Self-cleaning vacuum bots take care of tedious housework and eliminate the need for regular maintenance. We have tested cheap and expensive models.
Actually, one expects that vacuum cleaner robots should have been developed for years and clean all models properly. But the manufacturers keep outdoing each other with improvements that not only make the bots smarter, but also more comfortable and thorough.
Two recent advances make Suckbots easier to maintain and better at dealing with obstacles. Odds and ends on the floor and tangled cables under the desk are the natural enemies of suction bots. They get tangled, get stuck, and at worst, they overlook pet poo and usually end up in the bin. Such problems try the Ecovac’s Deebot X1 Omni and the JetBot AI+ to deal with cameras and object recognition by artificial intelligence.
With daily cleaning, you also have to empty and knock out the tiny dust container of the bots very often – which is not only no fun for allergy sufferers. All candidates in the test field therefore have base stations that suck the dirt out of the bot and transport it into a conventional vacuum cleaner bag. The X1 Omni from Ecovacs and the Roborock S7 Pro Ultra go one step further: Their stations also rinse out the robots’ mops and automatically refill their water tanks. The company Yeedi, which is little known in this country, shows that technically sophisticated models do not have to be outrageously expensive. The independent subsidiary of Ecovacs tries to offer the technology and performance of expensive bots at the price of a mid-range device. Instead of 1000 euros and more it costs Yeedi Vac 2 Pro under 500 euros.
