Eufy E20 3-in-one Robot Vacuum Reviewed

The E20 arrived just as my kids’ obsession with robot vacuum cleaners appeared to reach its peak. They wont leave the cursed things alone for a second, and have watched every flavour of YouTube video involving them.

I’ve seen dozens of robot vacuum cleaners scramble around a floor like atoms in hot gas, sucking up rice or confetti. I’ve seen robot vacuum cleaners tossed and kicked down stairs. I’ve seen robot vacuum cleaners smashed and scattered to plastic and metal shards on a gravel driveway. What I have not seen is any real significant variation on the two wheeled robot sucky thing formula.

Until now.

Eufy were gracious enough to send me the E20 3-in-one, the third robot vacuum I have tested from them, and the first to really do something truly interesting. What is that something?… well…

The entire vacuum part of the robot pulls clear of the chassis and becomes a standalone, handheld, cordless vacuum cleaner. This sounds bonkers, and it is. It sounds convenient and it… sort of is. It sounds expensive and… at £599 it sort of is. At least you’re effectively getting two vacuum cleaners and the convenience of a self-emptying system.

In a small way it also sounds like an admission. Ostensibly the point of a robot vacuum cleaner is to take over any and all vacuuming tasks in the home. Why, then, would I need a standalone vacuum in the same package? Anyone who’s owned one will know that the perfect robot clean is generally impossible. There are always edges, nooks and crannies that a robot simply can’t reach. Having a cordless, handheld vacuum on-hand to touch those edges up is, on the face of it, a pretty good idea.

The E20 3-in-1 is, surprisingly, both a competent robot vacuum cleaner and a decent cordless vacuum cleaner. But it fails somewhat in the details. The crevice tool, for example, has a little nook it fits into within the robot. If you just got a handheld vacuum and the crevice tool then this would be very convenient- call the robot over on your phone, pop out its innards, pop in the crevice tool and do a little edge cleaning. Sorted! But there’s also an upholstery tool (basically a wider nozzle with a brush, you know the deal) and a full-length stick with a motorized brush head. The latter have no place that they fit, there’s no clip to fix them to the robot’s base station, no storage compartment, no wall-mount, no commensurate convenience. They are, as it stands, just a little out on a limb. Is this a dealbreaker? Not really. But it feels like you’re getting a little short-changed. Some means of storing these parts is the most basic expectation I have from a cordless vacuum and it’s missing here.

The lack of a convenient, hand-height wall-mount is also something of a ding for accessibility. The cordless stick vacuum won, in part, because it’s so outrageously convenient to pick up and use. Nine times out of ten it will already be set up with the floor brush, fully charged, and mounted at a convenient height for even those with mobility concerns to fetch it and do some vacuuming. In the E20 there’s no such convenience. You need to bend down, remove the vacuum cleaner from the robot, find the long tube thingy (I cannot find mine right now because the kids have probably eaten it… no, really, I just went looking and I cannot find it anywhere), attach it, extend it, and you can finally start trucking. This isn’t a big deal if you’re doing 95% of your vacuuming by robot, but you should know that you have to do 95% of your vacuuming by robot for this enticing combo not to drive you potty.
Where, I think, the 3-in-1 E20 will shine is a small space where automated cleaning is desired, but deploying two separate appliances feels over the top.

So the convenience and accessibility of the combo isn’t great, but both halves stand well on their own in defiant juxtaposition to the classic “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” saying.

The Stick Vacuum

Despite being part of a robot, and thus necessarily designed around docking into and charging through the robot wheel base, the cordless stick vacuum is actually very good.

Two things, in particular, stand out to me and while they may be small accommodations in the wider world of cordless vacuums it’s nonetheless nice to have them here.

First, the stick, tube, whatever you want to call it is extendable. It collapses perhaps for storage more than anything else, but it is – as luck would have it – coincidentally just the right length for a child (one who’s obsessed with vacuum cleaners, no less) to do some household vacuuming. When expanded it’s decently long for a tall fellow like myself to vacuum without being plagued by hunch-induced-back-pain, but it’s notably shorter – both the tube itself and the body of the vacuum – than my previous vacuum.

Second, the trigger. There isn’t one. It’s odd because there’s a sort of trigger guard where you’d expect the trigger to be, but turning the vacuum cleaner on requires a long press of a button on the top. Once on, pressing the button cycles through various suction modes and a long press will turn it off. I’ve very mixed feelings about this choice. On the down side it’s a little delay before the vacuum cleaner starts, y’know, vacuum cleaning. On top of the inconvenience of pulling it out of a robot, on the floor, this adds up. On the up side, however, it doesn’t require being held down. This is excellent for those with motor issues or, indeed, for me with the creeping menace of RSI haunting my hands.

It’s also excellent for comfort in general. To explicitly call out the Dyson V8 Animal I’ve used for many years now; it hurts to use. The Dyson had an awful plastic ridge right where the trigger was, and it dug into my finger. Then, more recently, the trigger guard has completely snapped off, leaving a broken, exposed piece of sharp plastic. This, in conjunction with all the cracks (not injection moulding marks or lines in the plastic, actual, visible, obvious cracks) makes me rather less than enthusiastic about having recommended Dyson before. Absolute hot garbage. Anyway…

On balance I think I prefer the button over a trigger, it’s significantly more comfortable to use and isn’t outright painful like my cursed Dyson. Notably this button behaves very similarly to the button on Eufy’s own S11 stick vacuum https://gadgetoid.com/2021/01/11/eufy-homevac-s11-go-reviewed/, but the Eufy S11 had a trigger too, which you had to hold down while adjusting the suction speed. The E20 is very much an improvement over this.

