Our New Pet: Eufy RoboVac

A few years back my wife bought a very basic and cheap robot vacuum cleaner to just quickly run around our bedroom in between my weekly vacuuming.

At that time we didn’t know how effective it would be, and whether it would be worth the money; which is why my wife just bought the cheapest, and simplest one she could find.

We have a Henry canister vacuum cleaner as our main vacuum cleaner, which at the time I used once a week around the house.

My wife has also since bought a Hoover 2 in 1 pets cordless stick vacuum cleaner because she is partially disabled, and can’t manage the Henry; and she wanted something that was handy for just a quick spot clean (when required) rather than ask me to get out the big vacuum cleaner for just a small job.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that our first robot vacuum cleaner was rather basic, and had its issues, we fell in love with it.

The main reason we loved it so much is that in spite of being small and very basic, it actually did a good job. It was particularly good at getting up the cats hair from the carpet pile that even with the Henry was quite hard work at times.

We even started to use it on the living room carpet (as well as the bedroom carpet) in between my weekly vacuum clean with the Henry, as it helped to keep the cats’ hairs down, and made my job a lot easier when I used the big vacuum cleaner once a week.

The main issues with our first robot vacuum cleaner were, predominantly due to cats’ hair:-

• It had a very small dust collector that needed emptying every 10 to 20 minutes.
• The cat’s hair would clog the rollers and brushes, causing them to jam, so they had to be cleaned after each use.
• To remove the rollers and brushes for cleaning involved undoing a screw each time.

Having to clean the rollers and brushes each time made the robotic vacuum cleaner less labour saving than it should be, but at least I could do that job in a relaxed atmosphere, while sitting down in front of the telly with a coffee.

When our old robotic vacuum cleaner eventually died, it was a discontinued model. However, now knowing how handy they are we decided to replace it; but rather than just go out and buy another cheap model, we spent a little time researching for a better model that wouldn’t have the pitfalls of our first one; specifically we wanted a new robot vacuum cleaner that:-

• Has a Larger dust collector.
• Has less tendency for the rollers and brushes to get tangled with cats’ hair so quickly, and
• Rollers and brushes which are a lot easier and quicker to clean.

In making our choice, we looked at the various reviews on the Internet, including Amazon and YouTube, as well as watching demos on YouTube, all of which helped us to make an informed decision.

We narrowed it down to a couple of Models, from which we eventually chose the Eufy.

The Eufy is a little more upmarket (more of a mid-range model than a cheap one) and therefore double the price of what we paid for our first one. However, what we liked about it is that it has a much larger dust collector than our original robotic vacuum cleaner, and the maintenance (cleaning the rollers and brushes) is much easier.

Although the dust collector on the Eufy is only a ½ litre, half the size of some other models in the same price bracket, we reckoned a ½ litre would be ample large enough for our purposes (a lot bigger than the one on our old robotic vacuum cleaner).

Also, the Eufy comes with a charging base and remote; two bonuses over our old robot vacuum cleaner.

Our experience with the Eufy is great. It does exactly what we want, and more; so it exceeds our expectations. The brushes, rollers and filter do need cleaning periodically, but not anywhere near as often as we had to do with our old robot vacuum cleaner; and emptying the dust collector on the eufy is remarkably easy and quick.

Although you can use the remote to control the eufy and swop between different cleaning modes and suction power, what I really love about the eufy is that the ‘Auto’ clean mode allows the robot to choose the best way to clean your carpet.

However, we did find a couple of minor snags in using it; both of which were quickly resolved, these were:-

• The eufy tends to knock into and dislodge its charging base, and
• It’s slim enough to get in under the cupboard where we keep our Wii and then get stuck behind the Wii.

The charging base is designed to be nonslip on hard surfaces, but that doesn’t work on carpets; and the eufy is a slim design so that it can get underneath furniture and clean where no other vacuum cleaner can clean, hence why it gets stuck behind our Wii.

Therefore to resolve these two minor issues:-

Charging Base

I simply screwed a couple of large black brackets to the skirting board and wedged the charging base in place, between the brackets, with a bit of foam.

Getting Stuck Behind the Wii

I just placed a large chunk of wood in front of the Wii, a piece of teak hardwood, which is quite heavy and also blends in with the oak furniture nicely; so that it looks neat and tidy. I could have used pine but I would have needed three coats of oak coloured varnish to get the pine to colour match with the oak of the furniture.

Our first time use of the eufy in the living room was supervised so that we could see how it performed and what issues (if any) there were.

Apart from the two above mentioned issues, the only other issue was that if we left the living room door open it would wander into the hall and then dining room, and eventually find its way into the kitchen. However, as there is no door between the kitchen and dining room, and there is a small step down from the dining room, the eufy would have ended up being stuck in the kitchen with no way to get back to its charging base.

Therefore, whenever we use the eufy in the living room (or any room in the house) we just keep the door shut so that it can’t wander.

We used the remote control to program the eufy to clean the living room in the early hours of the morning, so when we get up it’s fully charged and can then be taken up to one of the bedrooms to give that a good clean. With using the eufy, the living room gets vacuumed every day, and each bedroom every few days as required.

I then whip around the rest of the house (wooden floors) once a week with our Henry vacuum cleaner, and quickly do the kitchen floor; although as it's a stone floor, I also give it a good wash once a month.

The eufy is designed to clean hard floors as well as carpets, but wooden floors don’t seem to get as dusty as carpet, and like the stone tile floor in the kitchen, are easier to sweep and vacuum anyway. Therefore, although we could use the eufy on them (apart from the stairs) I’m quite happy using the Henry to clean these floors.

The fact that our eufy looks after the carpets, which are a lot harder to vacuum than wooden floors, it saves me a lot of time and hard work; and therefore a big labour saving device that is greatly appreciated.

The eufy comes with its own remote (which we didn’t have on the old one) that can be used to:-

• Manually start and stop it.
• Control it by using the cursor keys.
• Change cleaning modes while it’s cleaning, from auto to quick, spot or edge cleaning.
• Change the suction power as its cleaning, from standard to boost or max.
• Choose a quick 30 minute clean; rather than the usual hour.
• Program it to regularly auto clean at any time of day or night, and
• Tell it to stop cleaning, and return to its charging base.