One-minute review
Robot vacuums are a great tool to have in any home, but some might find cleaning them out regularly to be quite a chore. Thankfully, the Shark IQ Robot Self-Empty XL takes most of the maintenance out of your hands, leaving it free to explore your home and gobble up dust along the way.
With a dustbin on the base that can hold up to 30 days’ worth of debris, the IQ Robot XL can be left along to potter around your home, picking up volumes of pet hair and dust from hard-to-reach areas. You’ll still need to do a little bit of prep work beforehand by clearing cables and pathways, but this is true for most robot vacuums anyway. Once let loose from its base, the IQ Robot XL can safely navigate around most rooms and obstacles, before returning to its base station for a final clean-up of its bin.
Clean-up is even simpler for the base station – simply detach the side bin when it gets full, hold it over a trash can, and then eject the entire contents with a simple button press. No struggling with specialty bin bags or extra fuss – the IQ Robot XL is supremely easy to clean in a matter of seconds.
There are a few things that hold it back from our complete approval, which is a shame since the IQ Robot XL is a competent robot vacuum to have. It struggles slightly on picking up larger debris, especially on carpets, and the ability to spot clean is missing from the app as well. It can also get quite loud while cleaning, and the mapping can take quite a few runs before your house is fully mapped out.
Price and availability
The Shark IQ Robot Self-Empty XL is available now, and is priced at $599 (around £441; AU$835). That’s priced the same as a Roomba i3+ with a base station, which offers nearly identical features. The only major difference is that the i3+’s base station requires special dust bags, which retail for $19.99 (around £15; AU$28) for a pack of three.
Design
- Self-emptying bin
- Holds 30 days’ worth of debris
- Simple control buttons
The IQ Robot XL doesn’t look very different from other robot vacuums on the market, opting for a familiar circular, all-black design. There are two buttons on the top – the Clean button will immediately start a cleaning cycle, while the Dock button will end a clean cycle and send the IQ Robot XL scurrying back to its home base.
Between them is the robot’s navigation module, which scans the environment as the vacuum travels to map out a space. It’s not as comprehensive as robots that use LIDAR modules to navigate and as a result you’re going to need a couple of clean cycles before the IQ Robot XL has properly mapped your space (our test space took five runs).
Underneath the IQ Robot XL you’ll find a self-cleaning brush roll and two single-spoke side spinning brushes that help to funnel debris into the robot’s path. Because the side brushes only have one brush and don’t spin very fast, they can regularly miss out on debris, which means that things can get left behind after the robot has finished cleaning. They also can sometimes unintentionally push debris into corners and the side of rooms, so you’re never left with completely clean floors.
There’s a small dustbin on board that collects debris as the robot cleans, which can also be manually removed and emptied if clogged. Most of the time however, the robot will return to its base station when it detects its bin is full, at which point the base station sucks out all of the dirt into a larger bin, and the robot then resumes its clean cycle.
The base station holds a larger, bagless dust bin, which Shark claims can hold up to 30 days of dirt before it requires emptying. The fact that it’s bagless is a huge advantage, as other similar robot vacuums tie you down to proprietary trash bags which can be inconvenient. The base station itself is quite large and will require a fair bit of floor space to set up. Shark recommends at least three feet of clearance on either side, and up to five feet of clearance in front, so you’ll need to be careful when choosing where to place it. If you need to relocate the base station at any point, you’ll have to remap your space all over again, as the IQ Robot XL is unable to detect that’s it’s been moved in the same space.
Performance
- Decent suction power
- Good at handling pet hair
- Can get loud
When it comes to cleaning, the IQ Robot XL has some mixed results. It mostly navigates in straight lines across your space, picking up whatever is in its way. The trouble is that there are instances where it’s unable to properly pick up debris across medium-pile carpets and even hardwood floors, missing things like larger crumbs. This is also partly the fault of the side brushes, which sometimes flick dirt away or don’t funnel it in properly, so it ends up being left behind.
