Although vacuums seem fairly complicated, particularly robot vacuums, almost every smart home company makes one. Take Eufy, for instance, a company generally known for security cameras. Their new flagship, the Eufy X10 Pro Omni, is a pretty great mid-range model at $799, and only shows its hand to high-end models in a few areas. This model will begin shipping this week.
Spinning scrub brushes replace the usual mop head
I've found that the newer floorbot docks take up more space—they hold a vacuum bag as well as two chambers, for fresh and dirty mop water. The bases clean mop heads and dry them. All that requires some bulky hardware, and the Eufy isn’t different from any other model I’ve tested in size and footprint. While I don’t think the X10 looks as expensive as some other models I’ve tested, it doesn’t look cheap, either. Matte molded plastic and lots of soft corners make the tower un-intimidating. The X10 only comes in black (for now), and although the specs ask for a few feet of space around the tower, I didn’t experience any issues with less than a foot on each side where I tucked mine away. I didn’t love that Eufy has gone out of the way to label the top of the dock to make it easier to understand which container holds clean water vs dirty water. I understand the point, but these containers are usually hidden behind panels on high-end models, to make it more visually appealing in your space.
The big difference between the X10 and my current favorite robot, the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra, is that the X10 swaps a mop pad for two continuously spinning scrubbers. While the idea of scrubbers evokes a deeper cleaning experience, I’ve been burned thinking the same of upright mops. The scrubbers tended to just throw water and dirt everywhere, and a plush mop pad with enough pressure generally does a better job. Meanwhile, the vacuum in the X10 uses one roller with brushes on it, instead of the dual roller combo seen in many floorbots.
Easy set up, pairing and voice commands
Note: I was sent a pre-release model for testing from Eufy, and used a beta version of the app because of this, so some functions may be different in the final shipped product.
Like most floorbots, there wasn’t much to put together upon arrival—the dock comes in two pieces and snapped together easily. The pairing process was not as seamless as I’ve found with other brands, I had to run through the process more than once (which could be due to the beta app I was using) but it still took less than 10 minutes. Eufy uses a range of apps for all its devices rather than one unified app, so you’ll need a whole separate app—Eufy Clean—to use the machine. While it works with assistants like Google and Alexa (but not Homekit/Siri) the controls you have there will be limited to on and off.
Robot apps have a wealth of functionality, and Eufy Clean is no different. Eufy will store a number of different maps, and you can manipulate those maps by splitting a room, combining a space or setting up zones for a one-time clean (or avoid). One of my greatest annoyances with most modern floorbots is that you can’t save these zones, as you could with Roombas. You are left to hack the room function by creating “mini rooms”—so if you want the robot to clean one area of a room every day, it will just clean this new mini room you’ve set up.
The X10 has a number of features you’d see in higher-end floorbots
One of my new favorite robot features that the Eufy included was the ability to set a spot on the map, and the robot will just head there and wait for more direction. In the same panel, you can direct the robot with a joystick—a surprisingly useful and fun feature. On more than one occasion, I just directed the robot to the floor next to me instead of getting up to retrieve it when it needed the brush cleared.
You can customize the cleaning to your taste, changing the intensity of the mop and vacuum, or excluding one altogether, and manually tell the bot to empty itself or clean the mop. You can set up extensive schedules from the Clean app, and while you could add the bot to your home automation apps, it will lack granularity of control. As with some other models, you can now see exactly how much life each of the parts of your vacuum have left to them.
No deal breakers, but a few annoyances
I’ve come to recognize how powerful the maps feature is on most floorbots. The LiDAR is amazingly functional in mapping your room, and being able to set up zones is critical. You mostly likely don’t need to clean the entire room every single day—you probably have an area that has more traffic, like walkways or under tables. The X10 doesn’t map as comprehensively as other models do, displaying furniture, rugs or floor changes to the room. Without landmarks, it's hard to set up a zone. The zone feature is also not very finger-friendly on the phone, so I ultimately had trouble getting the zone boundaries in the right place.
The Eufy is good at avoiding obstacles and even labeling where they were so you can address them. However, it frequently suggested that there were many piles of dog poop on my floor when it was really just some dog toy fluff, which other robots have sucked up and moved on from.
