Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Mopping over mapping
Despite some truly impressive mopping performance, the Deebot X8 Pro Omni's mapping performance is disappointing.
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Pros
- Next-generation mopping is great
- Powerful suction
- Anti-tangle brush works well
Cons
- Mapping software struggles
- No cleaning solution supplied
- Design of the base unit may not be for everybody
The Deebot X8 Pro Omni has been a difficult product for me to review. On the one hand, it has one of the biggest advancements I’ve seen for a while with its roller mop. For the first time, I willingly opted to have a robot both vacuum and mop in a single pass, and was impressed by the results.
On the other hand, I have found the quality of the map created by the X8 Pro to be woefully incompetent. Despite multiple attempts to map my home, it refused to differentiate between carpeted bedrooms and vinyl floorboard living spaces. And while I could manually edit the rooms, doing so meant that it would not vacuum one of the rooms at all.
It’s a case of mopping over mapping, and for me, it’s not a sacrifice I’m eager to make. Despite its fantastic cleaning performance, there are just a few too many challenges on the software front with this vacuum for my liking.
What is the Deebot X8 Pro Omni offering?
The major selling point here is the new roller style mop in the X8 Pro Omni. With technology leveraged from Tineco, the vacuum features both a clean and dirty water tank on board.
As it cleans, the robot sprays clean water onto one side of the roller mop, before scraping the dirty water out into a separate water tank. It does this while spinning at 200 RPM and applying up to 4,000 Pa of downward pressure on your floor, giving it a real scrubbing.
The roller (and the corner sweeper brush) extends out to the side of the vacuum to ensure it reaches right to the end and corners of your room.
This is an absolutely massive step up over the oscillating circle pads on previous generations like the X5 Pro Omni I reviewed earlier this year. Make no mistake, this is the future of premium robot vacuums, and you can expect to see this style become the norm over the coming years.
The vacuum function also gets a boost, capable of 18,000 Pa of suction, up from 12,800 Pa in the X5 model. You probably won’t really need that extra suction, but it does help give your home a cleaner feeling.
The main brush has been upgraded with Ecovacs’ new Zero Tangle 2.0 technology, which uses teeth on the underside of the vacuum to help cut longer hair to avoid it getting tangled in the main suction brush. The first generation of this technology underwhelmed me with the X5 Pro, but there is a noticeable step-up this year. You will still need to clear out the main brush, but you shouldn’t need to do it as frequently.
Ecovacs made some adjustments to its app, too, for the X8 Pro Omni. For the first time, you can program the robot to vacuum carpets before it begins the vacuum/mop cycle, so there’s no chance of it smearing a wet mop roller on your carpet.
The base station has also had a redesign. I don’t love the new design – I don’t really want to see the level of dirty water in my vacuums base station. But it doesn’t look bad. I just prefer the older style.
The X8 Pro also features a cleaning liquid solution tank for the first time, which automatically mixes with clean water when filling the vacuum. The catch is that Ecovacs doesn’t bundle any liquid in with the box, and you have to fork out $75 for two litres of the solution, which seems far too expensive.
What does the Deebot X8 Pro Omni do well?
I’m really impressed with the quality of the mopping with the X8 Pro Omni. I have vinyl floorboards throughout my home, and the X8 Pro Omni leaves them looking and feeling clean.
It does a good job of cleaning up wet messes, in a way that no other robot vacuum I’ve tested can do. I wouldn’t use it to clean up a thick chunky mess like cereal single-handedly, but it will mop up the milk really well, leaving your floor clean and streak-free.
The quality of suction in the X8 Pro is also exceptional. It wasn’t that long ago that robot vacuums topped out at 8000 Pa, but this offers more than double that suction power.
Yet despite its ability to draw out fine dust particles, battery life is still solid – the X8 Pro Omni vacuumed and mopped most of my house (more on that in a bit) on a single charge without much effort at all.
The new version of the Zero Tangle brush works quite well too. You’ll still find that you need to clean the brush periodically, but instead of it being clogged with longer human hair, it was smaller, tuftier bits of fluff that I needed to clear out after a month or so.
What could the Deebot X8 Pro Omni improve?
The reason I spent so long reviewing this vacuum was to try and see if its inability to effectively map my home was user error.
When you first set up the X8 Pro Omni, the robot will run a quick mapping cycle, where it drives around your home and creates a map. It’s pretty quick, and relatively painless — you just have to clear the floor as much as you can and make sure the doors are open to give the vacuum the easiest path to determine how it will clean your home.
If I’m honest, I’ve noticed that the quality of the maps has gotten worse over the past few generations of Ecovacs vacuums, but not in a way that it inhibited the vacuum's ability to do its job. It might combine a couple of rooms, or make me change the floor type.
But the X8 Pro Omni resulted in not one but three different maps which all refused to clean the back bedroom of my home.
Two of the five maps I created testing the X8. The first is after editing, and is a reasonable account of my home. The right is freshly created - note how it thinks the left side of the dining room (which ais actually two carpeted bedrooms) is floorboards.
To explain this a little better: I have a three-bedroom house, which is predominantly vinyl floorboards, except for the two bathrooms (which are tiled) and the two kids rooms, which are carpeted. The kids rooms both open off from the family/dining space, with standard sized doors and a very noticeable shift from floorboard to carpet.
The X8 Pro Omni, in five attempts, did not once detect that those were different rooms. Instead, it created a mega-room with the family/dining area, the kitchen, and the short hall outside the main bathroom.
What’s more, on more than one of those maps, the vacuum failed to detect that the floor in those bedrooms was carpeted.
In previous generations, I have faced similar challenges, but I have been able to edit the map in the Ecovacs app to better work around it. But this time, for whatever reason, when I edited the map to differentiate the two bedrooms, the X8 Pro Omni refused to clean the back bedroom. Even when I manually selected it for cleaning, the vacuum would attempt to access it through the other bedroom, before failing and returning to the base.
While I had a similar issue with the X5 in terms of the initial map, at least that vacuum managed to clean both bedrooms. The X8 will not clean my entire house because of its disappointing mapping software.
Now, the reality is that this problem is likely just one software update away from being a non-issue. But right now, it’s enough for me to say that you shouldn’t buy this vacuum, despite its mopping prowess.
Verdict
Ecovacs has been delivering some of the best robot vacuum cleaners in Australia for years, and I expected the X8 Pro Omni to go to the top of my list.
With its new roller mop style, updated anti-tangle brush and introduction of cleaning solution for the mop, it promised to deliver a superior clean. And it does, mostly.
But the mopping prowess comes at the expense of the mapping reliability. Despite numerous attempts, the X8 refused to identify the difference between carpeted bedrooms and a floorboard family room. Even when I updated the rooms on the map, it wouldn’t clean that back bedroom.
How can I recommend a product whose software doesn’t let it do what it’s designed for?
I can’t.
Until there’s a software update that addresses this, you’re better off looking elsewhere.
Buy the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni online
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Nick Broughall
