PROS:
- Vacuum function appears to be doing a ripper job on both vinyl flooring and carpet. It is a vacuum first and foremost and it is doing a great job of sucking stuff up!
- Mop function appears to be doing a decent job of lifting general residue from vinyl flooring.
- Autonomous navigation of the system is quite impressive as it can maneuver quite closely to obstacles and does a great job of mapping out your house and rooms.
- Detection of surfaces works really well, even specifically highlighting areas of carpet or rugs on the map to differentiate them from non-carpeted areas.
CONS:
- Auto-empty function has been a little hit and miss so far. Granted the first few runs are likely sucking up a lot more dust and hair than it will in regular use, but the robot debris cannister hasn't been fully emptying as yet with a large build up of dust fuzz clogging the cannister.
- Auto-empty station requires special bags (for dust retention/allergy prevention) to store the contents of the vacuum. This means ongoing costs which really are unnecessary - it could and should simply be another cannister, like on the robot or every other modern vacuum on the market that can simply be opened and emptied directly into the bin. Fortunately, I'll be purchasing them in bulk from China which brings the cost per bag down quite significantly.
- Programming/software for the robot lacks some basic features and the manual/instructions don't highlight important yet basic features. For example, using AUTO mode is the only way to create or expand the map it generates of your house - it doesn't mention this anywhere. There is also no simple way to instruct the robot to explore a specific area of your map to discover a new room you didn't map to begin with as using AUTO will try and remap the ENTIRE house (the workaround is to set lots of manual exclusion zones to make it skip what it already knows and force it to remap a pathway to where the new room is, where it will identify the new area and begin mapping it when it finds the open doorway). Nor is there a way to delete/remove an area that has been mapped (the robot will look through floor to ceiling windows and will map your yard/outside as a room). Being able to clean up the map to remove false areas and manually refine the perimeters of rooms are just little yet basic features that are lacking.
All in all, very happy with the physical results of the robot. Floors have been cleaned to a surprisingly good level. My main gripes are with the software as the App lacks some basic features, as well as the documentation not explaining some very basic need-to-know information. Thankfully I can figure these things out for myself, but for the price I do expect better on that front. The good news is software can be fixed at any time, so hopefully they continue to develop their software.
If you can grab this unit on sale and feel like spending the time to set it up and program it to vacuum high-use areas frequently, do it. It'll work as advertised and get your floors clean.
| Brand | ECOVACS |
|---|---|
| Model Number | DLX11-54EC |
| Color | T8+ |
| Product Dimensions | 33 x 33 x 7.8 cm; 6 Kilograms |
| Capacity | 0.42 Liters |
| Power / Wattage | 40 watts |
| Noise Level | 67 dB |
| Item Weight | 6 kg |
