In this video, I’m going to take a look at the RoboVac X8 by Eufy,
a robotic vacuum cleaner that promises top-level performance, at a pretty reasonable price point,
especially when compared with other robot vacuum cleaners on the market.
Now, Eufy are sponsoring this video, so with that in mind I’ll be leaving my
opinions out of this video, and will instead focus on nothing but facts,
but I will detail with you my exact experience of setting this item up,
and having it go to work in our house over the past couple of weeks.
The RoboVac X8 comes with everything you need to get started included in the box,
obviously the RoboVac itself, a charging point and cable for connecting it, a spare
set of side brushes and a spare filter, all the relevant paperwork and instructions you’d expect
as well as some cable ties which, I’ll be totally honest, I haven’t figured out what they’re for.
Setup is a piece of cake, just position the charging base in a suitable position
and plug into power. Eufy have included a section in the bottom where you can coil any extra cable,
not only does this make the charging base look neater,
it also avoids having running cable which could get tangled up in the RoboVac’s brushes.
When your RoboVac is fully charged, and this can take up to 5 hours from totally empty,
and you’ve set the base station up wherever you’d like it, your RoboVac is sort of like bringing a
pet home for the first time, it’s going to want to explore and figure out it’s new surroundings.
Push the power button on the top of it, and the vacuum will confidently exit it’s base station,
spin around a few times, before trundling off to check out it’s new home.
This is a super important part of the process, this is the mapping stage, where the RoboVac
will attempt to draw a 3D map of your home, which it will then use on all future cleans.
While it’s tempting to just hit the ‘go’ button and see what happens, you’re going to want to
do a tiny bit of preparation here, to ensure that you get the best results.
Firstly, ensure that your RoboVac has a full charge, as the mapping process
can take a while depending on the size of your house, and you ideally don’t want it to run out
of juice while it’s mapping, although it can pick up where it left off if that does happen.
Second, open all doors in your house to rooms that you’d like the RoboVac to be able to access.
Even if you don’t plan on the RoboVac cleaning a particular room there and then,
if you want it to include that room in it’s map, allow it access. Conversely,
you should block anywhere that you don’t want it to have access to. Thirdly, go around your house
and remove as many things from the floor as you can, to allow the most comprehensive map of your
space. Now obviously, I’m not talking furniture here, but if you’ve got little light objects,
small footstools, that kind of thing, it is worth getting them up and out of the way to
allow the vac to do it’s job. Remember, this thing can probably get under your sofa and other
items of furniture that you might not usually vacuum, so give it the space it needs to work.
With that prep out of the way, the RoboVac will disappear off on it’s maiden voyage, and while
Eufy recommend that you follow it around to ensure it doesn’t get stuck, I challenge you not to,
I was following this thing around like a kid with a puppy. It will go around the perimeter
of your entire floor first, trying to map out where walls and doors are, and then once it’s
managed to create a loop, it will then head into the middle and try and fill in the blanks. It does
all of this with what Eufy are calling it’s iPath Laser Navigation system and AI Map 2.0 technology,
allowing the vacuum to create and store up to 5 maps in the app. This could in theory be for
different homes if you’re living life like that, but for most of us I suspect this will be to allow
you to have a map for upstairs and a map for downstairs, that’s certainly what we’ve done.
This precise laser navigation and intelligent planning allows the vacuum to create an
efficient cleaning pattern around your home, which of course is going to save battery.
Obviously, all of this intelligent navigation would be a bit useless if the vacuum couldn’t
perform it’s job of, well, sucking very well. According to Eufy, the X8 is the first robot
vacuum cleaner to feature dual cyclone technology, with 2 fans each producing 2000 pascal pressure
units of power, which Eufy claim increases inwards air flow by 80% compared to just a single fan.
You can control the suction power in the app, ranging from pure at the bottom end all the
way up to max at the top end, along with a BoostIQ mode which aims to change the suction depending on
the type of floor it’s on. This really does work, I’ve watched the vacuum cross the boundary from
our floored hallway to our carpeted living room, and immediately heard the whoosh of the cyclones
kicking up a gear. I’ve found that in general, when the vacuum is cleaning our kitchen, hallway,
utility room or any other part of our home that is floored, the pure suction is generally good enough
for daily cleaning, but I do like to push it all the way up to Max when on carpet. Keep in mind,
it’s going to return to it’s base station and recharge after each clean, so for the odd clean
here and there, you might want to push the power up to know you’re getting the best performance.
And it does seem to make a difference, when you look in the dust collector, which Eufy claim has
UltraPack dust compression technology, in other words it can squeeze more in. Compared with their
30C model, the same size of collection bin can hold 127% more dust and dirt, which of course
means the vacuum can go about it’s business for longer, without you having to get involved.
Speaking of the bin, emptying it is dead easy, you just remove it from the vacuum,
open it up and empty. The filter is removable and washable,
and it even comes with a little magnetic tool to help you get any annoying dirt out.
Oh, and a vacuum review wouldn’t be complete without a mandatory suction test
where you throw a load of stuff on the floor and see what happens, so I did just that,
a mixture of ground up Rice Krispies, some flour, a bit of hair and some weetabix crumbs liberally
scattered about a large area of our kitchen floor, and you can see on the video how the
vacuum coped with it. I did find that the flour warranted pushing the suction up from pure,
but that’s just a tap in the app, and on the maximum setting, there was no chance any of the
dirt was still going to be on the floor. After one sweep of the area, I’d say 98% of the dirt looked
to be cleaned up, there were literally just a few stray Rice Krispies that had been swatted about
by the sweeper blades still on the floor, and for those, I just set the vacuum off on a second run.
