Can you replace your standard stick or upright vacuum with a robot vacuum that does all the work for you? I thought it had to be worth a try.
Like most of us, I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life wrestling with a manual vacuum cleaner. The old faithful. The likes of Dyson, Vax, Shark and, naturally, Henry. I’ve not always had a great relationship with vacuuming – one of avoidance and utter boredom in my 20s – but I’ve come to understand why some might find it therapeutic, mindful, even satisfying.
Some might say that when you finally buy a Dyson in your 30s, you’ve really made it in life. Until recently, I would have agreed. The Dyson in my life had been great. Strong suction power. Smooth manoeuvrability. Slick looks. The envy of all vacuum owners.
That was before I was introduced to the idea of using a robot vacuum.
A vacuum cleaner that will take itself off on its merry way, and clean the entire house while you catch up on your favourite box set. Buy the right model, and it’ll even mop the floors as it goes. Self-clean and empty itself after it’s done. If I’m honest, it sounded too good to be true. I might never have to vacuum again.
Would it truly give the floors a deep clean? Would it get stuck? Get into the corners? Suck up an entire iPhone charger? Crucially, could it actually replace the humble upright vacuum cleaner? To answer these questions, I decided to test one of the top models on the market. Something that would impress me – and my clean bean better half.
I chose the Eufy S1 Pro. You can read our review to find out more, but it’s Eufy’s flagship robot vacuum, and it not only vacuums and mops but takes care of its own dustbin emptying, water refilling and emptying, and even washes and dries its mop. It’s available from Amazon UK and Amazon US for £1,499/$1,499.
And I binned my Dyson (well, sold it).
Here’s what happened when I switched to using a robot vacuum for all my daily vacuuming.
It needs a home of its own
Firstly, let’s talk about looks. Of course, there are lots of different models on the market. Some come with a self-emptying or full-service base station, others with a compact charging dock.
Because it has this base station, all the nasty jobs get taken care of automatically
The S1 Pro comes with what Eufy calls the 10-in-1 Uniclean Station. It sure is stylish, and that’s important because a robot vacuum doesn’t live in a cupboard (as my Dyson did).
It has a built-in ozone generator that bubbles away in the clean water tank, removing up to 99.99% of germs in both the tap water and the dirty water tank as a result. It feels quite relaxing to watch actually.
Because it has this base station, all the nasty jobs get taken care of automatically – detergent filling, vacuum emptying, mop washing, water refilling, waste water collection and heated air drying. Neat.
The robot itself is is squarer than most of its rivals, with a matt sheen finish on its removable cover. It’s been designed to make corner cleaning more effective, compared to conventionally circular robot vacuums.
It’s also lower, so it’ll get under your sofa. Some models come with voice controls too and this one can be synced to Alexa and Google Home. Roborock calls its model Rocky so, naturally, my girlfriend affectionately nicknamed this one Roger (the robot vacuum).
A few crumbs away from perfection
The first time we set Roger free, he set about mapping each room in our flat. It’s not huge, but offers a series of interesting challenges. We have a lot of hard floor, a deep pile rug, carpet in the bedroom and a tiled bathroom floor. As we have limited space, there are a lot of obstacles in the way: tables, chairs, bins, shoes, clutter.
The S1 Pro features the same tech NASA uses in its Mars Landing project to map every room. LiDAR creates real-time 3D maps that help the robot to clean your home effectively, and you to tell it what to do. It’s pretty cool seeing how intricate this gets: all the nooks and crannies, any permanent things in the way – I can even see on the map where the plant is in the living room.
It couldn’t quite reach the outermost crumbs next to the kitchen skirting board
Eufy wants the S1 Pro to ‘observe, think and react like a human’. Like a real-life Roger the Dodger, I imagine. Much like the systems in a self-driving car, it’s powered by a 3D MatrixEye AI algorithm that claims to avoid obstacles with millimetre-level precision.
I’ve got to say, it’s damn near close. The S1 Pro frankly danced around our table and chair legs, getting under and in between each one. It was really quite impressive, as I’d expected the floor under the table to be difficult for it to clean.
I left some shoes out in the middle of the floor, and it got within a few centimetres, then backed off and vacuumed all the way around. The camera on the front has infrared vision that sees what’s ahead in real-time, building coloured 3D models so it can avoid obstacles. That means it can even clean in the dark. Very clever, Roger.
