After testing dozens of robot vacuums, he is neither worried about AI nor holding his breath for self-driving cars. He enjoys visiting factories and learning about regulatory loopholes, and has flooded our testing area only three times. There are tons more laser-nav robots, with largely similar specs and appearance, including bots from barely there brands, including Tesvor, Dreametech, Viomi, and Honiture. Again, our educated guess is that they all probably work okay and are just more prone to app glitches and less likely to get useful software updates over time than the best brands in this category. Another surprisingly useful upside to the basic Eufy bots is the short body.
In addition, robot vacuums have reached the point where they’re basically just as powerful and effective as regular vacuums. The robots rounded up here combine spinning brusholls and side brushes to clean your home just as well as their upright equivalents. And they’re able to travel underneath most couches and tables, so you don’t have to rearrange furniture. That said, one of the best innovations in the robot bissell crosswave cordless vacuum space in recent years has been the development of models that can empty their own dustbins. Beyond offering greater convenience than traditional models, they significantly limit your exposure to dust, a big plus if you suffer from allergies. As recently as a couple of years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find a sub-$1,000 self-emptying robot vacuum, but the pricing on these models has been coming down.
The Roomba 694, on the other hand, was easy for us to strip down and reassemble with just a screwdriver. The Eufy 11S is not meant to be taken apart and put back together—major repairs are impossible without breaking parts of the robot. Using a noise-meter app, I also measure the volume and frequency of each bot from about 10 feet away as they work.
Roomba automatically transitions from one floor surface to the next, including carpets, rugs, tile, linoleum and hardwood floors. If you’re picturing having your new robot vacuum clean your floors while you’re asleep, think again. Even the quietest models tend to make a racket when they’re zipping around your house, banging into your walls and furniture as they go. But yes, most robot vacuums do need to be emptied on a regular basis, or after every cleaning . That said, there are some self-emptying models that automatically dump debris into a bin in their home base , although as you can probably guess, self-emptying vacuums tend to be the most expensive.
But some great robots rely instead on a camera or gyroscopes , and they also get the job done—just a little bit slower, bonking into more stuff, and with a slightly higher chance of missing area. We bought one of the Goovi models, and lo and behold, we found that it is functionally identical to the 11S, with many of the same components and even the same beep and boop sounds. The biggest problem with the RoboVac series is that they don’t last as long as Roombas do, and they can’t be fixed when they break. About a year after the 11S was released, we started to hear from owners whose bots had already died, and the complaints have kept on coming.
In our experience, the Roomba i3 takes about 75 minutes to clean 1,000 square feet . In spaces larger than that, the bot may have to pause in the middle of cleaning to go recharge itself for 90 minutes at a time, before it picks up where it left off. That can feel quite a while to wait for clean floors, especially bissell crosswave cordless if you’re trying to stay out of the robot’s way, or to tolerate its whooshing motor and the sound of it thumping into baseboards and furniture legs. And if you pick up and move the bot by more than a foot or so in the middle of a session , the Roomba i3 will usually get confused and lose its positioning.