Eufy Clean X9 Pro review: A combination robot vacuum and mop that does its best work on hard floors

The Eufy Clean X9 Pro is a high-end combination vacuum cleaner and mop, with a powerful suction for vacuuming and rotating mop pads to provide a thorough clean. Its somewhat chunky base station contains two water tanks: one to hold clean water for filling the robot and clean its pads after use; the other to pump away the dirty water. It even blow-dries the mopping pads, with air heated to 40°C, to stop them from staying damp and getting musty.

With this level of sophistication, it certainly tries to align itself with some of the best robot vacuum cleaners we’ve tested to date, including the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni and the Ezviz RS2. So, how does it compare?

Eufy Clean X9 Pro review: What do you get for the money?

The Eufy Clean X9 Pro is encased in smart matt black plastic, with a flattened front that makes it more of a D-shape than the classic circular puck design but it is a familiar-looking device, similar to most of the other robot vacuum cleaners we’ve seen.

A small turret on the top houses its LIDAR system, which uses a laser to scan the surrounding area in every direction. The speed and accuracy of LIDAR means it can create a map of its environment in a matter of minutes, locate itself anywhere within that map in seconds and adapt quickly if and when furniture gets moved around. It’s by far the best system we’ve come across for robot navigation. Unfortunately, the downside is that it makes the X9 Pro relatively tall – it measures 326 x 352 x 112mm (WDH) to the top of the turret – and too tall to get under some of my furniture, which flatter robots without LIDAR turrets can easily get beneath. However, I would still opt for the navigational skills of LIDAR over a shorter robot.

On the underside, you’ll find the two 12cm diameter mopping pads. These rotate at three revolutions per second and exert a downward force of 1kg. They also remain attached to the robot, whether or not it’s mopping, but are automatically raised 12mm off the floor when the robot is in vacuum-only mode.

The brush bar on the X9 Pro robot doesn’t have bristles, but rows of rubber fins. It sits in the suction vent, slightly offset from the centre and closer to the robot’s left-hand side. There’s also a rotary edge-sweeping brush on the right-hand side to flick loose dirt into the brush bar’s path. 

Eufy quotes the maximum suction on the device to be 5,000Pa, which is about what you would expect from a robot vacuum at this price. However, most vacuuming doesn’t occur at full suction – unless you select that in the app. Instead, it automatically increases the suction when it detects it’s on carpet and reduces it again on hard floor.

The base station is relatively large, with dimensions of 422 x 416 x 443mm (WDH) including the parking base. Though it’s smaller than the bases that come with the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni or the Ezviz RS2, that’s still larger than most robot vacuum cleaners, but it might appeal if you want this combination of vacuum and mop yet want to minimise the amount of space the base station takes up.

Despite its size, the docking station doesn’t have a self-emptying function, so the collection bin needs to be emptied regularly – there’s a lift-up flap on top to access the collection bin – but the X9 Pro’s generous 410ml capacity means it doesn’t need emptying as often as other models with smaller bins.

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Eufy Clean X9 Pro review: What is it like to use?

I’ve waxed lyrical about the Eufy Home app before, and I’ll do it again with the Eufy Clean X9 Pro. Eufy uses the same app across all its robot vacuum cleaners, so you get a similar interface, just with a few tweaks and adjustments depending on what features the individual robot has. With the X9 Pro, you’ve got practically everything that might appear on any Eufy robot’s control screen, but it still remains logically organised and easy to use.

Setting up the robot is simple: the only thing you’ll really need to do is enter your Wi-Fi password so the robot can connect to the app. Then the initial mapmaking is quick, with the robot using its LIDAR while it takes a tour of your floorspace to get its bearings. In my tests, it took the X9 Pro just 8 minutes to map 67m2 and, during this, you can mark any no-go areas – such as cable nests – adding them on the fly to stop the robot from getting stuck.

Once the map is saved, the app divides the area into rooms. It’s remarkably good at this but, if it doesn’t get it quite right, you can correct it by merging rooms or further dividing them as you wish. You can also give each room a suitable name.

At this point, it’s worth noting that the robot can happily manage multiple maps. To map a new area you simply carry the X9 to a new place (such as the upstairs of your house) and set it off on an auto clean – it will recognise that it’s in a new location and offer to do another mapping run. Once done, the new map is stored alongside the existing map and the robot can work out which one it needs based on a quick LIDAR scan of its surroundings. Alternatively, you can select it yourself if you want to send it straight to a specific room.

Keeping the robot itself clean is straightforward, with the collection bin easily accessible when the robot is parked. While I missed the automatic emptying of the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni, it’s a chore that’s relatively simple and mess-free. The base station does, at least, keep the mop pads clean for you, though you have to empty the dirty water tank and keep the clean tank topped up. I also found the roller brush stayed clear of hair tangles during my tests, which is typical of a bar with rubber fins rather than a brush with bristles. Eufy doesn’t suggest that it has any kind of anti-tangle mechanism, but it seemed to do a decent job of staying tangle-free anyway.

Eufy Clean X9 Pro review: How good is it at finding its way round?

