Clean the wheels of an iRobot Braava jet 240 mop

2019 September 15

If you have an iRobot Braava jet 240 mop, you might find that hair gets stuck in its wheel wells and is awfully hard to remove. The driveshafts seem pretty well protected so this kind of thing doesn’t seem like too big of a deal, but it will probably keep your mop running longer to clean the junk out once in a while. Here’s how you can do it.

Prerequisites🔗

• Clean workspace with bright overhead light. Some of the screws to remove are in pretty deep wells, so a bright light that can shine straight down on the workspace is a big plus.
• Magnetized Phillips head screwdriver with long, narrow shaft. Because of the aforementioned deep wells for the screws, a screwdriver with a long narrow shaft is a essential, and magnetization makes replacing the screws massively easier.
• Very thin but strong pry tool. I used the tip of a nice paring knife.

Steps🔗

1. Remove the battery. I hope you didn’t actually need me to tell you this part.
2. Remove the while plastic cover on the springy part of the robot, as per this YouTube video. There are four screws to loosen. They cannot be fully removed! Some modest force will be needed to unlatch the plastic cover, but not much. Watch the interface between the cover and the spray nozzle.
3. Remove the main while plastic cover, as per the YouTube video. There are six screws to take out. The video doesn't show their locations well, but it shouldn’t be hard to find them at the bottom of six deep wells. Once again, only modest force is needed to remove the cover. The blue switch used to eject the cleaning pad may pop out here.
4. For each wheel you want to clean, hold the wheel in place and remove the screw right in its middle. I found that these screws were attached pretty tight. (I used my red-barreled Master Mechanic screwdriver with the PH1 head.)
5. Pop off the wheel. I needed to use medium force, but there didn’t seem to be any tabs holding it in place.
6. Clean the inside of the wheel if there’s any stuff there.
7. Use the pry tool to remove the inner hub piece, the one with the little round plastic posts sticking in towards the motor assembly. Right at the bottom of the wheel assembly, there is a small tab on this piece holding it in place. I got my pry tool right in at the base of the tab and pushed outward, and the inner hub popped off after medium force was applied.
8. Clean any remaining stuff out of the disassembled wheel.
9. Pop the inner hub back on. All you need to do is line up the tab where it was before.
10. Pop the wheel back on and reattach its screw. It will need to mesh with the gears of the driveshaft but this is easy.
11. Clean the second wheel in the same way, if so inclined.
12. Return the main white plastic cover. Make sure to feed the blue rubber cover for the water reservoir through the appropriate hole. Use your magnetized screwdriver to reattach the six screws. Reattach the blue switch that ejects the cleaning pad; it took me a few tries to get the blue plastic to mate with the lever inside the robot body, but all you need to do is get them lined up and push with medium force.
13. Return the final plastic cover, making sure the nozzle assembly fits into the hole in the cover correctly. Refasten the four screws.

After doing this procedure the pump in my robot seems a bit noisier, but otherwise the wheels are clean and everything seems fine!