However, I found it couldn’t quite reach the outermost crumbs next to the kitchen skirting board. Despite having swirling brushes that extend outside its body, it’s the sort of thing only the extendable hose on a normal vacuum could reach.
But, that was okay, I decided, because a quick sweep to move the crumbs out into the middle before the clean took no time at all. Better than getting on my hands and knees with a vacuum accessory.
The downside
I found Roger trustworthy enough to leave him going while we were out the house. It was totally carefree cleaning. That is, until we came home to find the robot had chewed up an important bank statement we’d forgotten about under the sofa. I suppose it was, in part, to its credit – I hadn’t expected it to clean under the sofa in the first place.
People still need to do their bit, moving the most important things out of the way
However, it hadn’t seen the paper under there in the dark, and it’s a reminder that robot vacuums aren’t perfect. People still need to do their bit, moving the most important things out of the way. Is it a big deal? Probably not, given that it’ll force me to be tidier anyway.
Another area that Roger couldn’t possibly hope to cover is the top of the sofa. Using the attachments on a normal vacuum, I’d usually clean up any debris in the cracks and crevices of our settee, and so for this we’d still need an alternative, like a handheld vacuum. We don’t have stairs but if we did, that’s another area we’d still need to clean ourselves.
Our deep pile rug presented another challenge – it’s something we barely have time to vacuum ourselves. Impressively, the S1 Pro dealt with it effortlessly – it can lift itself up and down to climb onto rugs and over raised thresholds – and gave the rug the deepest clean of its life.
It also raises the mop up when it detects carpet, so the dirty water doesn’t wet or stain. This is a feature you’ll only see on high-end models.
Roger did, however, get caught a few times in between the awkward legs of my girlfriend’s dressing table chair. Although its escape was noisy and laboured, it worked it out after a while and got free.
Finally, it miraculously made its way out onto our balcony (?!) and vacuumed that too, over a high threshold. It was a bit of a surprise, but an added bonus.
Everything but the bin juice
The mopping is also thorough, leaving an odourless, spotless floor in its wake. It’ll take on most grime, even the stubborn marks on our kitchen floor we would previously have had to scrub. Granted, it took two attempts – but the mop exerts 1kg of downward pressure and it can get the job done.
One morning, I noticed the bin bags had left a large spill overnight and thought it a good time to put Roger to the test. I don’t think I’d try this again. Whilst the mop will clear up most things, including minimal spills, larger spills do get a bit messy. Not ideal, when it’s bin juice you’re dealing with. Luckily, the Uniclean’s auto mop washing cycle cleaned the robot up like new.
Hands-free cleaning
Using the app, I was able to set each room up with different cleaning settings. A deep vacuum for the bedroom, mop and vacuum in the lounge, and deep mopping in the bathroom.
In the app, you can opt to block off certain areas and set zones for one-time cleans, which came in really handy when we noticed that the kitchen needed a clean-up after we’d been cooking. You can also give the robot a schedule, and ours is set to once every two days, because there are always crumbs and debris falling onto the kitchen floor.
I have to say, the floors and carpets in the flat are looking cleaner than ever. With a manual vacuum, we only had time perhaps once every week or fortnight for a proper clean. Now, we watch the vacuuming get done two to three times per week from the comfort of our sofa. It’s genius.
Yes, there are areas and jobs a robot vacuum can’t reach or complete. But I’m okay with that. It’s saved me so much time and hassle that I can live with needing to occasionally sweep the corners or hand-vacuum the sofa.
Would I go back to Dyson? Sorry, no. Roger is part of the family now.
A robot vacuum will take on most of your floor cleaning, but how much it can do it depends on the model you get. Whichever one you buy, you’ll still need a smaller stick/handheld vacuum for furniture, stairs and odd corners, and you’ll probably want to keep a bucket and mop stashed in a cupboard for big spills.
Eufy’s Omni S1 Pro is a top-of-the-line model with a correspondingly high price, but we’ve tested and can recommend models with a similar feature set (minus the mop drying) for much less in our round-up of the best robot vacuums.
You might also be surprised by the features you can now get on a budget model. See our best cheap robot vacuums round-up for buying advice on more wallet-friendly models.