The app is of course a key part of the RoboVac experience, and I’ve found it
to be generally very good. You’ll use the app to get your RoboVac setup in the first place,
connecting it to your home wifi, updating the firmware and all of that usual stuff,
and with that done, you’ll be able to use the app to both tell your RoboVac what to do,
and see what your RoboVac has been up to while you’ve been away.
There are a number of cleaning modes available. Auto will literally just have your vacuum leave
it’s charging base and go for a wander, cleaning whatever it finds along the way.
I’ve found that it still follows the same pattern of starting with the outside first,
creating a loop, then filling that loop in, and what I usually do is shut doors to rooms that
I don’t want the vacuum to go through to. It’s smart enough to work out that the door is closed
and will just set about cleaning whatever it has access to instead.
As well as Auto, you have Room which allows you to pick a room for it to clean,
Zone where you can map out a zone and spot, where you can drop a pin on the map
and have the vacuum clean just that area. You can also use the app to set no-go zones.
Obstacle detection is really impressive to watch. Obvious things like walls, cabinets, the vacuum
just gently bumps into them on it’s first mapping run, and then knows to avoid them in the future,
but it’s still able to position itself so as to get it’s cleaning brush right into corners as
it goes along. The area that I was keen to see it figure out was our kitchen table, chairs and
bench. It’s a mess of legs, the exact location of each leg is obviously constantly changing
each time we get up or sit down, and some of the gaps are big enough for the vac to get through,
some of them definitely aren’t. It was honestly amazing to watch the vacuum deal with this.
It would push gently up against each leg, then kind of circle around it as best it could,
pushing through the gaps it could fit through, backing out of the gaps it couldn’t.
I watched it get stuck once, getting part of it’s body caught against a chair leg,
and was about to get up to help it, when it suddenly stopped, reversed back
and corrected itself, before carrying on. Other than that, this thing hasn’t got stuck once. It
has ‘lost’ it’s charging base a few times, where it kind of comes close but not quite right,
and again, it seems to know that it just needs to have a look around, make some minor
adjustments, and it usually gets it right on the second or third attempt. It’s clever stuff.
The app also features a ‘point and go’ feature, which is where the vacuum will go to whatever
point on the map you send it to, and await further instruction. I didn’t think I’d use this feature,
and I ended up using it more than I’d thought I would, due to what I think is a minor bug,
one that I’m hopeful Eufy could easily fix. When the RoboVac first mapped out
our downstairs, all of the doors were open, but that’s not always the case in daily life.
First thing in the morning for example, I quite like setting the RoboVac off to clean the kitchen
and the utility, our most trodden house areas, and so I shut the door to the hall. The Vac then
realises that the door to the hall is shut, but it then seems to just kind of assume this is the case
forever from that moment on. When I try to ask the vacuum to clean the hallway, it leaves it’s dock,
figures out where it is, then announces to me that it can’t access the hallway even though it hasn’t
tried to get there, presumably because it believes the door is shut, before returning to it’s base
station. It would be nice if, instead, it would give it a try, and assume that the door is open.
There is an easy fix that I’ve found, and that’s to use Tap and Go to position the vacuum,
first in the kitchen, then into the hallway, and from there you can use the room clean function
to have it clean the room, because it realises it’s in the hallway. So, it trusts that the door
is open on Tap and Go, but not on room clean. It’s not a big deal, the fix is very simple,
but you can’t pick the vacuum up and position it manually, that will mess up it’s mapping system,
so I’m hoping and assuming that the Eufy engineers can fix this in a future update.
I said at the beginning of this video that due to this being a sponsored video, I’d keep my
opinions to a minimum and focus only on facts, but what I will say is that, after a couple of weeks
of living with ol’ Vincenzo the Vacuum as we’ve affectionately called him, I wouldn’t be prepared
to give him back if I was asked to. Do I see him replacing our vacuum? No, we’ve got a Dyson V15,
and I’ll be honest, if we spilled a load of coffee on the floor suddenly, I’d be more likely to grab
that, and know that I can clean up in 30 seconds. But, will he compliment our vacuum? Absolutely,
in fact, I reckon ol’ Vinny might be doing the majority of the vacuuming in our home from now on.
Because, a vacuum like this, I think, is about lifestyle. So after dinner for example,
when my fiancé and I load the dishwasher, then head through to the living room to watch some TV,
I like to shut the door and switch the vacuum cleaner on, and let him do his thing for 20
minutes. That way, any crumbs or mess we made preparing and eating dinner is dealt with
before we shut the house up to go to bed, and I’ve literally not had to do anything.
There’s something really nice about knowing that daily vacuuming
just isn’t something I have to concern myself with anymore.
And for more thorough cleans, the vacuum works well. We had guests coming this past weekend,
and rather than use the Dyson, I decided to take the RoboVac upstairs with it’s charging station,
and let it do a thorough clean of the entirety of our upstairs, which is almost all carpet. It
took it about an hour from start to finish, but the carpets genuinely looked like they’d had the
most thorough vacuum they’d had in a while. It’s impressive. Eufy claim a 180 minute battery life
by the way, which I’m assuming is on pure power mode, that battery is going to decrease as you
push the power level up, but it was able to clean the whole of our upstairs on Max mode, which as
I said took about an hour, and still had around half it’s battery remaining, which is impressive.
So there you go, the Eufy X8 RoboVac. This also comes in a hybrid model by the way which has a
small water container and mop attached, I can’t speak for that version as I’ve not used it,
but it’s there if you want to check it out. If you like the look of the RoboVac X8,
I’ll put some links in the description of this video where you can go and get yours.
What about you? Do you own a robot vacuum? If yes, which one, and how are you getting on with it? Or,
are you totally against the idea? If so, why? Drop me a comment, and let’s talk about it.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.