Lumen Vac R7 Robot Vacuum

A robot vacuum has one job: be less annoying than doing it yourself. The R7 gets there, with a caveat about ongoing costs and one software decision that will make you angry roughly once a month.

How we tested

Ten weeks in a 78 square metre flat with two cats, one short-pile rug and a threshold that has defeated weaker robots. We tracked run times, missed spots, tangled cables, and how often we had to intervene. Full log of 96 cleaning runs.

Navigation and coverage

The R7 built an accurate map on its second pass and held it through furniture being moved around. It edges along skirting properly, gets under the sofa, and returns to the dock without the five-minute hunt that plagues cheaper units. Cable detection is the weak spot: charging cables and headphone wires get eaten about one run in six.

Cleaning

Hard floors are excellent. Carpet is good rather than brilliant, and on the deep-pile rug we needed two passes. Mopping is the surprise: the vibrating pad plus the lift mechanism means you can schedule a combined run without soaking your carpet.

Where it falls down

The app. Scheduling lives in the cloud, so a dropped connection means a missed run, and the consumables maths is unfriendly at roughly 90 a year on top of the purchase price.