EcoVacs DeeBot T20 Omni Robot Mop Vacuum Cleaner Review

EcoVacs DeeBot T20 Omni Robot Mop Vacuum Cleaner Review

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Buy it at Amazon: EcoVacs DeeBot T20 Omni Robot Mop Vacuum Cleaner [Affiliate Link]

Takeaway: Laser guided, accurate maps, decent avoidance system, efficient regular vacuum and mopping with little effort.

Upon opening the box, the quick start guide is a large cardboard insert with illustrations and a QR code to download the EcoVacs Home smartphone app. Setup is simple and only takes about 10 minutes. You’ll receive the self-emptying charging station, robot vacuum, two sweeper brushes, two mop pads, 6 ft power cord, cleaning brush, mini brush with tangle cutter, and instruction manuals.

The unit comes with a sizable docking station measuring 17.5” wide, 16” from front to back including the ramp, and standing 22.5” tall. The docking bay houses ramp and water tray as well as built-in hot air dryer. In the lowest part of the tray is a removable debris guard that you’ll want to clean periodically so it doesn’t get clogged. It has clips on the end so to remove it just squeeze on the side at towards the back of it.

The ramp has textured grooves to help the robot climb up without slipping back down once parked. Way at the back of the bay you’ll see the two charging contacts for the robot. At the front, this drawer opens by pressing the release button underneath, which pops open the compartment for the 75-day capacity dustbin. It comes with 1 vacuum bag pre-installed which has a cardboard sleeve for installation and a slid-able cover to trap dust inside when replacing the bag. The entire bin can be removed from the dock for cleaning and maintenance by pressing down on the release button at the back and pulling it straight out.

On top of the dock is a single button that lets you start a cleaning cycle at the touch of a button. The top lid opens to reveal two color-coded 4L water tanks inside, the light blue for clean and gray for dirty. The tanks are easily removed by lifting them with their handles. The clean tank has a fill plug in one corner for adding water, although it’s just as simple to simple open the lid by releasing the tab at the front. At the back corner of the clean tank is a built-in debris filter to prevent particles from being drawn into the water hoses within the machine. Note that the tanks’ positions are not reversible and the clean water tank must always be installed to the right and the dirty water tank to the left.

On the back of the machine is the power port and an air vent. The power card has a 90 degree turn so that it sits nice and flush with the back of the machine. There’s also a built-in cord wrap so you can store any extra cable neatly. At the top is a handhold to help you lift and carrying the unit easily as it weighs 32.5 lbs.

The robot itself has a typical circular shape with 13.5” diameter plastic exterior and 4-1/8” height including the LIDAR puck guidance system. At the back of the unit are the two charging contacts and along the sides and front you’ll see these black infrared sensors that help the robot sense and see obstacles and determine its location.

On the bottom, towards the front you’ll install the spin brushes on the left and right sides. Note that they are color-coded red and green which you’ll need to match to the corresponding brush. They are easy to install and simply snap on. There are a number of drop sensors on the unit to prevent it from falling over stairs and ledges, 360 front roller wheel, removable soft rubber brush, and two rubber drive wheels. These two ports are for the mop plates whose washable pads stick on via Velcro, and these also attach by simply pressing them into place.

The silver cover on top lifts completely off the unit and is held on with magnets. There is a protective foam insert that you should remove. At the front is the mode button, which is touch sensitive, and the LIDAR puck. Next to it is the Wi-Fi setup button and red power switch, so let’s switch it on now. Then this clear compartment is the dust bin, which has a handle to help you lift it out. The bin is quite small measuring xx inches wide, xx inches long, and xx tall. There’s a HEPA filter installed so the air the comes out is free of fine dust particles and that piece can be removed for cleaning or replacement separately. When replacing the dust bin ensure the handle is vertical as folding it down locks it in place. This QR takes you to the product’s support page.

The flashing WiFi LED means it’s ready for setup, so let’s put the cover back on and do that next. First, select a location for the base station near an outlet with 2.5 feet of clearance in front of the unit and at least a couple inches to the sides. Next, make sure you’ve downloaded the EcoVacs Home mobile app. In the app you’ll need to agree to the terms and conditions and create an account to login. Once registered, setup a home location, then scan the QR code under the cover. You’ll need to enable permissions and connect the app to your home’s WiFi network, then press the WiFi button on the robot to connect it. Give your robot a name and select your time zone for scheduling, then install any updates.

The robot has a built-in voice AI assistant named Yiko and the wake phrase for commands is ‘Ok Yiko.’ Then you can issues commands like, ‘Go home,’ and the vacuum will find the station automatically and return for recharging. The robot’s battery takes about 6 hours to fully charge. The capacitive touch button towards the front of the robot lets you start and stop cleaning with a short press or send the robot back to the docking station to charge with a long press.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a map of the areas that it has access to. This process took about 5 minutes and worked pretty well for my open floor plan first story. The robot was able to travel to each room, crossing thresholds with ease, and accessed everywhere except the laundry room, which has a step down. However, it had trouble automatically dividing rooms accurately that didn’t have clear entryways or multiple open walls. Even through map editing, I was not able to parse such rooms as I could only “split” an existing room with a straight line where I needed to draw at least 2 to create distinctly separate rooms. However, I did appreciate that it could store up to 3 maps for use in another part of the house, as I was also able to map our second floor, which is carpetted. I was then able to take the robot upstairs, select that map, and use it there. The only downside is that the robot isn’t able to empty its bin or clean the mop heads in these secondary areas, as the base station isn’t present.

