I’ve been on a quest to find the perfect robotic vacuum cleaner and mop, and I’m getting closer, but perfection is an unrealistic benchmark. The first couple I looked at did an OK job, but despite being automated, needed too much of my attention when they got stuck or needed an adjustment. By the time I added in time on the phone with tech support, I concluded it was more trouble than it was worth. I could vacuum the house faster with my Dyson Cyclone V10. I couldn’t mop all our floors as quickly as a robot, but the cleaning person who comes in every other week is able to quickly do an excellent job.
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Still, with a grandchild who drops food on the floor and my need to avoid triggering my dust-mite allergy, I wanted to find a robotic cleaner and mop that I could use daily that worked well and required very little maintenance.
Eufy robotic vacuum, mop and furniture cleaner
So, after reading and watching videos with positive reviews of the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E28, I asked the company to provide me with a review unit that I’ve been testing for the past few weeks. It’s not only a vacuum cleaner and mop but has a pull out portable deep cleaner for furniture, carpeted stairs and other fabric surfaces.
It, too, is not perfect, but it’s a lot better than the Roomba Max 10 I reviewed in February, which was, at the time, iRobot’s flagship device. To be fair, iRobot has since introduced its Roomba Max 705 Vac robot + Auto Empty dock, which I haven’t tested, but based on its description, may be a big improvement.
Like most robotic cleaners, it has a companion smart phone app that lets you control all of its functions including how deep to clean, how much water to use and other settings, including cleaning the entire house or specific rooms. It can’t climb or descend stairs, but it does allow for multiple maps and has an edge sensor that prevents it from falling downstairs, which is handy for our two-story house. It can also be used to schedule regular cleanings and to create cleaning zones and “no-go” zones that you want to avoid.
Auto emptying and mop cleaning
Like other self-emptying robotic vacuums, the Eufy E28 has a home base or “doc,” which not only charges the robot but empties its dirt bin, sucks out its dirty water and refills its tank with clean water or a combination of water and floor cleaning fluid. It also washes the mop between cleanings, so you don’t have to. After a job, it returns to the home base where you hear a loud swishing sound as it empties the dust bin followed by a quieter mop cleaning. If you’re doing a large job, it might return to the base for charging, emptying and mop cleaning and then automatically resume its work. Dirty water goes into a separate tank that’s easy to empty.
Advanced mopping
The mop itself is an advanced design over some of the early vacuum mops. Instead of just a pad that drags over the floor, it’s a roller that’s more than 11 inches wide and exerts downward pressure on the floor. It did an excellent job on my totally flat surfaced hardwood floors, but like all cleaning systems including manual mopping, struggled with the grout on our tiled floors. One solution is to manually scrub the grout before using the robot and letting it suck up the water and debris while it cleans the rest of the floor. The machine can identify carpets, so it doesn’t get them wet.
Portable deep cleaner for fabric surfaces
The E28 home base houses a unique handheld corded “FlexiOne portable deep cleaner that can be used on furniture, carpets, stairs and other fabric surfaces. We have dining room chairs with fabric seats and backs that feel almost like corduroy, which are difficult to clean. But the portable deep cleaner got them clean pretty quickly. It has an attached hose with a spray nozzle and rotating brush that vacuums up the water or furniture cleaning fluid as you clean and does a better job than I could with a manual brush. You do have to be careful not to oversaturate the fabric and to make sure the water tank only has water or approved fabric cleaner and not the fluid used to clean floors.
Speaking of cleaning fluid, the mop and fabric cleaner do a pretty good job on floors with plain water, but if you do use fluid, be sure it’s made for robotic vacuums. Other fluids might harm the mechanism. Eufy and other robotic vacuum companies have their own products, but Bona is one of several companies with products designed for robotic mopping systems.
Strong suction
In addition to the mop roller, there are two rollers on the bottom of the unit to pick up debris as well as two brushes on the side to sweep debris from corners and along walls. The unit is rated at 20,000Pa (pascals of pressure) which is high for a robotic vacuum and helpful for picking up heavier debris. Still, there are times when it misses things. I recently had it mop and vacuum my kitchen floor. Although it picked up most of the debris and mopped up the spills, it left a few crumbs that were easily picked up by my Dyson cordless vacuum.
Getting under furniture
One of the things I love about robotic vacuums and mops is their ability to clean under furniture where dust accumulates. My only complaint about the E28 is that its lidar sensor on top makes it 4.37-inches high, which is quite a bit taller than most robotic vacuums, so I had to put furniture risers on the feet of my couch to get it to go under it. Those risers were inexpensive ($6 for a set of four) and easy to put on, so once I figured this out, it was an easy fix. If this is a major concern, consider a thinner device.
Cleaning the cleaner
As far as I know, all robotic vacuum cleaners need to be periodically cleaned, and the E28 is no exception. After a couple of weeks, I turned it upside down and noticed gunk on the vacuum rollers. They put a QR code to an instructional video near the rollers. The video was helpful but went too fast. I had to watch it twice.
The mop roller looked surprisingly clean considering how many times it had been used, thanks to the automatic mop cleaning. But when I took it off (which was easy to do) and rinsed it in clean water, the water was brown when it hit my white basin.
At $999 this is a relatively high-priced cleaner though less than some of the other mop/vacuum combinations. You can get much less expensive units that lack some of the advanced features starting at under $200, which generally work well as light vacuum cleaners, but you might have to manually empty the dustbin relatively often.
Don’t throw away your old vacuum cleaner or mop
Although the E28 does a good job at light cleaning, it’s not a substitute for an occasional thorough manual cleaning. But there is something to be said for having your floors cleaned on a more regular basis, especially if you have pets, young children or adults like me who can be messy at times.
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Larry Magid is a tech journalist and internet safety activist. Contact him at [email protected].