Our previous best value robot vacuum pick was Eufy’s G30 Edge but this similarly priced new model device surpasses it in almost every way. The Eufy X8 Hybrid (£380) is a great pick if you’re a bit anxious irobot vacuum cleaner about letting a robovac loose in your home—with clever tech on the inside to keep it in check. Aside from the visual navigation sensors, there are also other sensors in use by both robotic vacuums.
It will also mop your hard floors using its 140ml water tank, though this becomes more confusing to program if you have a mixture of hard floor and carpet. Like most higher-end Roomba robots, the new bissell crosswave cordless J7 is available to buy with or without the automatic self-emptying bin system. Simply opt for the J7 model if all you want is the robot vac itself or the J7+ if you want the complete combo package.
Thanks to the motorised brush that runs the entire width of the vacuum cleaner, you get full suction power right up to the edges of rooms, doing away with the need for side-sweeping brushes. The 360 Eye isn’t the first vacuum to use a camera for navigation assistance. IRobot’s Roomba 980 also has an embedded camera, which means it too follows a more intelligent route than prior models. Compared to competitors like the Roomba 980 and others, the 360 Eye has a smaller footprint, but it’s also taller. While that means it has an easier time navigating smaller spaces and around chair legs, in my case it couldn’t quite sneak under my sofa or bureau desk.
Hence you will need to select a single suction level and stick with it, unless you indulge in the faff of programming it in the Dyson app to ramp up the power in certain areas. This reviewer tried it out on the highest power and it sucked big time, in a good way. However, the battery started depleting rapidly and after around 30 minutes it was dyson robot vacuum desperate to get back to its base for a recharge. So I set it to the lowest suction level and, lo and behold, it still sucked well while the battery lasted a full 63 minutes – and this was on a combination of hard floor, carpet and lots of rugs. Truly, this is what we all dreamed of when the idea of robot vacuum cleaners was first mooted.
At 2,200 Pascals, theiRobot Roomba s9+ has extremely powerful suction and that means it’s an excellent option for those with a lot of carpet. It also automatically detects the type of floor surface it’s on, ramping up or lowering the suction accordingly. The 3,300mAh battery, meanwhile, keeps the bot running irobot vacuum cleaner for up to an impressive 120 minutes at a time. Its mapping system is also one of the best we’ve seen and the app that accompanies it is a joy to use. Although other robot vacuums tend to have less suction power than human-directed vacuums, they make up for this by taking several passes at each room.
It makes cleaning easier and is likely to encourage you to vacuum more often. Becky Rapinchuk, the founder of Clean Mama, a website that offers advice and products for keeping homes tidy, said she had also tested many cleaning tech products and found they were ideal for certain types of people. Robot cleaners, for example, are a great fit for busy commuters but not for professionals who work from home and would be disrupted by the noise. But when I pressed the trigger to activate the vacuum, my mouth gaped open and I began spewing profanities.