A robot that won’t shut up
The X10 is a noisy roommate. In its passive state, moving around, I noticed it was louder than other bots. Moreover, the sucker talks—all the time. While other bots do communicate "starting” or “returning to station,” the X10 was wau more chatty. “Cleaning mop!” it would cheerfully inform me, followed by alerts that it was drying the mop and emptying the bin, superfluous information that made me feel it was trying to prove its worth. I eventually figured out how to shush the bot, but you can only do a master volume change, which means you might miss alerts you’d actually need.
The X10 had trouble recovering from errors
And unfortunately, I did need the alerts. Like most bots, stuff got caught in the rollers that needed to be cleared a few times a week. In most cases, a robot throws an error, you clear it, and the robot and you both move on with your life. Lower-end robots tend to have a hard time recovering, and experience a cascade of error codes and problems when one thing goes wrong. When even small debris is caught in the rollers, the Eufy made a racket unlike any other bot I’ve used—and the robot wouldn’t stop and ask to be cleared until it was a much bigger problem. I spent three days clearing the roller every five minutes, and sending it back to the base to empty, which would then declare itself stuck, too, clearing both, only to have the robot declare itself stuck again five minutes later.
While debris got caught in the X10 as often as some other expensive vacuums, except the Roborock, the X10 struggled to get past it. This was also the first floorbot where I had to do work on the dock. In the first week, I was alerted that I had to clear a roller on the dock itself, and through a Reddit page and a Youtube video I was able to fix it, but I did not enjoy the experience. Docks are complicated, on the floor and dark inside—you’ve got to get down and get your hand into a small space you can’t see. The base just didn’t do as good a job evacuating the robot as other vacuums, so the robot would start back up and you could hear something stuck rattling around in it. The noise works as its own alert so you know to stop and fix the problem.
Excellent navigation skills and pretty good cleaning skills
The X10 never became stuck, not once—and thus becomes the only floorbot to navigate the complicated underpinnings of my living room with no navigational issues. Cords were no problem; small radius turns around table legs did not deter it. Remembering the narrow passage to get out from under the couch did not seem problematic for the Eufy. If you’ve got a complicated layout, this is an important consideration.
Overall, I thought the vacuum functioned fantastically on rugs. As long as the roller brushes were clear, it also did a valiant job vacuuming hard floors like my tile. When the rollers had something stuck in them (not enough to trigger an alert to clear them, but you could hear something bopping around in the chamber) the bot would lose all vacuuming ability and instead start spitting out debris over the floor. While there is a detangling function for the robot, and it’s a feature they mention often, I didn’t notice it having great bearing on the situation.
Again, most robot vacuums require human intervention, and the more crap on your floor, the more intervention. While dog hair or human hair did not deter the bot, it really struggled with anything larger than average floor dirt. To test this, I threw a half cup of cereal on the floor, and the robot was able to get most of it up, but had to immediately return to the cleaning base, where the cereal got stuck evacuating the robot. Still, that’s not a usual test case for a vacuum. When I repeated the experiment with dry couscous, it had no problem completing the job.
Eufy’s dual mop heads worked better than I expected, and worked specifically well in one way: The X10 got closer to the wall than any other bot I’ve tried. There’s a setting specifically in the mop panel called “edge hugging,” and it worked. Usually, bots leave a band of un-mopped space around objects and the wall, but not the X10. In terms of how well the mop actually cleaned the floor, I found that when I had it make two passes in a space, it worked very well to clean dirt, as the first pass worked as a pre-wash of sorts. While other bots tend to move in straight lines across the floor, the Eufy mops more effectively by using a wiggling motion as it moves around the floor. I had to empty and refill the water stations more often than other robots I’ve used, but it wasn’t cumbersome. The chambers just are slightly smaller than high end models.
Bottom line: a good mid-range model for homes without a lot of floor messes
If you’ve got kids who drop food or a pet that drops a lot of fluff or other debris around, I don’t think this is the model for you. But if you have a house that mostly deals with dust, no matter how complicated the floor plan, the X10 is a promising model to vacuum and mop, at a competitive price.
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