The Eufy X10 Pro Omni Is a Pretty Good Mid-Priced Robot Vacuum Cleaner.
Although vacuum cleaners seem quite complex, especially robot vacuums, almost every smart home company makes them. Take for example Eufy, a company widely known for producing security cameras. Their new flagship, the Eufy X10 Pro Omni, is a pretty great mid-range model at $799, and it holds its own against the high-end models in only a few areas. Deliveries of this model will begin this week.
Rotating brushes replace a regular mop head.
I found that the new docking stations for floor robots take up more space – they have a vacuum bag, as well as two chambers for fresh and dirty water for mopping the floors. The bases clean the mop heads and dry them. All of this requires bulky hardware, and the Eufy is no different from any other model I’ve tested in terms of 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 plenty of soft corners make the tower unintimidating. The X10 only comes in black (for now), and while the specs say several feet of space around the tower, I had no problem with less than a foot on each side where I hid mine. I didn’t like that Euphie went to great lengths to mark the top of the dock to make it easier to tell which container contained clean water and which contained dirty water. I get the point, but on high-end models these containers are usually hidden behind panels to make them 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 replaces the mop pad with two constantly rotating brushes. While the idea of scrubbers evokes a deeper cleaning experience, I got burned thinking the same thing about upright mops. Scrubbers tend to just spray water and dirt everywhere, and a soft mop with enough pressure will usually do a better job. Meanwhile, the X10 vacuum cleaner uses a single roller with brushes instead of the two-roller combination seen in many floor robots.
Easy setup, pairing and voice commands
Note. Eufy sent me a pre-production model to test, and as such I was using the beta version of the app, so some features may differ in the final product.
Like most floor robots, there’s not much to assemble upon arrival: the dock comes in two parts and is easy to assemble. The pairing process wasn’t as easy as with other brands, I had to go through the process multiple times (which may have been due to the beta app I was using), but it still took less than 10 minutes. Eufy uses a range of apps across all of its devices rather than one single app, so to use your device you’ll need a whole separate app – Eufy Clean. While it works with assistants like Google and Alexa (but not Homekit/Siri), the controls you have will be limited to on and off.
Robot apps come with a variety of features, and Eufy Clean is no exception. Eufy will store a variety of different maps, and you can manipulate these maps to divide a room, consolidate a space, or set up zones for one-time cleaning (or avoiding it). One of my biggest gripes with most modern floor robots is that you can’t save these zones like you can with a Roombas. All you have to do is hack the room function by creating “mini-rooms” – so if you want the robot to clean one area of the room every day, it will simply clean that new mini-room you created.
The X10 has a number of features that can be seen in higher-end floor robots.
One of my new favorite robot features included in Eufy was the ability to point to a point on the map and the robot would simply head there and wait for further instructions. On the same panel, you can control the robot using a joystick – a surprisingly useful and fun feature. More than once, I simply directed the robot to the floor next to me instead of getting up to retrieve it when it needed to clean a brush.
You can customize the cleaning to your liking by changing the intensity of the mop and vacuum cleaner or eliminating one altogether, and manually order the bot to empty itself or clean the mop. You can set up advanced schedules from the Clean app, and while you can add a bot to your home automation apps, it will lack granular control. As with some other models, you can now see exactly how much life is left in each part of your vacuum cleaner.
No deal breakers, but a few annoyances
I’ve come to realize how powerful the maps feature is on most floor robots. LiDAR is amazingly powerful at mapping your room, and the ability to customize zones is critical. Chances are, you don’t need to clean the entire room every day—you probably have high-traffic areas, like walkways or under tables. The X10 doesn’t show as complete a picture as other models, showing furniture, rugs, or floor changes in a room. Without landmarks it is difficult to create a zone. The zone feature is also not very finger-friendly on the phone, so I ended up having trouble placing the zone boundaries in the right place.
Eufy can avoid obstacles and even mark their location so you can get past them. However, it often suggested that there were a lot of piles of dog poop on my floor, when in fact it was just dog toy fluff that the other robots had absorbed and moved away.