The dust compartment in the E20 is small, but it can be emptied into the main dust collector in the Robot’s base station so it never really gets too full. In my experience these bags really do last many, many months and can be readily replaced with cost-effective off-brand ones. In my case the bag supplied with the Eufy X10 Pro Omni lasted 7 months, and I replaced it with a pack of 10 that set me back £12. Using these figures and some back of the napkin maths suggests a yearly bag cost of around £2.40. Or about 20p a month. That’s significantly less than the electricity cost to run it. Eufy’s claims are a more realistic 75 days, and I think your mileage will vary based on cleaning frequency and, uh, pets maybe.

The idea of using bags again was somewhat disconcerting to me – the extra waste and whatnot – but they are a lot more convenient than trying to empty a bagless vacuum without unleashing a cloud of dust. In the case of the E20 you can empty just by dropping the cordless vacuum back into its robot docking station, and long pressing a button to send the robot either trundling back to its dock, or on a happy little dance to rotate itself 180 degrees to go from charging to emptying.

As for build quality – the gloss plastic finish is probably not going to stay pristine forever, but it gives the whole thing a very clean, crisp appearance. It’s not busy or complex and it feels very premium. It doesn’t have anything that looks suspiciously like a weak spot, and I’d expect it to last pretty well. Only time will tell. The main unit is fairly compact and lightweight – necessary constraints of spending much of its time docked within a robot no doubt – and it’s reasonably easy to get into tight spots. I cranked up the suction and attacked all the crumbs in my car, for example.

Clipping in and removing attachments is an awful lot easier than the Eufy S11 Go vacuum, I’m glad they’ve improved this since we still use the S11 Go and it’s bloomin’ annoying. Unfortunately the weird square profile crevice tool does not clip into the extension tube – it’s a square peg into a round hole-, so you wont easily be cleaning around the tops of rooms (and down behind awkward furniture) with it. The same applies to the upholstery tool.

I’d like to see a smaller motorised brush for cleaning up stairs, since the full-sized floor brush is a little unwieldy and stairs are the one thing we can all agree that robot vacuum cleaners can’t handle. A flexible tube for the crevice tool would be handy, too, some spots in the car are quite tricky to get to, even with a compact handheld vacuum cleaner. It wouldn’t solve the cleaning around the tops of rooms problem, but it would be a nice addition.

The floor brush seems to handle cleaning both hard floors and carpets fine, and it has a neat little locking switch to release the roller for the inevitable regular snipping of wrapped-around hair. There’s no tool supplied for this… I, uh, use my sharp grooming scissors.

The Robot

The robot is, as near as I can tell, a batteryless, vacuumless chariot for the vacuum to ride around in. It looks much for muchness like any other robot vacuum save for this idiosyncratic design, and it doesn’t seem to have lost anything for being separated from many of its important, sucky bits.

Well… except the robot is effectively stone cold dead every time you remove the cordless vacuum from it. It has no backup power and no ability to navigate on its own. Replacing the cordless vacuum causes it to boot back up, so you have to wait a moment or two to start robot vacuuming if – like me – you’ve removed the cordless vac, used it, and not returned it properly. This ends up with the robot showing as “Offline” in the app, disabling most of the app functionality until it’s back up and running. If someone’s using the vacuum as a cordless vacuum, for example, you won’t be able to view cleaning history, adjust schedules or change settings. It would be nice, if a little weird, if the cordless part of the vacuum remained connected and was able to report a “not docked” status.

I strongly suspect that the cordless vacuum unit is pretty simple, with the majority of the robot brains being inside the robot itself. These only get powered on when the cordless vacuum – the battery – is inserted.

When united with its battery, though, the robot behaves exactly as you would expect- it had no trouble navigating our rooms upstairs, cleaning around two of our bedrooms and a hallway without plunging down the stairs. It has, however, spent rather a lot of time either disassembled by the kids, or hidden on top of the wardrobe to avoid it being disassembled by the kids.

Did I say they were obsessed? Yup. It’s made this review perhaps one of the more difficult robot vacuum reviews I’ve penned to date.

Software

The app is the same familiar experience I’m used to with Eufy’s robot vacuum cleaners. The robot will trundle around and produce a map of your upstairs, giving a rough approximation of the room shape and any permanent obstacles. You can forego scheduled cleaning and simply tap a room and send the robot on its merry way. This is more or less the way I use both of our vacuums, since I prefer to tidy up and prepare the room for a thorough cleaning before starting. I’ve never really had a problem with Eufy’s companion app, though I’m now three robot vacuums deep into their ecosystem and have seen precious few updates. If a feature isn’t quite working, or isn’t available at launch then don’t hang your hat on a firmware update ever fixing or adding it- a good example is the child lock – or lack thereof – on the X8 Hybrid and the lab features (water level detection) that have been in beta on the X10 Pro Omni for the nine months since I tested it.

Overall

Despite its few shortcomings – lack of places to mount the accessories, tendency to be completely disassembled by the kids, the odd-shaped crevice tool that doesn’t connect to the extension tube, and lack of a compact motorised brush for stair cleaning – I really like the E20.

Accessibility is definitely a concern, but it feels more like something a young couple or individual might have in a small home, or especially a single floor apartment or bungalow. Having 90% of the daily vacuuming handled by the robot is great. Having a grab and go vacuum to handle the remaining 10% of fiddly spots is even better. Not having to buy both separately is truly an exciting new prospect.

While it’s not perfect it’s very cool. I’m interested to see where Eufy goes from here. Especially since half of my complaints can be fixed with some bits of plastic and a new optional accessory. Genuinely one of the more interesting bits of technology I’ve tested recently.

If you’re as intrigued as I am, you can grab the Eufy S30 3-in-1 from Amazon for £599.

Sunday, February 9th, 2025, Home Appliances.