Eufy X9 Pro review: This $1499 robovac comes so close to being the perfect servant

Hundreds of episodes into our quest for the perfect robovac, we haven’t yet found what we’re looking for. But the eufy X9 Pro comes close.

I

’m beginning to think I’m the problem, and not the robots. Just look at all the attempts I’ve made over the years to form a loving master/servant relationship with a robot, and how they’ve all failed.

This year alone, I must have auditioned three or four for the coveted role of Chief Floor Scrubber here in the Digital Life Laboratories, and I’ve found fault in every one of them.

The eufy X9 Pro in action. It collects dog hair, you’ll be pleased to know. But...

Over the course of the past decade, dozens would have passed through the labs, all laser-eyed and bushy-brushed as they go about mopping and vacuuming our floors, only to be picked apart and ultimately rejected due to some minor or major flaw I’ve spotted.

Well, what if the flaw lies with me? What if I’m too picky about my unpaid cleaners? What if I’m demanding too much?

Take this week’s auditionee, the eufy Clean X9 Pro robovac from the (somewhat controversial*) Chinese electronics conglomerate, Anker Innovations.

That poor robot put on one hell of a performance, especially when it came to mopping our floors. There are things the eufy X9 Pro can do with a mop that I’ve criticised other robots for not doing, and yet it’s still not enough for me to say, OK, this is the robot servant I’ve been waiting for.

It comes damned close, but nope, there’s always something.

The thing it does with a mop that I wish other robots would do is pretty simple: it mops kind of like a human would, if a human could be bothered.

Rather than just dragging a filthy mop over your floors, even over areas it’s already mopped, this machine picks its twin, spinning mops up in the air (it only lifts them 12mm, but that’s enough), and only puts them down and starts them spinning again when it’s moved to somewhere it hasn’t mopped.

And then, when the eufy X9 Pro has cleaned around 6 m² of floor, it picks its mop up again, trundles back to its base station, and rinses the mops using water from a tank you’ve filled up.

The eufy X9 Pro takes a novel and sensible approach to mopping: it washes its mop in fresh water first.

You’d be amazed how many robovacs don’t do that. Most of them have a small water tank in the back, and keep dripping water onto their mop, extending their mopping range at the cost of the mop getting dirtier and more useless with every minute passed.

But, unusually and frankly bloody sensibly, Anker decided not to add a water tank to the eufy X9 Pro. It rinses its mops from water you load into the tank in the base station, then mops using only that water for moisture, and quite literally rinses and repeats, just like you and I would if we didn’t have robot servants to attend to our chores.

The mopping is so good on this machine, so common-sense and effective it just kills me to say the next word.

But.

But the damned thing doesn’t empty its own dustbin.

What kind of robot servant expects its master to empty the dustbin nowadays? Not many, let me tell you. Pretty well every robovac with a tower base station as big as eufy’s has a vacuum in the base station, that hoovers out the robot’s dust and stores it in a bag so you don’t have to touch it.

If you’re someone who has, say, dogs, that makes a huge difference – the difference between having a robot servant you can ignore, only attending to it a couple of times a month, and one that you have to attend to every day, or however often you make it vacuum up your filth.

I don’t know if you’ve seen one, but the dustbins in these robots are tiny, and need to be emptied a lot. There’s nothing sadder than watching a robot vacuum desperately trying to please you, cleaning your floors with a full dustbin:

Oh you poor, stupid robot. You’re going to have to do every bit of that over again, just as soon as I get one of my underlings to empty your bin.

It’s a double shame the eufy X9 Pro doesn’t empty its own dustbin because it’s a pretty decent vacuumer. The fact it’s able to lift its mops up and keep vacuuming when it encounters a rug means it’s willing and able to muck in and do a thorough job when you’ve got mixed floor surfaces, unlike some other robovacs that turn their nose up at the task.

We never tested the eufy on the red goop in this picture, but we do like the way it mops all the same.

(Yep, the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni is another example of a robovac that’s close to perfect: it mops well, it vacuums well, it even empties its own dustbin like a proper robot servant, but it won’t lift its mops up and it won’t even cross a rug when it has a mop attached, much less vacuum it.)

There’s one other flaw with the eufy X9 Pro that gets up my nose, though in fairness it’s a flaw shared by all my would-be robot servants: it doesn’t handle houses that have multiple levels very well.

The eufy’s take on this flaw is a little unique, in that its mop-rinsing system – mop a little, rinse, mop some more, rinse etc – fights against the feature I would like to see, which is that you can pick it up, take it to another level of your house, and have it do a sensible job of cleaning that level.

What I would like to see in my perfect robot servant is this: I pick it up and take it to a different level of the Labs; it vacuums and mops as much as it can, then it returns to the exact spot I left it, notifying me it’s ready for the next step; I pick it up and take it back to its base station, where it rinses itself and notifies me when it’s done; I pick it back up again and return it to the same spot on the other floor; it resumes vacuuming and mopping where it left off.

It’s a laborious workflow, I know, but it drives me mental that no robot maker enables it.

Am I asking too much?

Anker Innovations comes closer than anyone else. The eufy does the first few steps well enough (it does hunt for its base station when it should know better, but you can’t have everything), but when I’ve returned it to its base station and it has finished rinsing its mop, it doesn’t wait for me to pick it up and return it to the level it had been working on just moments ago. It completes its rinse cycle, and immediately trundles off to “finish” cleaning the wrong floor.

Aaaaargh! It has to be me. This stuff seems so obvious to me, and yet no-one can figure it out.

eufy, empty your own stupid bust bin, keep track of which floor has the stupid base station, and you’re hired as my unpaid floor servant.

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