We scattered an assortment of debris for the IQ Robot XL to clean up, including flour, breadcrumbs, and dried oats, to see where it would struggle. On hard floors the flour and breadcrumbs were picked up without a problem, but some of the oats were left behind. With medium-pile carpets, the flour and breadcrumbs were harder to pick up with a single pass, so you’ll have to run another clean cycle or manually vacuum certain areas yourself.
One thing that we found a bit disappointing is the lack of a spot clean ability. You simply can’t pick up the IQ Robot XL and tell it to clean a specific area – the most you’ll be able to do is tell it to clean a specific room entirely via the app. You can further divide up a room if necessary, but this defeats the purpose – the lack of a spot cleaning function is something you’re certainly going to miss having.
Overall, the suction power on the IQ Robot XL is decent enough to pick up most pet hair, dust, and dirt from floors. For busy households you’ll find that the robot makes one or two trips back to the dock to empty its bin before resuming its clean cycle. The brush roller tends to stay tangle-free, with hardly any hair and pet fur getting caught in it. Where problems may arise is if there’s a lot of stray pet hair, the robot’s bin can get clogged up, making it harder for the base station to vacuum it out. You’ll then have to pop the bin out yourself and clean it out before the robot can resume.
For other instances where clogs don’t occur, the base station can quite adequately empty the IQ Robot XL’s bin with a rather alarmingly loud woosh. When standing two feet away from the base station, we measured nearly 78db of noise when the base station suction was activated, which is loud enough to drown out any conversation you’re having nearby. We recommend keeping the base station in a low-traffic area so that it doesn’t disturb anyone when it comes to emptying.
The base station holds up to 30 days’ worth of dirt, and there’s a handy transparent window on the side that lets you see how much dirt has been collected. Emptying the bin is an easy affair – just detach it from the base station via its carry handle, hold it over a waste bin, and press the side button to open the base and dump its contents out. This can release a small cloud of dust if done a bit too vigorously, so we recommend holding the bin as low as possible when emptying it.
App
- Allows for cleaning schedules
- Fiddly no-go zones
The Shark app is easy to use, and walks you through the entire setup of the IQ Robot XL. Once charged up and paired with your WiFi, you’ll be able monitor each clean cycle, as well as check out the map of your space the vacuum creates after a few completed clean cycles. You can then rename various rooms for easier cleaning, as well as set a cleaning schedule based on your preferences. The downside is that you can’t specify particular rooms to clean in a schedule, only a complete clean of your space.
If there’s an area you want the IQ Robot XL to avoid, you can create no-go zones on your map. Just drag the boundary square to the room or area you want to avoid, and the robot will automatically clean around these spaces and rooms. It can be a little cumbersome to drag these boxes around in the app and finely adjust them – we would have much preferred having the option to add virtual walls as well, which makes it far easier to block off an entire room.
The IQ Robot XL does ship with 9ft of boundary tape, which can be cut and affixed to the floor to stop your robot from entering a space. We’re really not fans of using this simply because it’s such an eyesore, and would much prefer having this done via an app instead of using physical boundary tape.
For even more automation, the IQ Robot XL can be paired with an Amazon Echo or Google Home device, so you can use voice controls to start or stop clean cycles, or clean a specific room – all with just your voice.
Battery life
- Nearly 90 minutes of clean time
- Slow to recharge
The IQ Robot XL handled our 850sq ft test home easily on a single charge, never having to go back for a top-up charge. Depending on what suction level you’ve set the vacuum at, you may notice the battery draining faster, so we suggest playing around with different settings until you get something that matches your space.
Recharging was a different experience, and we found that it took the IQ Robot XL nearly five hours to recharge from a full depleted battery. After a 45 minute cleaning cycle the battery had dropped to about 74%, and then took around two hours to bring this back up to 100%. For spaces that are less than 1,000ft, you should easily be able to get enough cleaning done on a single battery charge.