After mapping, you can set virtual boundaries (straight line or rectangle) where the robot won’t enter or clean, and these can be set to exclude mop-only or both vacuum and mopping. The maps generated are pretty accurate; the robot detects furniture and obstacles in real-time and maneuvers around them. The height of the robot is low enough to clear most of my furniture and cabinet/appliance toe kicks. It had a little more trouble with avoiding long and skinny chair and table legs though and tended to tap them lightly. The AI TrueDetect is supposed to help it avoid things like toys, socks, power cords and cables, however, I found that it doesn’t always work as it got stuck on some cords a couple times. It will attempt to dislodge itself if it gets stuck but isn’t always successful.

For cleaning there are several modes. Housekeeper mode uses AI to determine which cleaning strategies to use for different areas of the home for a particular map and adjusts its settings automatically. You can also select specific rooms or define a custom rectangular area to clean and choose standard, deep, or fast with one or two passes; suction can be set to quiet, standard, strong, or max, depending on the level of soil. With the mop pads installed, you can set the machine to vacuum and mop simultaneously, mop after vacuuming, or just perform one or the other. I recommend “mop after vacuum” mode, as when vacuuming and mopping at the same time, the side brushes get wet and dust in them tends to ball up into a paste which can stick to the wet floors instead of being picked up.

The vacuum picks up a lot of hair, dust, and debris and the side brushes do a great job getting close to walls, into corners, and going around furniture without bumping into things often. The small dustbin was completely packed after vacuuming our carpeted second floor for an hour, though you can set the emptying behavior to “extra” which empties at the station more frequently. The base station completely clears the robot’s bin each time and captures the dust in the pre-installed 3L vacuum bag.
For mopping, you can set defaults for the pad wetness, the pad rinsing interval, and the length of hot air drying time from 2 to 4 hours. The base station heats the rinse water to 131°F to better remove dirt and oils from the pads and seems really effective; the rinse water is always dark and gray, and my floors do look brighter afterwards. The water tanks hold just over 1 gallon of water and to mop my entire first floor (600 sq ft.) consumes about 2/3 of the tank. The auto-lift feature of the mop pads raises them when not in use, so that when the unit is not mopping, for example when going over rug and carpet, the wet pads are not being dragged along the floor.

On a full charge, I got about 1 hour and 40 minutes of continuous use: an hour of that time was using mop and vacuum in housekeeper mode and the rest running vacuum only at max suction (6000 Pa) on carpet. At its lowest settings (quiet mode, vacuum only) you can get over 4 hours of runtime on a single charge. The hot air drying for the mop pads takes a while as it’s quite gentle, so I recommend letting it run for the max duration or simply removing the pads to hang dry to avoid the buildup of mold, mildew, and bacteria. If you won’t be mopping daily, I’d also suggest taking the tanks out of the machine to dry completely between uses.

The app will track and record the robot’s travel path right on the map, so you can see its coverage during and after a cleaning session. It also shows you the robot’s location in real-time, though if you can’t find it for any reason, you can tap the ‘Find My DEEBOT’ button and it will announce “I’m here” each time. With ‘continuous cleaning’ enabled, if the robot runs low on power before finishing, it will return to the station to charge and resume from where it left off once it has enough power to finish the cycle.

The simplest thing to do is set a daily cleaning schedule for the robot. Multiple schedules can be set up with separate settings for different areas. If ‘edge deep cleaning’ is enabled, once a week, the unit mops right up to the edges of your walls for better cleaning coverage. This helps us maintain our floor’s cleanliness on a regular basis and saves us a bunch of time and effort.

For hard flooring this robot cleaner picks up a ton of dust, dirt, and hair, and even some larger bits like leaves. On rugs and carpets, it’s more of a surface clean, as it doesn’t have stiff brushes to dig deep into the pile to remove trapped dirt and dust. With daily runs, I change the vacuum bag only every couple of months. As for other maintenance, the mop tray where the pads are rinsed need to be manually cleaned once in a while. You can do this by filling the clean water tank, then pressing and holding the button on top of the station to start the self-clean cycle, scrub the tray with the telescoping brush, then press the button on top again, which should be flashing, to drain the water. Lastly, don’t forget to wipe dry the tray to prevent mold and mildew.

Overall, this robot floor cleaner makes vacuuming and mopping my floors on a regular basis simple and convenient. With the automated hot water rinsing and drying of the mop pads, there’s less manual intervention with this function outside of filling and emptying the water tanks. The dustbin empties itself, and it will prompt you when it’s time to perform maintenance like replacing the vacuum bag, brushes, and pads, so you don’t have to keep track of it. It has ample battery life, and the maps and avoidance systems are quite good and the robot rarely bumps or rubs against furniture or other obstacles. This will go a long way to ensuring the sensor windows stay clear and scratch-free as this is an issue with other robots that I’ve owned. I can clean multiple mapped areas of my home, even without the base station present and the unit is easy to control via the app, voice commands, or simply set on a schedule to run on its own.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned
Buy it at Amazon: EcoVacs DeeBot T20 Omni Robot Mop Vacuum Cleaner [Affiliate Link]