A robot that is not silent
X10 is a noisy roommate. In a passive state, moving around, I noticed that he was louder than other bots. Moreover, this sucker talks all the time. While other bots reported “launching” or “returning to station”, X10 was more chatty. “Cleaning mop!” he gleefully informed me, followed by warnings about him drying the mop and emptying the trash can, unnecessary information that made me feel like he was trying to prove his worth. I eventually figured out how to silence the bot, but you can only make a general volume change, which means you might miss alerts you really need.
X10 had problems recovering from errors
And unfortunately, I needed alerts. Like most bots, the videos got stuck with things that needed to be cleared several times a week. Most of the time, the robot throws an error, you clear it, and you both move on with your lives. Lower level robots tend to have a hard time recovering and experience a cascade of error codes and problems when things go wrong. When even a little bit of debris gets into the rollers, Eufy starts making noise, unlike any other bot I’ve used, and the robot doesn’t stop and ask to remove it until it becomes a much bigger problem. I spent three days cleaning the roller every five minutes and sending it back to the base to be emptied, which then declared itself stuck as well, clearing both, only for the robot to declare itself stuck again five minutes later.
Although debris got into the X10 as often as some other expensive vacuum cleaners, with the exception of the Roborock, the X10 struggled to overcome it. It was also the first floor robot I ever worked with on a dock. The first week I was warned that I needed to clear the roller on the dock itself, and through a Reddit page and a Youtube video I was able to fix it, but I didn’t enjoy the experience. The docks are complicated, on the floor and dark inside – you need to go down and stick your hand into a small invisible space. The base just didn’t do a good job of evacuating the robot as well as other vacuums, so the robot would start up again and you could hear something getting stuck in it. The noise acts as its own warning, so you know to stop and fix the problem.
Excellent navigation skills and fairly good cleaning skills.
The X10 never got stuck – making it the only floor robot that navigates the complex foundations of my living room without any navigation issues. The cords weren’t a problem; the small turning radius of the table legs did not stop him. Remembering the narrow passage to get out from under the sofa did not seem problematic for Euphie. If you have a complex layout, this is an important point.
Overall, I think the vacuum does a great job on carpets. While the roller brushes were clean, they also did a valiant job of vacuuming hard floors like my tiles. When something got stuck in the rollers (not enough to trigger an alert to clear them, but something could be heard bouncing around in the camera), the bot would lose all vacuuming ability and start spitting out debris onto the floor instead. Although the robot has an unraveling feature that they often mention, I didn’t find it to have much of an impact on the situation.
Again, most robot vacuums require human intervention, and the more debris on the floor, the more intervention. While dog or human hair didn’t stop the robot, it did deal with more than just dirt on the floor. To test this, I dropped a half cup of cereal on the floor and the robot was able to pick up most of the cereal, but it had to immediately return to the base to clean up where the cereal got stuck when the robot evacuated. However, this is not a normal vacuum test. When I repeated the experiment with dry couscous, the job was done without any problems.
The Eufy’s dual mop heads worked better than I expected, and did one thing particularly well: The X10 got closer to the wall than any other bot I’ve tried. There is a special setting on the mop panel called “edge girth” and it worked. Usually bots leave a strip of uncleaned space around objects and walls, but not X10. As for how well the mop actually cleaned the floor, I found that when I made two passes through the space, it cleaned up the dirt very well since the first pass acted as a sort of pre-wash. While other bots tend to move across the floor in straight lines, the Eufy cleans more efficiently by using a rocking motion as it moves across the floor. I had to empty and refill the water stations more often than other robots I’ve used, but it wasn’t onerous. The cameras are slightly smaller than high-end models.
Bottom line: A good mid-range model for homes without a lot of clutter on the floor.
If you have kids who drop food or a pet that drops a lot of lint or other debris, I don’t think this is the right model for you. But if you have a home that mostly collects dust, no matter how complex the layout, the X10 is a promising model for vacuuming and mopping at a competitive price.