A household’s love for a robot vacuum cleaner has grown in the last few years, with cleaning, self-cleaning and even mopping capabilities added to the mix of autonomous machines that clean your whole house at the tap of an app, or through a simple voice command.
Brands from the original iRobot from the US, UK’s Dyson to China’s Xiaomi, Dreame, Ecovacs, Roborock and more, have been building and improving on the modernised vacuum cleaner to make home cleaning a chore no more, and the results have varied over the years. From advanced artificial intelligence that detects the amount and type of dirt, to the various models that can map out your home layout, traverse thresholds, operate over carpets, automatically increase cleaning intensity, and even drying capabilities to blow dry a vacuum’s cleaning head to prevent the need to disassemble the brushes after each use, to dry out the parts, brands are going all out to outperform the others.
And some are taking different approaches to cleaning.
Now unlike how Dyson has focused its core business on wireless vacuum cleaners and merely experimented with robotic ones, Ecovacs has done the opposite by launching a wave of robot vacuums with different capabilities, while putting less emphasis on wireless handheld cleaning machines. The Ecovacs Deebot X11 OmniCyclone is the latest flagship self-guiding cleaner that is easy to set up, deploys different cleaning modes and intensity, and can be configured to deal with pets, continuous cleaning, and offering the ultimate deploy-and-forget cleansing.
Like most robotic cleaners, it comes with a massive base station that is actually lightweight to carry around. The bottom area is the docking bay that connects to the round robot cleaner, while the upper region of the station comprises two compartments. On the front left is a latch that can be removed, to house two plastic containers that contain cleaning solutions. The smaller one with a black lid is used to contain a strong cleaning solution, while the larger one with the blue lid is used to store regular floor cleaning solution. In the middle is a removable round chamber that deposits the dirt from the vacuum, making it easier to clean out the dust deposits.
At the top are two larger containers of equal sizes – the one on the left is used to hold clean water, while the one on the right is for the used water that the cleaning machine generates and disposes of. There is an opening at the top, and reaching in will reveal a handle to pull each container up and out. These containers have built-in latches in place, so you know if they are inserted correctly, to prevent any leaks since they all handle some form of liquid. There are also markings on the containers to avoid overfilling.
The underside of the robot unit comprises several sections and balanced on each side are two wheels, flanked by a smaller 360 degree wheel at the front, and the large mop head meant for mopping at the rear. While this mop head stays within the circumference of the unit, it can extend when deployed to mop the edge of walls, which Ecovacs refers to as edge-to-edge, streak-free mopping. And in the middle is the high-density nylon brush roller for vacuuming.
The top of the unit is the three-prong element that has the Power button in the middle, and you can actually remove the plastic plate, to access the Wi-Fi access button to pair the unit to your phone. Lifting it will also reveal the removable container that keeps the dirt sucked up by the machine, before it’s extracted to the main chamber on the base station.
The first time you turn on the machine, you will be asked to install the Ecovacs app which will pair the machine to your phone, and allow you to connect it to your home Wi-Fi network (via the Wi-Fi button located under the plastic plate, and next comes the fun part – mapping your home. The unit, which showed around 65 per cent battery capacity out of the box, will traverse your home and map it via the app. This isn’t a cleaning mode as yet, as it will merely detect objects and travel around the edges of furniture, cupboards, walls and other big items, such as chairs, coat’s rack and more around your home, so if you have objects that are not a permanent part of your home layout, including bags, boxes, or even office chairs on rollers, do remove or move them for the machine to correctly map your home.
It took around an hour to map my 1,200 sq ft apartment, and there were a few things apparent during this time. You need to remove any regular-sized floor mats on the floor, as the rollers will get caught on the lightweight pieces of cloth and interfere with cleaning operations. Note that this mapping is done without any of the unit’s rollers or brushes deployed, so you can already imagine how much more of an impact such items will have, in preventing the machine from performing.
The catch is that there is a 3.2 cm high threshold between the dining room and kitchen, and while the machine easily rolled into the kitchen, it was unable to traverse out of it. Most toilets also have a similar threshold and while the machine is supposed to be able to maneuver across them, it depends on the depth of each one, if your intent is for the machine to clean your toilets as well. Otherwise, you can use the app to block out the kitchen and toilets, which I did, to stop it from cleaning those areas.
The sensors on the unit are able to detect the walls in the home and are able to differentiate between the outline of a bed in the middle of a room and a wall, though it also misidentified the small area outside the entrances of two bedrooms and the toilet, as a separate bedroom – perhaps identifying the small distance between two opposing walls as a doorway instead.
Regardless, after the home is mapped out, you can re-orientate the map and rename the rooms, and that’s when the cleaning fun starts. You can configure the automated cleaning to clean the whole house, and be done with it. The app allows you to alter the cleaning conditions as you see fit, such as choosing a vacuum mode, vacuum and moping mode, or a vacuum followed by mopping mode. And the vacuum suction is strong, as the machine has high airflow and strong suction, with 38 CFM (cubic feet per minute) airflow and 19,500Pa (Pascal) suction. While there is no numerical value to provide as an average, pure suction or airflow is not enough to determine how good a vacuum is, while a strong combination works better.
