Eufy RoboVac X8 Hybrid
Eufy’s RoboVac X8 Hybrid is an excellent robot vacuum cleaner paired with a mediocre mop. It handles multiple floors, carpets, laminate flooring and transitions onto rugs with relative ease and picks up a frankly distressing amount of dust.
“But, why pick up a robot vacuum at all?” you might ask. Well, the answer is – in short – convenience. But to get much more specific, it’s automating away a task that neither me nor D seem to be able to keep on top of.
Also on the roster- I don’t think I’ve heard @prettygreentea squeee so much at anything I’ve had under test before ?? pic.twitter.com/rijCr90DEl
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 15, 2022
You see, the trouble with vacuum cleaning is that – outside of picking up very obvious left-over food after the toddler unleashes a mealtime apocalypse – the problem with vacuum cleaning is that you should maintain a regular schedule. Visible dirt and detritus is a great motivator to grab the cordless vac and make the effort, but it’s the dust you don’t see that’s the true household menace.
And that’s where robot vacuum cleaners shine. While the RoboVac is perfectly capable of powering through all sorts of food mess (although I did find a fry lodged in the cleaning brush), its ability to regularly, and without complaint, do a methodical clean of the entire floor is simply unparalleled for dust suppression. I challenge you to do a better job, especially on hard flooring where you don’t have lines in the carpet to remember where you’ve been.
Totally unabridged video of the @EufyOfficial RoboVac X8 doing a “zone” clean around the kitchen table. Including a kerfuffle at the end where it fails to dock & charge. Notice how the whirly brush is prone to flinging stuff across the floor, but the cleaning is thorough. pic.twitter.com/OXjQOnOlxW
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) December 13, 2022
So why the RoboVac X8? Well, in truth it’s the first robot vacuum I’ve tested since the Samsung SR8855 NaviBot which was more than 12 years ago. Reading back over my very terse, old review (I can’t remember that far back) suggests that the basic premise of robot vacuum cleaners hasn’t changed much. What strikes me as immediately preferable about the RoboVac – and in light of recent furor about Eufy’s somewhat lax security and GDPR practices – is the lack of a camera for visioning. Smart, camera-based obstacle avoidance is a headline feature in some competitors, but this raises two issues – first and foremost, do you really want a remote-controlled, internet-connected camera roving around your home? The second, and this is perhaps a little ableist so I’ll grant some exemptions, can’t you just pick your stuff off the floor? In fact, RoboVac’s inability to avoid toys and wires has been a strong motivator for us to pick things off the floor, tidy away toys and generally demote the floor to temporary dumping ground. Our nighttime routine now involves a sweep of the house, putting away toys, rescuing socks from under the sofa, putting shoes in the shoe rack, hanging up coats and ensuring drying clothes are not trailing on the floor before manually unleashing the RoboVac for a full downstairs clean. It’s quite remarkable how a product that might strike you as the epitome of laziness has turned out to be a strong motivation for proactive tidying.
Hahaha Google your cute little jokes about magicking the living room tidy aren’t so fucking cute anymore eh! Ahahahahaha who’s laughing now ??? pic.twitter.com/SINcyiIP3S
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 17, 2022
In lieu of a camera the RoboVac comes equipped with your standard bump sensors, a wall-sensor, cliff sensors (so it doesn’t fall down your stairs) and – the pièce de résistance – a whirly laser distance sensor which is used to build up a “floor” plan of your house. At least it builds up a plan of a few inches above the floor, anyway. On its first trip around your house RoboVac will build up a complete floor plan, which is then used to determine an optimal cleaning route and additionally allows the robot- via sorcery and magic- to determine where it is within your house with fairly surprising accuracy.
Vacuuming
Cleaning downstairs- the kitchen, living room and connecting hallway- takes roughly 40 minutes and reports an area of 41 square meters. That’s about a minute per square meter, which is reflected in the times it takes to clean the upstairs. This sounds slow, but it feels surprisingly quick- I suppose that time flies when you’re juggling a baby, a toddler, a job and a blog.
Multi-map support – which you need to toggle on in the app – allows you to move the vacuum upstairs and let it build another map. This is great since, while RoboVac (and, indeed, our cordless upright) has trouble with some lint stuck in the carpet, it really does wonders for keeping the upstairs carpet dust under control and is much more thorough and methodical than I can ever manage. I usually let it clean the two main upstairs bedrooms and the connecting hallway three times on a single charge at max suction- there always seems to be more dust waiting. Unfortunately on the first run upstairs I didn’t line the robot up against the wall and it’s not smart enough to figure that out. As a consequence the upstairs map is slightly rotated and this causes havoc with the vacuum’s ability to run nice, straight, methodical snaking paths through each room.
