Eufy X9 Pro review

Mopping robot vacuums often exceed at one of those chores at the expense of the other. Eufy’s X9 Pro is one of the few that bucks that trend.

With a hefty top suction of 5,500Pa and a pair of rotating mop heads that scrub dirt like professional-grade floor cleaning machines, this hybrid robot is a true double-duty cleaner. The X9 Pros does have a significant drawback, however: its lack of a self-emptying bin.

Design and setup

Let’s say it up front: The X9 Pro is a bit of a space hog. Its auto-clean station measures a bit over 17 inches high and 16 inches wide. That girth is primarily to accommodate a pair of water tanks housed inside: a 4.1L tank for fresh water and a 3.6L tank for dirty water. These are easily accessed from a lid atop the station.

The robot measures 4.5 inches high. That’s about an inch taller than most robot vacuums I’ve used, and it may struggle to get under low-profile couches and beds. The front end is slightly squared off to better reach into corners with its edge brush. A pair of rotating mops on the rear bottom take care of wet cleaning hard floor surfaces like wood and linoleum. As with most cleaning bots these days, the X9 Pro includes a raft of technology for cleaning more efficiently with fewer collisions, including laser navigation, an AI camera, intelligent mapping, and obstacle avoidance.

The app-guided setup is straightforward. The Eufy Clean app recognised the X9 Pro immediately and prompted me through a few steps to connect the robot to my Wi-Fi.

My first order of business was to run a quick-mapping session, during which the robot patrolled and scanned all the accessible areas of my downstairs level to create a map. That took less than 10 minutes and returned an accurate map that divided the floor plan into three distinct rooms—living room, kitchen, and entryway—and dotted it with icons depicting the obstacles it recognised such as shoes and cables. You can edit the map to make the layout more accurate, rename rooms, and add no-go zones you want the robot to avoid.

The app enables a lot of customisation, allowing you to vacuum and mop separately or in tandem as well as select from multiple suction and water levels. You can also customise cleaning settings for each room, which are applied whether you clean the entirety of your mapped floor plan or only specific rooms. The app lays out all the options clearly so that you can navigate them even if you’ve never used a robot vacuum before.

Evaluating the Eufy X9 Pro’s performance

Robot vacuum manufacturers have been ramping up the suction power recently, and the X9 Pro follows suit. Its 5,500Pa of suction is about double what used to be common, and the results were immediately apparent in my testing.

The vacuum removed more dirt, debris, and pet hair than most other robot vacuums I’ve trued, but it also sucked up pens and other small objects that other bots simply rolled over. That meant I spent more time removing stray items from its rubber roller brush. The moral here is to make sure you diligently declutter your floor before turning the X9 Pro loose.

Michael Ansaldo/Foundry

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The robot has a relatively small 410ml dust bin, which fills up quickly if your floors include a lot of fluffy pet shedding. Since the X9 Pro’s base station does not include an auto-emptying bin—the main con of its design—you should be prepared to manually dispose of the dust bin contents multiple times per cleaning job if you have a large home.

That minor inconvenience is more than compensated for by the X9 Pro’s mopping. Most dual-mode robot cleaners drag a damp cloth across the floor to wet clean, which is OK for removing surface dirt but not vigorous enough to clean sticky stuff and stains. The X9 Pro takes an approach similar to that used by commercial floor cleaners, employing two circular mops that spin at 180 rotations per minute while applying a bit over 2 pounds of downward pressure. These provide the “elbow grease” to loosen and remove every trace of gunk.

What if you have carpeting or area rugs in your home? In the past, you’d have to create a physical or virtual barrier to keep a mopping robot off these surfaces. The X9 Pro, though, detects carpet and lifts its mopping pad 12 millimetres so they don’t get soaked.

Michael Ansaldo/Foundry

After it finishes a mopping job, the robot returns to its base station where its mop pads are cleaned using water from the fresh-water tank and then dried with 104-degree F air over a few hours to prevent bacteria and odour from developing. While that spares you from having to handle dirty mop heads, you still need to empty and clean the dirty water tank after each mopping to prevent it from developing an odour.

Should you buy a Eufy X9 Pro?

The Eufy X9 Pro costs $899/£899. US readers can buy it from Eufy and Amazon, whilst UK readers can get it from Eufy, Amazon and Very. You can check out our chart of the best robot vacuums for more options.

Given the X9 Pro’s emphasis on mopping, it’s a no-brainer for homes that have a lot of hard floor surfaces. But really, its efficient all-around cleaning would be welcome in just about any home. That said, the X9 Pro’s lack of the now de rigueur self-emptying dustbin is a bit of a bummer.

If you can’t live without a self-emptying bin, check out the DreameBot L10s Ultra. The L10s Ultra’s list price is a few hundred bucks more than the Eufy, but it’s frequently on sale and does pretty much everything the X9 Pro does, plus it can auto-empty the dustbin’s contents.

This article has been syndicated and localised from TechHive – read the original here.

Eufy X9 Pro specs

• Cleaning modes: vacuum and mop
• Charging dock type: auto-clean station
• Navigation: Laser Direct Structuring (LDS)
• Suction: 5,500Pa
• Obstacle avoidance: 3D ToF+RGB camera
• Dustbin capacity: 410ml
• Mopping type: rotating mop ×2
• Water tank capacity: fresh-water tank: 4.1L, dirty-water tank: 3.6L
• Carpet detection: yes
• App control: yes (Android and iOS)
• Voice control: yes (Alexa and Google Assistant)