Good, But Could Be Much better

The Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid vacuum/mop is, prima facie, a clear upgrade over the Roomba 650 that raptly held my attention when I bought it five years ago. But while the Eufy might do a lot more for a great price, you don’t really want a vacuum that just does more. You want one that also does it all really well. Sometimes this one flubs that up.

Physically slight, the Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid is nowhere near as buxom as my Roomba, standing slightly more than 2.75 inches at its tallest point, and spanning just over a foot in diameter. Like most vacuumbots, it is a circle. Beneath, it looks very similar to the robot it replaced, minus one beater brush, with a single side brush and two large wheels, and one swivel caster in the front. The dustbin pops out with an intuitive sliding catch, and the same catch lets it fall open when emptying its contents. Inside lies its HEPA filter, which is washable—commendable, Anker! The whole thing feels pretty sturdy, with most, if not all, wearable parts replaceable.

Fans of cable management will like the dock, which features a cavity in the back for winding up the excess slack, keeping visible only the amount of cable needed to place your robot where it needs to go. In addition to the basic dock, the G30 Hybrid comes with a waterproof pad that the robot fully rests on when it’s done with its basic mopping—more on that, later. It’s got some neat features, too, like mapping and returning to charge and, if it wasn’t done when it had to charge, going right back to the spot it was when it needed juice to finish the job. Neat!

Control of the lil’ guy is tucked into the EufyHome app—Anker’s bespoke home control center. Presented as a customizable widget on the app’s home screen, it gives you quick controls that get more granular as you expand the widget, ranging from simple play/pause to suction power control and charging. Tap on the widget, and you get a clean interface with a little cartoon version of your RoboVac cleaning or sitting on its charger, depending on its current status. Up top, there’s the name of your robot, current status, estimated square footage of the cleaning area, and the amount of time it has been working. The controls are at the bottom of the app, where you can, with a tap or three, initiate cleaning, pause it, adjust suction power, send it home, start spot cleaning, set up a cleaning schedule, and view its cleaning history.

Digging in, you’ll find four suction power options—Standard, Turbo, and Max, with a fancy BoostIQ mode that adjusts power based on need. The map icon gives you an Atari 2600-level layout of your home, filling out as the robot moves. Scheduling is pretty nice—each day has its own toggle and individual start time, and you can even set the robot’s suction power for each specific clean! This is some thoughtful design.

Back on the RoboVac home screen, the gear icon in the upper right corner gets you to the vacuum’s settings. Here, you can adjust the robot’s voice volume, set Do Not Disturb, and switch to manual control. There’s even a section that estimates how soon you’ll need to replace its parts. Of particular note is that there are detailed instructions, with pictures, on replacement of these parts. Obviously, Eufy will sell them to you, too. A multinational corporation’s gotta eat!

If you like, you can connect the RoboVac to a smart assistant. It’s compatible with Google Assistant and Alexa, and using either gives you basic voice commands, letting you start or stop cleaning, send the robot home, or get it to emit chimes so you can find it. I tested these commands, and they’re fine. Initial integration, however, was a little fraught. Connecting the eufyHome app ostensibly worked, but the Google Home wouldn’t acknowledge that I had connected the vacuum. After some troubleshooting, I ran out of time and gave up, only to find it working the next morning. Suc….cess?

That’s all well and good, but how about the actual, you know, cleaning? Well, I immediately noticed that I could barely hear the dang thing. It was a whisper of a dream, it was. I’m exaggerating, but it was very quiet; unlike the industrial metal show that is the Roomba 650. As it moved around the room, its S-shaped cleaning pattern was far more satisfying to watch than the chaos of random-pattern cleaners. However, it seemed to move to the edges of a room too soon, leaving bits of dirt in the middle of the floor that it never got around to going back for. This would turn out to be a pattern I would see over and over again. Also, though it climbed on all of my rugs pretty easily, it didn’t seem to pick much up from any but the low-pile runner in my hallway.

