As self-emptying technology becomes more common, base stations for robot vacuums have gotten larger—that's where all the dirt and dust is being stored, after all. The $469.99 iRobot Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo aims to minimize your contact with collected dirt while doing away with the large base station by compacting the debris it collects and storing it in the robot itself, so you only have to empty it every month or two. It's an innovative feature, and the 205 vacuums well, but its short battery life and lackluster mop performance keep it from topping the budget-friendly $299.99 TP-Link Tapo RV30 Max Plus as our Editors’ Choice.
The Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo does away with the need for a large base station while still promising to hold 60 days of dirt. A simple plastic fin in the dustbin itself squeezes all dirt to one side or the other after a run, making the most of the space and maximizing the time before it needs to be emptied without a separate dust bag in the base station. While not as splashy as a retractable robot arm, the DustCompactor is a cool, practical innovation that eliminates the need for a large, unsightly base station.
With its self-compacting dustbin, the Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo Robot is the most innovative member of iRobot’s current lineup. Roomba offers the 205 in variants with and without a mopping attachment. The vacuum-only $449 Roomba 205 otherwise matches the specs of the Combo.
As a more traditional alternative, the Roomba 105 ($469 for the combo or $449 for vacuum only) shares the same specs and pricing as the 205, but comes with a self-emptying base station instead of a built-in dust compactor. iRobot has refined the design of the bag on the 105 to hold 75 days of dirt instead of the standard 60. The 105 is also available with a non-self-emptying base station ($319 for the combo or $299 for vacuum only), replacing the $274.99 Roomba Combo Essential at the bottom of the company’s lineup.
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All of the 205 and 105 models have 7,000 Pascals (Pa) of suction, beating the Tapo RV30 Max Plus (5,300Pa). iRobot doesn’t specify the Pa of the Roomba Combo Essential (or any of its other robot vacuums released before this new lineup), but says the 205 and 105 series models offer 250% more suction power than that model.
In another step up over the Combo Essential, the 205 and 105 series models have LiDAR navigation so they can map your floor plan, navigate systematically, target specific rooms, and steer clear of restricted areas you set up in the app. The Combo Essential uses rudimentary bump navigation.
Otherwise, the 205 and 105 series have built-in Wi-Fi and work with Alexa and Google Assistant for voice controls through compatible smart speakers. Additionally, they have obstacle detection and avoidance technology, carpet detection sensors, and smart scrub modes in their respective mopping variants.
The 205's novel dustbin is enormous, taking up most of the robot's back half. Depressing a gray plastic lever on top releases it, and then it opens by firmly pulling up from an indent on its back. I would occasionally exert too much force when opening the dustbin, spilling some dirt and knocking loose the installed filter within.
Once open, the plastic DustCompactor fin stands out in the middle of the space. It does a good job of keeping collected dirt pressed firmly to the side to allow room for more, though I would have appreciated a more ergonomic way to open the container and ditch the dirt when it does finally fill up.
Despite the large dustbin, the disc-shaped Roomba 205 still only measures 14.1 by 14.1 by 4.0 inches (LWH). The Tapo RV30 Max Plus measures 13 by 13 by 3.9 inches. The 205's base is much smaller than any with self-emptying functionality. It’s a simple black rectangle with a ramp in front holding charging contacts. Its only purpose is to give the robot a place to recharge.
Otherwise, the all-black Roomba 205 Combo matches the rest of iRobot’s current robot floor cleaner lineup with a simple grid pattern on the top. The upper left corner is textured and features the company logo. The bottom half has a matte finish and holds the dustbin. The top right corner is a reflective surface that holds the two buttons comprising the physical controls. Hold the power button to turn the robot on or off, or tap it to start or pause a run. Tap the home button to send the robot back to its base.
The front of the robot has a bumper surrounding a clear plastic panel protecting its sensors. On the bottom of the robot, there's a caster wheel flanked by two charging contacts at the front, a side brush in the upper left corner, and the main rubber brush roll in the middle. Large, retracting wheels jut out on either side of this main brush, and cliff sensors circle the perimeter.
