Roomba Max 715 Vac review: Powerful vacuuming, with a few snags
The Roomba Max 715 Vac focuses exclusively on vacuuming, using powerful suction and smart navigation to tackle everyday messes.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
LiDAR navigation allows the robot to map your home’s layout for more efficient cleaning, while AI obstacle detection helps avoid everyday obstacles such as shoes, charging cables, and pet toys. iRobot’s Dirt Detect technology is also on board to identify areas with more concentrated dirt and make additional passes to clean them.
With so many multi-function docks now the size of a dorm-room refrigerator, the Max 715’s accompanying AutoEmpty dock is a welcome change, measuring a compact 11.4 x 6.8 x 8.4 inches (HWD). It automatically transfers debris from the robot into a disposable dust bag, which iRobot says can hold up to 90 days’ worth of dirt.
The Roomba Home app offers scheduling, room-specific cleaning, and no-go zones. Its Smart Clean feature goes further, using information about your household and cleaning history to recommend settings and prioritize rooms that need more attention. You can also create custom routines for recurring cleaning jobs.
Roomba Max 715 Vac: Setup and performance
The Roomba Home app walked me through connecting the robot to Wi-Fi and checking for software updates. It also asked how many adults, children, and shedding pets live in my home. My answers—three or more adults and three or more shedding pets—prompted the app to classify it as a high-activity household and recommend more frequent cleaning with stronger suction settings.
The Max 715’s Auto-Empty dock collects debris in a disposable bag that iRobot says can hold up to 90 days’ worth of dirt.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
The Max 715 first did a mapping run of my home without vacuuming, which it completed in about 13 minutes. The resulting map was mostly accurate, though I had to make a few adjustments. It treated my breakfast room and adjoining living room as a single space and also misidentified a couple of rooms that I had to rename. The app’s editing tools made those corrections fairly easy.
The early result of my testing were mixed. The Max 715 excelled at removing debris from the area rug in my living room but was consistently leaving a noticeable amount of it behind on my hard floors. Bumping the suction mode from Standard to Deep improved debris removal enough that I eventually turned on Smart mode, which automatically adjusts cleaning power according to your household needs and cleaning history. From there the Max 715 settled into a solid cleaning groove.