There are also four suction modes to toggle with, and when it comes to mop, you can even set the amount of water used for mopping. There are also three speed modes – standard, deep cleaning and quick, for when you want a quick run around the home to prepare for guests. Lastly, you can also set the device to do one or two passes around the home.
And since you have mapped the layout, you can decide how the machine cleans each room in the home. If you note that the kitchen is dirtier due to cooking, and want a more thorough wet session following a vacuum, you can. If that spare room is not used, you can set the machine to simply vacuum, but not mop that room. And maybe you want the machine to focus on cleaning your children’s bedroom with greater intensity as well.
What’s amazing, and while somewhat pointless, is that once you have the home mapped out, you can reorient the map to become a 3D map, and once you position furniture, like the dining table, beds, wardrobes, desk and kitchen counter tops, you effectively have mini digital dollhouse on your finger tips, to better track the movement and route of the machine.
It takes a while, but after 76 minutes, the house was spick and span. What the machine did was clean one room and a half, and then went back to the docking station to swap out the water, before moving to finish another room, then back to the dock to replenish, before spending a large amount of time on the living and dining room. The bulk of the dirt was under the couch and dining table, and you can just see the systematic way the device rolls across the open space in straight lines, through live tracking via the app, ensuring that every open area receives a good clean.
The return to the docking station is not just to clean the unit, as the vacuum comes with PowerBoost charging that also charges it quickly, effectively allowing it to run continuously in larger homes and areas. You cannot comprehend the frustration in the past, to come home only to find a powered down robot vacuum in the middle of the bedroom, simply because it ran out of juice to complete its job.
Another amazing feature is that the machine comes equipped with a video camera, and you can view the machine’s journey around the home in real time. It can be therapeutic to watch the machine move around the home, travel under the couch and in between the legs of the dining table, to clean the house. And if the machine is stuck, you can immediately tell what is in the way, be it an item left on the ground, or perhaps it’s your pet at home messing with the robot trying to clean up its mess.
What was surprising was that there wasn’t a mess of hair, normally caused by three long-haired ladies in the home, trapped in the roller after the machine did its round around the home. Like the Dreame H14 Ultra Wet Cordless Wet & Dry Vacuum Cleaner, the cleaning head on the unit uses an anti-hair tangle approach so that long hair doesn’t get twisted and trapped in the gears of the rotating brush. The suction brush head was relatively clean and if the mop is deployed, the machine has a self-cleaning function that uses hot air to wet clean and then blow dry the cleaning velvet material on the mop head.
For any machine that offers wet cleaning, this drying with high heat is a must as it effectively eliminates any foul odour that can remain on the cloth material through normal drying. The end result was a used water container filled slightly less than half with cloudy water, and a dust chamber filled with dirt twists.
And post-cleaning, you can also view the path the device took on the app, to see which area it travelled and cleaned. And if you see a spot that was missed, you can visit the actual area to see what was obstructing the cleaning process. In the event that a room door is closed, the app will also reflect that the room wasn’t clean and you can choose to only clean that room in the next run. On a second round a few days later, bedroom slippers were left in the path that prevented the machine from going around, and the system identified an obstruction, as did the cleaning record on the app, showing clearly which area wasn’t clean.
In the four weeks of use, the machine cleaned the home extremely well, leaving the marble floors feeling polished and without that powdered feel upon the feet. When the machine was made to run two rounds across the home on regular mode, cleaning took close to two hours. The one thing that was not followed was the manual’s instructions to use only cleaning solutions made by Ecovacs. Instead, normal, suds-free cleaning solution was used in the regular cleaning solutions container, and the cleaned home emitted a soft lavender fragrance, courtesy of the cleaning solution.
There’s also an automatic mode where the machine will detect the type of cleaning needed for the home, and room by room. Called Agent Hosting, it uses AI to determine the type of cleaning needed and one run of that took 138 minutes. One recommendation is to ensure mats and other items are removed from the floor, and to let it run when no one is home. This ensures that upon your return, all your feet are stepping back on clean floors that you produced, at the tap of an app.
At S$1,699, it’s certainly a hefty investment, but it’s a small price to pay for coming home to clean, shiny floors.
GEEK REVIEW SCORE
Summary
Robot cleaners have come a long way, and while wireless vacuums were the rage before, robot cleaners, with their superior approach to cleaning and tackling both vacuum and mopping, put those old machines to shame. The Ecovacs Deebot X11 OmniCyclone is one of the best in its class, and can mop the floor with the best of the rest.
Overall
9.1/10
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Aesthetics - 9/10
9/10
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Build Quality - 9/10
9/10
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Performance - 9/10
9/10
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Geek Satisfaction - 9.5/10
9.5/10
Hsals needs more space in his house, and more money in his bank account to pay for all the toys, collectibles and other geek related items that companies are churning out. Free-time? Girlfriend? Who’s got time for those?
Zinho De Costa
Si Jia
