So after we had a bit of a chat on here about them I finally bit the bullet and purchased one myself recently to replace my cheap cordless. I’ve had it a couple of weeks now so thought I’d share my thoughts with the forum.
I still keep my reliable old friend Henry around for ‘proper’ vacuuming, for those not from the UK they’re one of the most popular cleaners here and generally last forever, with a little smiling face on them.
But this review isn’t about Henry.
It’s about the Ecovacs I bought.
First impressions- The packaging is decent, and it comes with enough spare accessories that you probably won’t need to buy any new sweepers or a brush bar for a long while. One thing that I looked at before buying it was the cost of new accessories and at around £20 for a new set, ongoing maintenence won’t break the bank.
The unit itself is quite heavy, perhaps heavier than I expected. As I live in a flat, I don’t plan on picking it up that often. It does have a feature where you can have multiple floors saved on a map, so if you’re in a house with multiple floors it is still usable but I imagine it would get tiresome quite quickly having to move it around.
The build quality feels pretty good, being made of solid thick plastic.
Cleaning performance - For vacuuming, the cleaning performance is pretty impressive. Even when running it daily, in my pet free, smoke free, child free home, it seems to pick up an impressive amount of dirt, especially on the first few runs. We’re by no means dirty and I vacuumed at least 3 times a week previously so was a bit shocked at how much was living in the carpets, in my fairly small one bedroom flat.
For mopping, the performance is… okay. It will mop the floors, and not do a bad job but where you can’t use any detergent it’s more of a top up clean than removing dirt and stains. Annoyingly I have discovered to get any sort of decent performance you need to pre-wet the mopping pad and there were a couple of runs where there were dry patches. I find it quite cumbersome to take the pad on and off, so I generally just stick to vacuuming and mop by hand (a hallway, tiny bathroom and kitchen aren’t too difficult to do!)
Robot features - One place where it does seeem to fall down a bit is getting stuck on stuff - quite often it will struggle to get over a rug that never comes up during ‘normal life’. And you have to be super careful with power leads etc - more than once it has gotten stuck as a phone charging cable tucked away under my bed has been eaten. In some ways having the vacuum forces you to be a more tidy person as anything left on the floor may cause issues with cleaning.
In regards to navigation, it does a good job, albiet it seems to have taken a few runs to stop bashing into walls and corners. One place it does seem to fail is on a fish tank stand, which is about half an inch higher than the carpet. It tries to ‘clean’ the bottom of this and fails to see the bucket in the way.
I deliberately chose a model which had the more-pricey LIDAR feature as I wanted to be able to tell it to clean a specific room such as the kitchen and it’s been great for this.
It’s taken a bit of trial and error with the dock, but now it’s in position it always finds it way home for charging, as long as it doesn’t bump a door shut behind it which it done a couple of times.
Noise wise, I would say it’s a bit quieter than a standard vacuum. I can still have a conversation while the vacuum is running, or watch TV.
App /smart features- The app is pretty good, if a little bit overwhelming at first. There’s lots of settings, from the vacuum power level to whether you use the map in simple or advanced mode. You need to switch to advanced mode to enable stuff like cleaning only one or two rooms, and the switch involves resetting the current map and remapping your place. They could do with making this a bit more clear as the mapping process took over 30 minutes even in my tiny one bed flat.
The app is how I normally interact with the vacuum. It has Alexa integration but this seems a bit hit and miss, having to ask Alexa to ‘enter Deebot’ then ‘ask Deebot to clean’ takes more time than it does to press start cleaning on an app.
There is, supposedly an integration with Home Assistance but so far I have been unable to get this to actually work at all.
Battery life - The battery is pretty good and will probably manage to do one floor of most average properties. As mine is so small, it rarely gets to less than 50% even after doing a full vacuum then mop.
Value for money- I spent a long time looking at reviews, comparing products before I settled on the Deebot. I paid about £420 while it was down from £500. This is a lot of money to spend on a Vacuum - I’ve never spent more than about £150 before. At £420 I would say it’s a good buy, at £500, probably not. The LIDAR vacuums are much more expensive than the less smart ones but for me being able to choose where to clean is a killer feature and the Ozmo 920 is one of the cheaper ones that does this. At the time of writing, it’s down to £350 which is a pretty good price.
My verdict - I would say buy one of these if you’re after the convenience of not having to vacuum. You do save a lot of time, and it makes it a lot easier to actually keep the floors vacuumed. Not getting a heavy thing out of a cupboard and plugging it in is brilliant.
If you’re not 100% sold on the idea though, I’d give it another couple of years and see how far the price comes down.
Buying one?- You can help support this site by purchasing through the below affiliate link for Amazon UK. I was not paid for this review and spent my own hard-earned cash on the unit. If you do not wish to help fund the site for any reason I also provide a non affiliated link.