The mopping attachment combines a washable cloth pad and a hard plastic plate that holds a water reservoir. The whole thing slides and snaps into place underneath the robot. The cloth pad has a rigid edge that slides into a slot at the front of the plate. The rest of the pad sticks in place with Velcro. A blue plastic lip on top of the plate flips open so you can fill the reservoir with cool tap water. Green notches keep the plate locked in place on the robot, and buttons on the outer edges let you detach it.
Cleverly, you can both slide the mop into place and detach it without ever lifting the robot, but doing so takes a little practice. I initially thought the power conduits on either side of the mop plate were magnets, and expected the plate to sit firmly in place once I slid it into position. Roomba’s instructions for this aren’t clear, but sliding it into place isn’t enough to secure it. This caused a few errors in my first testing run: The app didn’t want to start a mopping run because it sensed the presence of the plate but knew it wasn’t fully attached.
Properly installing the mop plate requires a bit of force until you hear it click on both sides. Even once I knew what to do, I occasionally had to finesse the plate a bit to hear that satisfying click.
The Roomba 205 Combo includes the robot and the base, the mop plate with a pad already attached, and a spare pad. The box also includes a power cord and paperwork with safety and warranty information.
iRobot has launched a new Roomba Home app (for Android or iOS) alongside its latest robot vacuum lineup. If you had a previous Roomba, you can ditch the old iRobot Home app, though your account information will still work to log into the new app. Otherwise, you'll have to set up a new account.
To start the setup process, find a spot for the base on hard flooring, near an outlet, in a spot with a good Wi-Fi signal. The base needs 1.6 feet of clearance from walls on all sides, and five feet of clearance from any ledges and in front, so the robot has room to come and go.
Plug in the base, then place the robot on it, aligning the charging contacts on the bottom with those on the base. The robot will wake up once it is charged, though it takes nearly a minute to do so. I fiddled with it a bit in the interim as I was unsure it was lined up correctly.
For the app's setup, you’ll need to grant permission for it to find nearby devices via Bluetooth and enter your Wi-Fi information. At first, the app failed to find the robot, but it suggested restarting my phone’s Bluetooth, and that worked. Even with this hiccup, which might have been due to my two-year-old phone instead of the vacuum, I was up and running in the app within five minutes.
Once connected, I gave the robot a bit to charge and update, then followed the app prompt to send it on a mapping run. The Roomba 205 Combo finished mapping my 1,500-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment in 6 minutes and 45 seconds (6:45). That’s faster than the Tapo RV30 (8:19) and impressively speedy, regardless of price. It even outpaced the $1,399.99 Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni (7:46).
The 205's resulting map was highly accurate. It even got most of the borders between rooms right. I edited the names of the rooms and one or two boundaries in the app afterwards, but I've had to do that for every robot vacuum I’ve tested. While editing the map, zooming and moving it is a little cumbersome, but it’s otherwise simple to adjust boundaries, name rooms, label floor types, and add no-go zones.
iRobot says it wanted to prioritize putting useful controls front and center with the Roomba Home app, calling out competitors who take up much of the page with a useless illustration of the robot. I wouldn’t say iRobot fully succeeded at that goal. Controlling the robot is mostly done through cards offering preset and customizable routines, and I would have liked at least one simple button to just hit go.
The app opens to the My Home tab, showing an overview of any maps you’ve created. Tap a map to see it in more detail. The map will highlight any rooms it thinks need vacuuming/mopping in orange, while the rest have a white background. Above the map are the cards used to initiate cleaning. They combine suggested routines, such as a first pass of the whole home, with cleaning options you’ve used in the past.
Tap any card for a big button to start the cleaning, and another button beneath it to schedule the cleaning for later. With the routine window open, you can tap rooms on the map to select and deselect them for cleaning. Scroll down to switch the cleaning profile (light, normal, or deep), and/or drag and drop rooms to set a cleaning order.
Tap the gear icon in any room to set specific parameters. You can switch the mode (vacuum only, mop only, or vacuum + mop), toggle between four levels of suction power, three levels of mopping liquid usage, one or two cleaning passes, and enable or disable SmartScrub for sticky messes.