The Eufy Clean X9 Pro is very good at navigating between rooms and generally finding its way around. It can intelligently pick a path even if those rooms are distant and the route is complicated, moving around without any problems most of the time.

This boils down to a decent average speed. As you can see from the chart below, the X9 Pro is not quite as fast as the Ezviz RS2, but it pips the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni to second place. It’s also a long way ahead of the Dyson 360 Vis Nav, which has to repeatedly head back to its charging station to top up its battery when cleaning larger areas.

The one area the robot didn’t manage to navigate perfectly was approaching my kitchen kickboards, which are tucked away under overhanging kitchen units. The gap is 100mm and the main body of the robot is 94mm, so it looked like the robot should have been able to get its shoulder under the overhang and sweep right up to the edge. However, I suspect as a result of the height of the LIDAR turret, it mistook the overhanging cupboard for a wall and stopped the base from going under it. As a result, it didn’t sweep the one place where the most crumbs seem to congregate.

The X9 Pro has the relatively unusual ability to spot and avoid obstacles using its front camera. Eufy claims it can recognise up to 20 types of dropped objects, and avoid them if necessary. I tested this with my usual trio of hazards: a white charging cable, an ankle sock and a convincing-looking fake pet poo. The results were mixed: it spotted the cable straight away, marking it as a cable on the map and dodging it entirely. It somehow recognised the sock as a sandwich – at least, that’s the icon it used on the map – and it clipped it as it passed, though there wasn’t enough contact to disturb it, so that was mostly successful. However, the pet mess wasn’t picked up as a hazard at all and the robot ploughed straight over it. Compared to the object detection of iRobot models such as the Roomba Combo j7+, this still has a way to go.

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Flour collection went in the opposite direction, managing to clear 84% of the spillage on hard floor, but only a disappointing 45% from the carpet, leaving a significant amount behind. This was the only test where the robot performed below average though. It seems like the rubber-finned brush roller might be more effective on hard floors than on carpet.

When cleaning pet hair, we had to be careful to spread it out first, as on practice runs the X9 Pro would spot clumps of hair on its camera and avoid it as an obstacle, rather than tackling it as a cleaning challenge. However, once we got around this problem, the results were reasonably good: it collected all of the dog hair that we put out on the hard floor, and 75% of it when scattered on carpet. Both the Ezviz RS2 and the Dyson 360 Vis Nav scored better than the X9 Pro, collecting more hair from the carpet test.

Moving over to mopping, I was expecting good things as this unit uses rotary mop pads; I’ve seen these put to impressive use on rival models such as the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni and the Ezviz RS2. To compare specs, both the X9 Pro and the X1 Omni spin their mop pads at the same speed (three revolutions per second) but the X9 Pro adds more downforce, with 1kg of pressure to the X1 Omni’s 0.6kg. 

I tested it on laminate flooring by dropping blackcurrant squash and tomato ketchup, and leaving a muddy footprint before letting them dry. The mop handled the mud and squash well, clearing them in a single pass. The ketchup was more problematic – taking three passes to completely clear – but it’s a tough test.

When the mopping is complete, the robot returns to the base station and the pads are rinsed. They’re also dried, using air warmed to 40°C. This takes about three hours and is not a silent process, so this is not the robot to keep parked next to your TV. It’s not overly loud but there’s an audible whirring that doesn’t fade into the background.

Edge cleaning is a problem for the mop. Firstly, it suffers from the same kickboard confusion that I mentioned above, but there’s also a second problem: the mopping pads are a few centimetres from the edge of the robot, and this means that even when the robot gets reasonably close to a wall, the mopping pads don’t.

Eufy appears to have spotted the problem and has added an optional ‘Edge-Hugging Deep Mopping’ mode in the app’s experimental settings. Enable this and you get the option to switch it on in the Mode menu. However, because it’s experimental, you have to do this for every clean – it switches off again after it’s finished. The reasoning behind this seems to be that the cleaning pattern will drain the battery faster. Instead of simply tracking around the edge of a room, the robot moves a short distance then swings its back end towards the wall to get the mopping pad closer, and it repeats this every few centimetres. It definitely gets the mopping pads closer to the edge, and that’s good, but it’s a bit annoying that you have to select it at every clean rather than leave it on by default.

However, this also points to another side of the Eufy app that’s worth commenting on: Eufy keeps on updating and improving things, adding features and improving functionality. Not all robot manufacturers put this level of care into their ongoing service, and Eufy should definitely be commended for continuing to innovate.

Eufy Clean X9 Pro review: Should I buy it?

If you’re looking for a robot vacuum cleaner with a decent mop, you definitely want to get a model like this, which uses rotating pads to add extra agitation to your floor cleaning. Compared to robots that simply drag a cloth behind them, the increased cleaning ability is significant.

The first main rival to this vacuum is the Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni. It does everything the X9 Pro can, but has the added extra benefit of a self-emptying collection bin that sucks the dirt out of the robot and into a larger bag housed below the water tanks in the base station.

The Ezviz RS2 is also worth a look. Though it doesn’t self-empty, it performed better than both the X9 Pro and the X1 Omni in our cleaning tests, so definitely one to consider if you want the absolute best clean from both mop and vacuum.