Buy on Amazon UK - Affiliate Link
Buy on Amazon UK - NON affiliate link
I still keep my reliable old friend Henry around for ‘proper’ vacuuming, for those not from the UK they’re one of the most popular cleaners here and generally last forever, with a little smiling face on them.
But this review isn’t about Henry.
It’s about the Ecovacs I bought.
First impressions- The packaging is decent, and it comes with enough spare accessories that you probably won’t need to buy any new sweepers or a brush bar for a long while. One thing that I looked at before buying it was the cost of new accessories and at around £20 for a new set, ongoing maintenence won’t break the bank.
The unit itself is quite heavy, perhaps heavier than I expected. As I live in a flat, I don’t plan on picking it up that often. It does have a feature where you can have multiple floors saved on a map, so if you’re in a house with multiple floors it is still usable but I imagine it would get tiresome quite quickly having to move it around.
The build quality feels pretty good, being made of solid thick plastic.
Cleaning performance - For vacuuming, the cleaning performance is pretty impressive. Even when running it daily, in my pet free, smoke free, child free home, it seems to pick up an impressive amount of dirt, especially on the first few runs. We’re by no means dirty and I vacuumed at least 3 times a week previously so was a bit shocked at how much was living in the carpets, in my fairly small one bedroom flat.
For mopping, the performance is… okay. It will mop the floors, and not do a bad job but where you can’t use any detergent it’s more of a top up clean than removing dirt and stains. Annoyingly I have discovered to get any sort of decent performance you need to pre-wet the mopping pad and there were a couple of runs where there were dry patches. I find it quite cumbersome to take the pad on and off, so I generally just stick to vacuuming and mop by hand (a hallway, tiny bathroom and kitchen aren’t too difficult to do!)
Robot features - One place where it does seeem to fall down a bit is getting stuck on stuff - quite often it will struggle to get over a rug that never comes up during ‘normal life’. And you have to be super careful with power leads etc - more than once it has gotten stuck as a phone charging cable tucked away under my bed has been eaten. In some ways having the vacuum forces you to be a more tidy person as anything left on the floor may cause issues with cleaning.
In regards to navigation, it does a good job, albiet it seems to have taken a few runs to stop bashing into walls and corners. One place it does seem to fail is on a fish tank stand, which is about half an inch higher than the carpet. It tries to ‘clean’ the bottom of this and fails to see the bucket in the way.
I deliberately chose a model which had the more-pricey LIDAR feature as I wanted to be able to tell it to clean a specific room such as the kitchen and it’s been great for this.
It’s taken a bit of trial and error with the dock, but now it’s in position it always finds it way home for charging, as long as it doesn’t bump a door shut behind it which it done a couple of times.
Noise wise, I would say it’s a bit quieter than a standard vacuum. I can still have a conversation while the vacuum is running, or watch TV.
App /smart features- The app is pretty good, if a little bit overwhelming at first. There’s lots of settings, from the vacuum power level to whether you use the map in simple or advanced mode. You need to switch to advanced mode to enable stuff like cleaning only one or two rooms, and the switch involves resetting the current map and remapping your place. They could do with making this a bit more clear as the mapping process took over 30 minutes even in my tiny one bed flat.
The app is how I normally interact with the vacuum. It has Alexa integration but this seems a bit hit and miss, having to ask Alexa to ‘enter Deebot’ then ‘ask Deebot to clean’ takes more time than it does to press start cleaning on an app.
There is, supposedly an integration with Home Assistance but so far I have been unable to get this to actually work at all.
Battery life - The battery is pretty good and will probably manage to do one floor of most average properties. As mine is so small, it rarely gets to less than 50% even after doing a full vacuum then mop.
Value for money- I spent a long time looking at reviews, comparing products before I settled on the Deebot. I paid about £420 while it was down from £500. This is a lot of money to spend on a Vacuum - I’ve never spent more than about £150 before. At £420 I would say it’s a good buy, at £500, probably not. The LIDAR vacuums are much more expensive than the less smart ones but for me being able to choose where to clean is a killer feature and the Ozmo 920 is one of the cheaper ones that does this. At the time of writing, it’s down to £350 which is a pretty good price.
My verdict - I would say buy one of these if you’re after the convenience of not having to vacuum. You do save a lot of time, and it makes it a lot easier to actually keep the floors vacuumed. Not getting a heavy thing out of a cupboard and plugging it in is brilliant.
If you’re not 100% sold on the idea though, I’d give it another couple of years and see how far the price comes down.
Buying one?- You can help support this site by purchasing through the below affiliate link for Amazon UK. I was not paid for this review and spent my own hard-earned cash on the unit. If you do not wish to help fund the site for any reason I also provide a non affiliated link.
Buy on Amazon UK - Affiliate Link
Buy on Amazon UK - NON affiliate link
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