Whether it follows a rational path or not, however, the RoboVac picks up an astonishing amount of dust and debris and there is seemingly no end to the former. It will happily do this for a few days of daily vacuums without any apparent lack of performance, which is handy since it’s a bit of a rigamarole to empty and clean.
And here’s the zone cleaning route- that bump on the left is where I had to stop it nudging the tripod ? pic.twitter.com/IeJOREFawS
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) December 13, 2022
Zone and spot cleaning modes are extremely handy for, well, cleaning zones and spots. Zone is great for cleaning under the dining table after a particularly messy rice/toddler interaction. While the little spinny sweeper brush has a habit of sending food skipping across the hard floor, zone cleaning does its methodical back and forth both horizontally and vertically (or West to East and North to South if you prefer) making sure that anything missed on the first run gets caught on the second. This takes twice as long as a regular clean, but for a small, high dirt area it’s extremely thorough and very useful.
Totally unabridged video of the @EufyOfficial RoboVac X8 doing a “zone” clean around the kitchen table. Including a kerfuffle at the end where it fails to dock & charge. Notice how the whirly brush is prone to flinging stuff across the floor, but the cleaning is thorough. pic.twitter.com/OXjQOnOlxW
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) December 13, 2022
The dust picked up both on the hard flooring and rugs, and upstairs on carpet, has been nothing short of shocking. RoboVac has a knack for packing it into the dust compartment.
Content warning: absolute filth! @EufyOfficial pic.twitter.com/qn2MqCmV6U
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 15, 2022
Mopping
I’ve thrown a lot at Eufy’s RoboVac X8 and it’s impressed me with its cleaning performance and location awareness but it’s not perfect. As I alluded in the introduction, in an effort to avoid burying the proverbial lede, the X8 Hybrid’s mop is more of a wet wipe over your hard floors. When I hear “mop” I expect some kind of vigorous mopping action, you know- like those big, rotary things you see in American movies. What the X8 has is a small, cold water tank that you can velcro (I mean hook and loop) either a disposable or washable mopping pad to. It does wipe over floors, and it does lift up dirt, but it’s sorely lacking in elbow grease.
Full floor with robot mop pad, versus a quick go over just the sink area with a manual mop. It picks up *some* dirt to be sure, but it’s definitely a damp wipe over to catch dust that the vacuum doesn’t quite lift and not a replacement for a vigorous mopping regime ? pic.twitter.com/dENCmWaYcS
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 30, 2022
Letting the RoboVac X8 loose on our kitchen floor yielded unsatisfying results, and a secondary wipe over with a flash mop revealed all the grime it had missed. Couple the fairly mediocre mopping performance with the rigamarole of filling the mop tank with water, attaching a mop pad and ensuring the RoboVac is instructed not to mop your carpets and it really dispels the magic of having a robot do a job for you. Suffice to say the mopping feature feels very much like an afterthought and if it’s crucial to you, then give the X8 Hybrid a miss.
Management
The companion “eufy Clean” app works more or less how you’d expect, allowing you to set up the RoboVac X8, keep the firmware updated and configure cleaning settings. You can request spot cleans – the robot will trundle to a given spot and vacuum around it – or area cleans – the same, but in a given rectangular area – clean a specific room or just leave it on “Auto” to clean a whole floor in one shot. You can watch in approximately realtime the location of the robot in your house floorplan and see the route it took while vacuuming. You can adjust the suction from “Pure” (which is a funny name for Low) through Power, Turbo and Max. On the lowest setting it does a great job cleaning hard floors and is pretty quiet. On the highest setting it’s obnoxiously loud but pulls distressing amounts of dust out of carpets. Either way it’s better to not be in the room while it’s running. Tidy up, set it cleaning for the night, go upstairs to bed. It’ll send you a notification if it gets stuck. Or, in my case, manages to eat my pyjamas.
Once a floorplan – or map – has been generated, you can slice it into rooms (granted I had to take liberties with our rooms, since you can only slice in a straight line) and then command the vacuum to clean a specific room. It’s smart enough to undock, locate itself, trundle to the desired room and begin its cleaning regimen usually without any mishaps.
Okay so the @EufyOfficial RoboVac shut the kitchen door and got very, very confused – but it did eventually make it back to the charger… in a kind of Bridges of Königsberg attempt by a five year old way. pic.twitter.com/GGqqDxwFAy
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 15, 2022
I say usually because there have been a couple of hiccups where the vacuum will be unable to locate itself, or locate itself hilariously wrong. This, I think, is because I never reset the map after moving its base-station so don’t do that!
