Review: Electrolux Pure i9

Many people like to run their robovacs at night or while they’re at work. I choose to run ours while I’m awake, right after dinner and while we're putting the kids to bed.

First off, I don’t see any reason to walk around all evening with crumbs sticking to the bottoms of my feet if I don’t have to. But I’ve also found that most robot vacuums will require rescue, which means you have to be awake or around. If you’re sufficiently pressed for time and energy that you need a robot vacuum, you’re probably not being as diligent as you could be about eliminating botvac booby traps, like tiny doll socks or stray shoelaces.

Even with navigational aids like virtual wall barriers, magnetic strips, or no-go lines, only a few robot vacuums have been reliable enough to leave completely unattended. I’m happy to report that the Electrolux Pure i9 is one of them.

Right out of the box, the Electrolux Pure i9 looks markedly different from the other botvacs that I’ve tried. It’s a steel-gray, rounded triangle that measures 12.8 inches across and 3.3 inches high. It's only 0.2 inches less in diameter than the Roomba 690, but it looks much smaller.

It comes with only its charging stand, a magnetic side brush, and instructions to download the Pure i9 app. Unlike other robot vacuums, it’s not compatible with Alexa, Google Home, or other voice assistants.

Out of the box, it took two hours to charge. Setting it up by connecting it to the app is an easy, familiar process, and the app itself is clean and simple to navigate. Just follow the app’s instructions to connect the Pure i9 to your Wi-Fi; you can also operate it with buttons on the botvac's top panel. Once connected, you can select your robot’s name (I chose “Dung Beetle”) and tinker with its settings. For example, you can select a more energy-efficient eco mode, or a mute option that reduces the volume of the bot by about 5 decibels, from 65 to 60. You can schedule cleanings, or switch the app’s language. You can access online support or visit Electrolux’s online shop for replacement parts.

The botvac's battery life is not overly long. In normal mode, it ran for 50 minutes—slightly longer than the advertised 40 minutes—before it had to return to the base for charging. It was able to clean 270 (very dirty) square feet in 40 minutes. But I strongly suspect that Electrolux might be able to increase that runtime if it could make the navigation software slightly more efficient.

The Pure i9 uses a 3-D vision camera set in the front to navigate. It’s exceptionally accurate. Even without navigational aids, the Pure i9 never got lost or stuck. It never dinged my furniture or bashed into any walls. It never mistook a cliff where there was none, or failed to clamber over the lip of a doorway or a carpet. When I stepped in front of it, it paused to assess the situation before moving around my feet.

After one cleaning session, I realized that my toddler had completely disassembled a flag banner and hidden it under the couch. Almost any other botvac would have found this to be a disaster—frayed string, little pieces of loose fabric—but the Pure i9 navigated smoothly around it.

However, the mechanism by which it steered clear of obstacles was maddening to watch. It’s easy to intuitively divine how the navigation mechanisms in a robot vacuum work. The cheaper ones ping-pong randomly back and forth, while powerful, methodical botvacs, like the Neato line, vacuum back and forth in orderly parallel lines.

The Pure i9 gave the impression of being an elderly butler, wandering around haphazardly with a dusting brush in a sheepish, absentminded manner. “Does that robot vacuum know where it’s going?” our babysitter asked, watching it work one morning.

Every time it went around a corner, came up against the base of a chair, or approached the edge of a rug, it stopped and re-started over and over, repeatedly reassessing the situation until it deemed it safe to go forward. “Oops, oh no, excuse me,” I imagined it saying in a British accent, every time that it started shuffling in the hallway for one, two, or five minutes. “How perfectly buffle-brained of me. Please, you go first.”

I could chart its progress in real-time on a map of my house in the app. Electrolux doesn’t display the amount of square feet cleaned or time spent cleaning graphically over time, as do iRobot and Neato. But the map is a fairly close approximation of what my house looks like, and made it easy to check if I’d had the bathroom or bedroom doors closed on any given day.

With mute on, I measured the Pure i9’s sound at a fairly quiet 60 decibels. In normal mode, the vacuum ran at about 65 dB, which kicked up to a turbo 70 dB whenever it encountered a particularly filthy patch of carpet.

After each cleaning, the high traffic areas by the door and under the kitchen table were clear. The triangular shape with the side brush may have helped with digging into the corners.

The Pure i9 didn’t provide nearly as deep a carpet clean as the Roomba 980, mainly because it wasn’t able to thoroughly agitate the fibers. But the anti-tangle brush wasn’t constantly snarling and stopping the vacuum, in the way that the Neato Botvac D7 Connected did. I also didn’t have to clean out the bin nearly as much. Even with its diminutive size, it has an impressive dustbin capacity of 0.7 liters. In comparison, the dustbin of the Samsung Powerbot holds only 0.3 liters.

The Pure i9 has AutoPower, which automatically detects the floor surface that the vacuum is on and calibrates the level of cleaning power. When battery runs down, it returns automatically to the base, recharges, and restarts, which occasionally scared me awake when I forgot that it hadn’t finished and it automatically restarted in the dead of the night.

My one real gripe is that the Pure i9 is only so-so at returning home to the charging station. If a cleaning cycle had finished, it went back no problem. But if I stopped it and pushed the home button halfway through, the app informed me that the the Pure i9 was returning home even when it clearly wasn’t. Some mornings, I would awake to find it sitting sadly, alone in a corner.

It's hard for me to recommend products that I wouldn't purchase myself. Spending $899 is a lot, especially for a robot vacuum that lacks many basic functions. I don’t use a voice assistant to control my robot vacuum, but many people do, and much cheaper robot vacuums work with Google Home and Alexa. It also has spot cleaning but no directional control and no remote, which has bothered me in the past.

Still, its very simplicity won me over. I have spent so much time fussing with navigational aids to help my robot vacuums, that it never occurred to me that I might not even need them. And while its navigational quirks can be maddening, I have spent more evenings than I would like, cowering in bedrooms, listening to Neato Connecteds trying to break the door down. I appreciated a shy, sheepish robot vacuum that gave my house a thorough clean without breaking anything, or itself, in the process.

In the end, this isn't my top recommendation for a high-end robot vacuum. But if you're looking for a slightly smaller, reliable, and good-looking robot vacuum, the Electrolux Pure i9 makes a very decent contender.