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- Great on carpets, good on floors
- Excellent navigation abilities
- Good value by robot vacuum/mop standards
- Base station is large and bulky
- Dock and vacuum show up dust
Eufy’s new Omni E25 and E28 robot vacuums were launched earlier in the year, but have only just gone on sale in the UK. Or rather, the E25 has. The E25 and E28 are the same basic design, but the latter has a detachable deep cleaner for tackling really stubborn stains and commands a £150 premium.
The E25 costs £849, though Eufy seems to run regular promotions, and for a short time, while I was testing it, you could get it for £699 and the E28 for £849.
I can’t be the only person who thinks that even £700 is a lot of money to cough up just to avoid getting the hoover out once a week, but that’s actually pretty good value for a combo robotic vac/mop combo. You can easily spend over £1,000 on this type of device.
Eufy Omni E25: What do you get for the money?
Eufy’s new Omni E25 is no ordinary robot vacuum. It might look it with its mostly circular body, its two spinning brushes at the front and its centrally mounted carpet brushes. But its mopping system is what really sets it apart.
Instead of the static or spinning pads most combination cleaning robots use, the E25 has a retractable roller, which Eufy says is applied to the floor with 1.5kg or pressure, thus ensuring a more thorough clean. The roller is also actively cleaned using jets of water as it turns, the idea being it leaves much less of a smear on your floors as it goes than with other methods.
Physically, the E25 is rather a chunky affair. It stands 13cm tall, with almost 2cm of that being the tower housing the robot’s spinning LiDAR sensor. LiDAR is a light detection and ranging system that robots like this use to help them map rooms and navigate. Of course, the advantage of a LiDAR tower is a superior 360-degree field of vision, so there is some benefit to the extra height. To assist the LiDAR system, there is an “AI-enhanced” camera array at the front.
While the Eufy E25 is indeed cheaper than some of the competition, it also looks cheaper. The shiny black plastic panels of the Omni Station dock and the robot vacuum itself show up dust badly and need regular wiping down. But it’s all well screwed together, proven by the fact that I dropped the entire assembly while moving it, but with no harm done.
As well as the robot, you also get a fairly large, bulky docking station in the box, which carries out several key jobs. It’s used to recharge the robot, naturally, but its also there to maintain and clean the robot.
It empties the dust chamber into a three-litre dustbag, a process helped by the two carpet brushes spinning backwards to free up any trapped rubbish. At the same time, a small reservoir in the vacuum is replaced with clean water, and its mop roller is dried with warm air to prevent it from getting mouldy and smelling.
One clever design feature worth mentioning is the circular LED light that sits below the water tank. When the system is powered up and all is well, it refracts with a reassuring Halo-blue but when there’s an issue it changes to Tron-red. The light isn’t so bright that it’s ever a distraction, but it is intense enough that you can see it with a quick glance.
What is it like to use?
Even if you’ve never used a robot vacuum before, setting up the E25 is unlikely to cause any problems. It’s a straightforward job of assembling the dock, reading the setup guide, downloading the Eufy Clean app and connecting it to the E25, filling up the 2.5L water tank, adding the supplied floor cleaning solution and popping the robot in the dock to charge.
Incidentally, a replacement bottle of floor cleaner will set you back £20, although the E25 does seem to use it quite sparingly.
The app is easy to master, with various options to change the intensity of the suction and how wet the mop gets. However, I found it easier to stick the system into AI Automation Mode and let the E25 worry about things, which is surely the point of having an automatic cleaning system.
The only time you will have to intervene is to clear the brush rollers of hair – which shouldn’t be very often, as the anti-tangle design works very well – and to retrieve the robot when it gets stuck. When this happens, not only does the app let you know by issuing a notification, but a loud and clear voice alert is emitted by the unit itself.
On one occasion, it stumbled into a gap just a few millimetres wider that it and tried to turn rather than reverse, jacking one of the drive wheels up off the ground. I was aware of the problem in moments and was able to free it to get on with its job.
It’s worth mentioning here that some early reviews of the E25 from the USA reported a certain lack of reliability with the E25 randomly powering off and not responding to app commands. I experienced no such problems, so I can only assume that firmware updates (a significant one was installed as soon as I connected the E25 to my home network) have resolved these issues.
Is it good at finding its way around?
Robot vacuums tend to perform best in large open-plan spaces with minimal clutter. My two-bed terrace is the opposite of that, but the E25 still performed admirably.