This is fine everything is fine… pic.twitter.com/7SfA9W78K8
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) December 7, 2022
Properly resetting maps can be tricky, since the X8 is really, really good at remembering them and identifying its position. To fix my weird skewed upstairs map, I tried resetting the map and running the RoboVac again from its base-station, pushed snug against a wall. It immediately restored the old map and set about cleaning as usual. It wasn’t until I’d turned “Multiple Map Saving” completely off, deleted maps and tried again that I managed to get a fresh, square map for upstairs. This is a bit tricky, but worth doing since the robot’s intelligent routing is much, much more efficient when given straight walls to follow.
You can also- albeit this is an experimental feature- record your own voice snippets to replace the voice notifications spoken by the vacuum. This lets you replace simple phrases like “Start Cleaning” or “Resume Cleaning”, but not everything. Toddler took great joy in rattling through these and now we have a creepy vacuum that uses our toddlers voice.
The app is, unsurprisingly, connected via some third party server which bridges your phone to the WiFi-connected robot vacuum. This is an unfortunate truth of modern, smart-home devices. It has the benefit that you can set the vacuum cleaner running, or keep an eye on it, when you’re away from home.
Maintenance
While the RoboVac X8 may handle cleaning your floors for you, you must – in turn – handle cleaning it.
Eufy attempts to make this relatively easy- the dust compartment is easy to remove, opens right up and includes a little brush tool to dislodge any stubborn detritus and clean out the filter.
Comes with a little brush to clean the carnage out of the dust collector and a little blade to remove all the tangled hair… pic.twitter.com/iOEJDAPT32
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) October 15, 2022
This tool has a hooked blade at the other end which allows you to- without having to sully a pair of your scissors- near effortlessly remove hair from the brush. The brush even has little divots in the ends which allow you to hook in and snip hair that would otherwise threaten to jam it. This is great because our upright (Dyson, I’m looking at you) is so badly (and cheaply) designed in this respect that hair got into the “bearing” and friction welded into the plastic. Not so with the RoboVac X8, wherever hair or wires would threaten to jam a bearing or clog a moving part the X8 is designed defensively and carefully. The wheels- for example- turn around a fixed hub with no visible shaft. If you’ve ever driven RC cars indoors and had them inevitably snared with hair, you’ll know why this is important.
I found the best way to properly clean out the X8 is – ironically – to use another vacuum cleaner. While the dust compartment catches the lion’s share of debris, some of it is prone to hanging around in the brush and a little clean of both the compartment and the robot keeps everything tip top.
The elephant in the room, however, is the pleated filter that separates the dust compartment from the two, powerful suction generators on either side of the robot. The dust compartment effectively acts as a reusable bag, save for the filter which gets aggressively jammed full of dust to the point where it’s difficult to fully clean it. Filters are replaceable, and the X8 Hybrid comes with just one spare. In slightly under three months the first filter is already looking pretty ragged, albeit cleaning performance does not seem to have suffered and the RoboVac seems to be able to ram an astonishing amount of dust against it.
Despite the concerns I raised in my YouTube “review”, there seem to be about a dozen off-brand replacements for the filters, brush, sweeper and mop pads. This lies in stark contrast to the HomeVac S11 Go which has perhaps one. The RoboVac filter is just some pleated material in a plastic cartridge that a 3D-printer user could make themselves.
Summary
The RoboVac X8 has been an absolute godsend and I don’t think I could see us returning to a manual vacuum- mostly because we definitely didn’t do that often enough and aren’t likely to change. Its cleaning performance is impressive but it’s not perfect, there are still areas it will plain miss – such as tight corners – and it can’t give carpets as thorough a clean as an aggressive upright.
Tell me you have a robot vacuum without telling me you have a robot vacuum pic.twitter.com/V4J4w3nrRS
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) November 12, 2022
I would suggest pairing a robot vacuum with a monthly routine of deep cleaning, using a carpet washer or otherwise on carpets and a good mop on hard floors.
Concealed the @EufyOfficial RoboVac under the coffee station so we can reenact that scene from Fifth Element ? pic.twitter.com/PC3oIFPE3L
— Phil Howard (@Gadgetoid) November 27, 2022
The mop functionality of the X8 Hybrid is underwhelming- if you want something to gently caress your floors with a damp cloth then it’s got you covered, but it won’t touch stubborn, stuck down food.
The disposable nature of the filters concerns me slightly, but as of time of writing the availability of replacements is pretty good. Filters are also supposed to last for ~200 hours of cleaning, but it’s already looking shoddy in just 20! I guess only time will tell if that has any impact on cleaning performance.
Replacement brushes, brush guards, battery and other bits and bobs are available directly from Eufy and these are easily found through the app.
If you want to play to its strengths, run the RoboVac on a daily basis to keep dust under control. The novelty of a robot cleaning the floors still hasn’t worn off with toddler yet, so it’s a great way to motivate a quick tidy up.