iRobot Roomba 105 Vac Review

The iRobot Roomba 105 Vac is the cheapest machine on this site with genuine ClearView LiDAR mapping, which means app-drawn keep-out zones, room selection and recharge-and-resume at a price where most machines are still bouncing off walls. The catch is a real one: iRobot publishes no suction figure at all, so its cleaning power is the one thing on the specification sheet you cannot check.

#	Product	Best for	Score	Price
01	iRobot Roomba 105 VacThe lowest price at which you can buy genuine LiDAR mapping from a company that has been doing this for twenty years. It publishes no suction figure.	Cheapest real LiDAR	6.9out of 10	$149.00 - View on Amazon $299.9950% off #ad Price last verified September 21, 2026. How we are funded

Scores come from the published rubric on How We Pick: suction 25%, navigation 25%, pet hair 20%, running cost 20%, setup 10%. Editorial judgments about published specifications, not test results.

ClearView LiDAR, with keep-out zones. This is the whole reason the page exists. A mapping machine cleans in rows and knows what it has covered, so a run finishes rather than expiring. More usefully, it lets you draw a box in the app around the dog bowl, the cable nest behind the television, or the rug with the tassels, and the machine treats that box as a wall. Nothing without a map can do this, which is why physical barriers are still sold.

The 70x power-lifting suction line. Read it carefully, because it is the most-quoted number about this machine and it is not a specification. It is a ratio against iRobot's own 600 series, a line that dates to the early 2010s. It tells you this machine is much stronger than a fifteen-year-old Roomba. It tells you nothing about how it compares with the 8,000Pa Ecovacs sitting next to it in the same search results, and it cannot be converted into one. On our scoring an unpublished figure is scored as unverified, which is why a machine this competent scores 6.0 on suction.

Three-stage cleaning with an edge-sweeping brush. A multi-surface brush, a side brush that pulls debris out of the wall junction, and suction. It is the layout iRobot has been iterating on longer than anyone, and the edge brush matters more than it sounds: the strip of floor within an inch of a baseboard is where dust collects and where most round machines are weakest.

Recharge and resume. The machine returns to the dock when the battery is low, charges, and picks up where it stopped. On a floor plan too big for one charge this is the difference between a job that completes and one you have to restart. It is a mapping feature - a machine with no map has no idea where it stopped.

Dirt detection, spot cleaning and adjustable passes. iRobot publishes a dirt-detection sensor, a spot-clean mode that works one area for up to five minutes, and app control over both the number of cleaning passes and the suction level. That last setting is the useful one: a second pass over a room is a far more reliable way to get a floor clean than a bigger number on the box.

A charging dock, and nothing more. You empty the bin yourself. iRobot sells the same robot with an AutoEmpty dock for roughly $100 more, and if you have a shedding pet that is the version to look at - a bin this size is a twice-weekly job with a dog in the house.

2.4 GHz Wi-Fi for setup and operation. Normal for the category and worth knowing in advance if you run a mesh network that likes to hand devices to the 5 GHz radio. Your phone can go back to 5 GHz after setup; the robot cannot.

Under about $150 the field divides cleanly into machines that navigate and machines that wander. A wandering machine is not useless - it will cover a small hard-floor room given enough time - but its coverage is a function of battery life rather than intent, and it will do the same square yard four times while missing the corner behind the door.

What a map buys is not tidiness for its own sake. It buys the three things people actually want: the machine finishes, you can tell it where not to go, and it can be sent to one room rather than the whole floor. Two years ago that combination started around $400. That is the story of this price band, and this is the machine that tells it. Our navigation explainer covers how LiDAR differs from the camera and gyroscope systems it is often confused with.

Someone who wants a map, an app that behaves, and a brand with a spare-parts supply chain. iRobot's app is the most mature in this category by a distance - the map survives furniture moves, the schedule works, and the Clean Map report tells you where the machine actually went. If this is your first robot vacuum, that reliability is worth more than a headline Pascal figure you cannot verify, which is why it leads our first robot vacuum ranking.

It also suits a home where the floors are mostly hard and mostly clear, and where somebody in the house wants to be able to fix the thing in three years without hunting a defunct brand's parts bin.

Anyone who shops on numbers. If your instinct is to line up specification sheets and take the strongest, this machine cannot be lined up. It does not publish a Pascal rating, an airwatt rating or a runtime you can compare. That is a legitimate reason to buy something else, and our highest published suction ranking is where to go instead.

Anyone with heavy pet shedding and no patience for the bin. No dock, no bag, no cyclone - you open it and empty it. A little further up the ladder the self-emptying machines change that relationship completely.

Anyone who wants mopping. This is a vacuum. There is no tank, no pad and no mop mode, and the listing does not pretend otherwise - which, in a category where almost everything claims to mop and almost nothing does, is a point in its favor.

The Ecovacs DEEBOT N20 Plus publishes 8,000Pa and empties itself into a bagless bin, for meaningfully more money. The Lefant M210 costs a good deal less and has a brushless inlet that handles hair better, but no map of any kind - Lefant against Roomba sets the two brands side by side. And the under $150 band page puts the whole shortlist at this ceiling side by side, with live prices.

We have not handled this machine. Everything above is read from published specifications and the manufacturer's own documentation, cited below. These are the specific claims we could not check:

• Actual suction. iRobot publishes no absolute figure, so there is nothing to verify against - and we have not measured one.
• Whether the LiDAR map survives a rearranged room. iRobot's mapping has a good reputation, but we have not moved furniture and re-run it.
• Runtime. No minute figure is published for this model, so we cannot tell you how much floor one charge covers.
• Bin volume. Not published on this listing, which matters because the bin is the thing you will be emptying.
• Body height. Not stated, so we cannot tell you which sofas it clears.
• Noise. No decibel figure is published and we have not measured one.
• Filter and brush life in a shedding household, and what iRobot's consumables will cost three years from now.

That list is not a disclaimer bolted on at the end. It is the actual scope of this review, and anywhere a competitor's confident phrasing implies they checked these things without saying how, it is worth asking the same question of them.