One handy feature shows a rough time estimate for the overall cleaning process, and how much each room adds to the estimate. That said, I would have preferred an easy way to just change the cleaning modes and parameters for a whole job at once, instead of having to make selections on a room-by-room basis.
The main page of the app does not show any status information for the robot. To see that, click on the Robots tab and tap your device. From there, battery life is shown at the top, and you can see the remaining life on any of the replaceable parts. You can view the owner’s manual and quick start guide, and check detailed settings with the three dots in the upper right.
The option for syncing the robot with smart home assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant can be a little tough to find. On the first page of the My Home tab, tap the person icon in the upper right corner, and then Smart Home.
The app becomes easier to use after a couple of runs, as it’ll show your favorite created routines at the top, making them simple to select again, but a more straightforward way to get started would be nice.
To test battery life, I sent the Roomba 205 on a routine to clean my entire apartment. It didn’t finish the job before it announced that it needed a charge, heading back to its base station after only 39 minutes of work. When I checked the app, the Roomba 205 still had 47% of its charge.
I consider 90 minutes of functional battery life a sufficient mark for most homes. For comparison, the Tapo RV30 completed roughly 1.5 full runs in the same space before calling it quits at 20% charge after 98 minutes.
I noticed that the Roomba 205 defaults to high suction power vacuuming mode, so I switched the power to normal and ran another battery test. It still stopped at 41% after just 42 minutes. For comparison, the Roomba Combo Essential lasted 127 minutes in my battery test.
An iRobot representative told me that they’d noticed a software issue related to the 205 battery and asked me to reboot my machine and try the test again after an update rolled out the following day.
I did as instructed, and the Roomba 205 finally completed a run of my home on a single charge. However, it only lasted 59 minutes and stopped at 27% charge. The result is below our benchmark threshold, so it likely won’t be able to cover large homes on a single charge.
The Roomba 205 worked its way around my place systematically and efficiently. After the battery fix, it completed a full run of my home in 57 minutes, outpacing the Tapo RV30 (68 minutes). The Roomba Combo Essential never actually covered my whole apartment in a single run, because it would always get lost after cleaning a couple of rooms. The upgrade to LiDAR on the Roomba 205 makes a big difference.
In each room, it would circle the perimeter, then go up and down the middle of the floor, pivoting around any furniture. It thoroughly cleaned wall edges and didn’t leave behind dust bunnies or dirt. It even picked up all of the fur shed by my two cats without accumulating tangles on its brush roll.
The 205 got stuck once, in a strange position. It drove between two legs of a chair, then decided it couldn’t get out, stopped, and sent an error message via the app asking to be rescued. It clearly had enough room to back out, but the problem didn’t repeat itself. On other occasions, it looked nimble when moving around chair legs.
It didn’t show any agility around other obstacles, however. Roomba claims its ClearView LiDAR system comes with obstacle detection, but I didn’t see any signs of that ability in practice. Obstacle detection isn’t an expected feature at this price, but given the company's claims, I tested it on the 205. I tested obstacle detection and avoidance with cat toys of various shapes and sizes intentionally scattered on the floor, and the 205 ran over everything.
Past high-end Roombas like the j9+ ($899.99) have been particularly adept at avoiding obstacles. Those models have a camera on the front, though. If you need a robot vacuum with effective obstacle avoidance, you can usually find the j9+ and the Combo j9+ ($1,399.99) on sale for steep discounts at this point.
I evaluate particle pickup through a series of test runs in two different 100-square-foot rooms, one with hard flooring and the other with wall-to-wall carpeting, using two debris types: rice (representing everyday debris) and sand (representing stubborn debris). I distribute a specific amount of the debris on otherwise clean flooring, then close the robot in the room and have it clean. I weigh the robot's internal dustbin before and after each test run to calculate how much debris it picks up.
The Roomba 205 did quite well on all four tests. Rice on carpet is the easiest, and the 205 grabbed 99.4% of the debris. This test further showed the improvement brought by LiDAR, as the Combo Essential only picked up 90.7%. The Tapo RV30 Max Plus grabbed a perfect 100%, but the Roomba 205 comes close enough.
