish mine that was bricked by a bad firmware update. Surprisingly that was not the case. The response I got back was that the device was Out of Warranty. 10 month old, a $500 vacuum, and it’s “Out Of Warranty”. I was told that if I chose to I could ship the device back to them at my own expense, and that sometime later it would be returned to me and that they would ‘attempt to repair it.’
The thing that interested me here is the length of the warranty. I was confused and messaged back, assuming they had made a mistake. Obviously the device was under warranty, it was just 10 months old. I confirmed the serial number and again, waited 24 hours for a reply. It almost began to feel like a NASA mission, where I was waiting for some communication delay between me and a set of engineers on another planet. I am an engineer, and I have some experience with warranties, so I went to look how long the warranty was on Roborock Products. The warranty, it turns out, is 30 days. Roborock only guarantees that their products will continue to function for 30 days after purchase. Past that date repairs are only carried out at the end users cost. Generally a warranty time is set where you calculate the MTTF, mean time to failure of the components, and you design the warranty to be long enough to cover basic failures, but not so long as to include the failures of consumable products. Given this knowledge it’s safe to assume that Roborock does not expect their devices to last more than 30 days. The design is intentional, and these aren’t ’out of band failures’. Roborock is, and I confirmed with support, aware of the fact that their devices all will fail within a year, and the expectation is that the customer can, if they choose, continue to pay for subsequent repairs, regardless of whether or not this failure was caused by misuse, failure of components, or by receiving a bad firmware update.
All of that in mind, the actual functionality of the vacuum is also extremely limited. We ran our vacuum on a nightly schedule for 10 months and rarely was there a night where it actually completed the schedule without getting lost, stuck, or failing in some way. Low lying furniture seemed to provide an especially difficult challenge, as the vacuum would constantly climb onto the furniture legs and then become stuck. The solution ended up being placing ‘no go’ zones around everywhere that the device would get stuck, and after about 7 months of tweaking the map, we were able to get it to successfully complete a single run. Of course roughly 40% of the map had been blocked off and in subsequent runs we found that the Roborock frequently got ‘lost’ and wandered into No Go zones, only to then freeze and require us to move it manually out of the zone. It was a little like having a toddler vacuum for you, some part of the floor got cleaned, but overall it was more work to use the Roborock than it was to just vacuum it ourselves. Even when it did vacuum we found that it did at best a mediocre job, often leaving debris behind, and that the ‘mopping’ function left our floors streaky and resulted in a wet and smelly mop being dragged over our carpets when it transitioned between floor types. There is no function to tell it to vacuum carpets first and then mop floors, in fact it randomly moves between floors and carpets in a way that seems designed to ensure as much of the carpet as possible gets wet. The Lidar function is all but useless and in watching the vacuum operate I watched it constantly bounce and knock into things, seeming to have no idea where it actually was at any given time. It functioned roughly as well as a cheap robot vacuum without any lidar or advanced mapping features.
Finally, and this I only learned recently. Roborock is entirely located in China. I include this because for a lot of people there are serious concerns with services and hardware that communicate back with Chinese servers, largely because the Chinese government openly identifies that it has the ability to take possession of any data on any server that belongs to any Chinese company, which is why you have seen services like TikTok be blocked and why the Government has banned Huawei. Understand that if you have a Roborock vacuum that any data it collects becomes property of the Chinese government, including mapping data and anything the sensors detect in your home. This may or not be a big deal to people, but I feel it’s worth mentioning since Roborock does a good job of obfuscating this point.
Overall I would say that the 500$ Roborock performs no better than a 99$ Eufy vacuum I have upstairs. The LiDAR doesn’t seem to function at all, it seems to have no ability to avoid furniture or to keep itself from becoming trapped or lost. Even when it does vacuum it does a mediocre job and generally leaves the carpets dirty and wet, if you use the mopping function. I would highly suggest you avoid both this model and products from Roborock. It’s clear from my interactions with support that Roborock has no faith in their products, they consider them to be disposable and provide only at cost repairs after purchase.
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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023