After doing a few normal cleans, I tested the G30 Hybrid on specific objects. I found that while it did well with just general dust, and other small objects like glass bits, it had trouble with scraps of paper, glass that was roughly dime-sized and up, twist ties, and bobby pins. After that, I spread out some sugar, flour, and rice—all regular thorns in the side of anyone trying to clean a kitchen floor.

It did not go well.

I mean, depending on your goals. If the aim is even distribution of powder, rice grains, and saccharine granules to coat your feet with when you walk through, the G30 Hybrid is a contender! But, for cleaning up these materials, you’ll still need to get out a broomstick, you primitive screwhead.

At last, I required to see how a mid-array robot vacuum in 2020 fares towards a basic Roomba from 2012. So, I devised a easy check: I made two rectangles out of magnet strips, a digital wall, and rolled-up rugs, measuring to make positive they ended up as shut to the identical dimension as attainable, then distribute out what ever many grime and detritus I could accumulate from outdoors, making use of a broom to try to evenly disperse every little thing. I set both of those robots roughly in the center of their rectangle, then concurrently began them.

Aside from the thrill of my brief tenure as King of the Crawling Circles, I was transfixed anew at their operate, observing the Roomba zip all around, jerking at every boundary and flitting off in a new, random course, although the Eufy took a slower, far more calculated approach, and they sometimes fulfilled and politely divided, I picture carrying out a little robotic curtsy. At a small a lot more than 14 minutes, the Eufy declared its occupation done—it was not. I reactivated it and viewed it continue to disregard dirt in favor of meticulously combing the edges of this mundane Thunderdome, right up until I finally permit the Roomba—which experienced long-due to the fact accomplished its task—take care of the remainder.

In the Eufy’s defense, it was a great deal of junk to toss at it, and the dustbin, when I looked, was full, so it’s not really it’s fault. Even so, I was truly amazed that the Roomba did as very well as it did by comparison.

The subsequent take a look at was ledge detection. For this, I positioned it on a cardboard box about 50 % a foot off the ground and watched it impotently rage in opposition to its invisible barriers for a couple of minutes, and I finally established it on good ground when more for its final trial: mopping.

Let us get this out of the way: mopping with the G30 Hybrid is not actually supposed to clean significant messes, so a lot as get the previous dusty bits the standard vacuum task skipped. The instruction booklet expressly forbids the use of cleaning methods, advocating rather for plain water. This is positioned into a drinking water tank you clip onto the bottom of the dust bin, to which you attach either the washable mop pad or a person of the replaceable ones provided.

As soon as you’ve established it up to mop, you basically set it on the floor and press the start button. It works by using no special manner for this it only snakes by the house, leaving powering a shiny, thin layer of moisture. I spilled random liquids of varying viscosity on the flooring, and all have been wiped away, but it didn’t make a dent in the little bit of paint left by my daughter before in the day—not that I predicted it to. The mopping is made up strictly of dragging a wet pad across the flooring, soon after all, with none of the agitation that would be needed to scrub more difficult-to-get rid of stains and encrusted dried liquid. In all, my flooring looked superior.

Screening out of the way, I made the decision to acquire a search at what critiques reported about this robot’s predecessor, the RoboVac G30 Edge. Issues typically centered close to mapping and wayfinding—the G30 would get misplaced a good deal, get caught cleaning a single location obsessively, or not find its way back again immediately after cleansing. I observed all of this come about, but getting owned a fairly dumb vacuum for heading on 5 a long time, I have presently determined most of the trouble areas and taken actions to block them off, and I dared not enable the vacuum go to any of the impediment classes that are our bedrooms or place of work. Also, it only ever seemed not able to return property if I began it in yet another place, blowing up no matter what map of my dwelling it had saved. I can only talk to my individual knowledge, but none of the grievances I browse about manifested in any unsurprising ways.