All budget models tend to struggle picking up sand on carpet, a suction stress test. The Roomba 205 only grabbed 28.7% of the dirt, but that number is actually impressive for this price. The extra suction power over the Tapo RV30 paid off, as the RV30 only picked up 26.9%, and the 205 again improves on the Combo Essential, which grabbed 23.8%.
On hardwood, the Roomba 205 effectively picked up both types of debris, grabbing 94.2% of rice and 90.8% of sand. Those numbers mostly match the Combo Essential's results (91.5% and 91.7%). The Tapo RV30 picked up more rice (95.9%), but struggled with sand (53.9%). The extra suction power helped the Roomba 205 beat the Tapo RV30 on this test as well. Some robot vacuums tend to spread and drop dirt on hardwood, a slippery surface, but the 205 minimized flinging.
During these tests, the Roomba 205 maintained the efficiency it showed while cleaning my entire apartment. It finished all carpet tests in 9 minutes on average, while taking 11:13 on hardwood. Both times undercut the Roomba Combo Essential (14:20 and 23:57, respectively) and the Tapo RV30 (14:49, 22:01).
The Roomba 205 didn't perform quite as well on my mopping stress test, in which I spread 0.25 ounces of raspberry jelly on a single spot of my kitchen floor. I wasn’t expecting a perfect result, as a stationary mop pad, customary to budget models, can't match the scrubbing power of spinning or rolling mops found on higher-end hybrids. That said, the Roomba 205 struggled even compared with budget-friendly robot mops.
At one point, it got stuck on the raspberry jelly smear, and I needed to rescue it. It did clean up most of the glob by the time it was done, but it ended up smearing some jelly and making most of my kitchen floor sticky in the process. The Tapo RV30 has a similar mop design and left some sticky residue, but it did a better job of not spreading seeds or stickiness to other parts of the floor.
The iRobot Roomba 205 Combo vacuums well on multiple surfaces and minimizes maintenance by compacting dirt in its dustbin, but its battery life and mopping capabilities fall short of the competition.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
iRobot Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo Robot
- 5.0 - Exemplary: Near perfection, ground-breaking
- 4.5 - Outstanding: Best in class, acts as a benchmark for measuring competitors
- 4.0 - Excellent: A performance, feature, or value leader in its class, with few shortfalls
- 3.5 - Good: Does what the product should do, and does so better than many competitors
- 3.0 - Average: Does what the product should do, and sits in the middle of the pack
- 2.5 - Fair: We have some reservations, buy with caution
- 2.0 - Subpar: We do not recommend, buy with extreme caution
- 1.5 - Poor: Do not buy this product
- 1.0 - Dismal: Don't even think about buying this product
Read Our Editorial Mission Statement and Testing Methodologies.
The Roomba 205 DustCompactor Combo debuts a cool innovation in an otherwise average robot. The plastic fin that compacts dirt works well and allows the robot to clean multiple times without needing to empty the dustbin—and without requiring a big, unattractive base station. The 205 is effective as a vacuum, and its LiDAR navigation helps it work efficiently. That said, its battery life is limited and it falls short on mopping performance. The 205 is worth considering if you really don't want a large base station taking up physical and visual space in your home, but the TP-Link Tapo RV30 Max Plus offers better performance at a more affordable price, so it remains our Editors’ Choice.
STILL ON THE FENCE?
About Our Expert
I’m PCMag’s senior writer covering smart home and wearable devices. I’ve been reporting on tech professionally for nearly a decade and have been obsessing about it for much longer than that. Prior to joining PCMag, I made educational videos for an electronics store called Abt Electronics in Illinois, and before that, I spent eight years covering the smart home market for CNET.Â
I foster many flavors of nerdom in my personal life. I’m an avid board gamer and video gamer. I love fantasy football, which I view as a combination of role-playing games and sports. Plus, I can talk to you about craft beer for hours and am on a personal quest to have a flight of beer at each microbrewery in my home city of Chicago.
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