On first launch, it pottered about the upstairs of my house to get its bearings and map the space. The sensor tower prevented it from getting under my bed, but otherwise it mapped the space faultlessly, even as far as taking one look at the box- and cable-strewn spare bedroom and rightly labelling the space as Home Office.
Once the system has mapped a space and is cleaning, you can check the robot’s path on the app, so it’s very easy to see if it’s missing any spaces. Usefully, you can view maps in 2D or 3D and you can designate no-go areas in the app if you find it getting stuck repeatedly in the same places.
But generally, the E25 does well at getting over small obstacles and avoiding those things it can’t. Door thresholds, thick extension cables and carpet protectors didn’t break its stride, and it deftly navigated around discarded shoes and boxes.
Obviously, stairs are a no-go area for robot vacuums, but at least the E25 didn’t hurl itself down those either. Rather, it just rolled up to the edge of the top step, paused and spun around. Good robot.
You can even tell the app if you have pets, which puts the camera system on high alert for piles of poo. Obviously, you don’t want your robot trundling through that sort of mess and spreading it around your carpets.
Elsewhere, it’s also good to see that the Eufy app lets you store multiple maps, so the system can remember different floors in your house. Given the weight of the robot and base station, I can’t see many people lugging the whole lot up and down a flight of stairs regularly, but if you just move the robot itself, it copes perfectly well. You will need to pop it back in its docking station to empty the dustbin, refill its water and clean the mop roller after it has finished, however.
How well does it clean?
Quick and quiet is the easiest way to describe the E25’s performance. According to the app, the upper floor of my house is 20m2, and it took 23 minutes to vacuum the whole area. That is pretty quick, although it isn’t quite the quickest robot vacuum we’ve tested.
That same cleaning job reduced the E25’s battery charge from 100% to 70%, but after 20 minutes back in the dock, it was back to 100%. You’d need a seriously large floor area to make battery life an issue – these numbers suggest it should be able to vacuum around 67m2 all in one session. That’s a lot better than the Dyson 360 Vis Nav, which needed to recharge twice to vacuum a floor space 56m2.
I was rather impressed by how quietly the E25 went about its business, too. Granted, you can hear it coming if no one else is in the house, and every time it left the dock, the dog came to see what was afoot, but when I had my music turned up while writing, it did a full circuit, including my office, without me even noticing.
Does the E25 suck? Indeed, it does. Eufy rates it at 20,000Pa (that’s the number of Pascals of pressure the system can generate), which is towards the top end for any robot vacuum and in all of Expert Reviews’ standard field tests, it performed very well indeed, beating its predecessor and matching the more expensive Dyson Vis Nav 360.
Our lab tests focus on how well the vacuum sucks up flour, rice and dog hair from both carpeted and hard floors. The methodology is not overly complex: we measure how much stuff we put on a clean surface, let the robot vacuum do its thing, then measure how much has been collected.
The new Eufy aced the rice and dog hair tests, getting as close to 100% as makes no difference and did equally well with flour on a hard floor test. It struggled with the flour on carpet test, but all robot vacuums tend to trip up with that one; they simply don’t sweep back and forth enough to get everything up from the depths of the pile. However, the Eufy E25’s still managed to suck up nearly 65% of the flour, which is till very impressive.
The E25 certainly managed to keep my carpets clean, doing an excellent job of picking up the dog hair. That said, Mylo, my greyhound, isn’t much of a shedder, so that’s not much of a challenge.
Would the E25 have been as successful at dealing with the hair-maggedon that my previous dog, Comet, the Norwegian Elkhound, left in his wake? Possibly, but I suspect regular inspection of the vacuum dust caddy may have been necessary.
When it came to mopping, only a seriously dried-on stain (I wish I could say it was created for the test, but alas it was not) on the linoleum kitchen floor proved too much for it, although in fairness, the system did spot the stain and spent several minutes attempting to scrub it clean – and it did get rid of most of it.
I ended up having to get a stiff scrubbing brush out to fully clean it away, so it was probably a job beyond any soft mop, even one with 1.5kg of downward pressure. I don’t think any automated cleaning machine would have done better than the E25.
Eufy Omni E25: Should you buy one?
As with all robot vacuums, the key determining feature is the environment in which you plan on using it. While testing the E25, I had occasion to visit an old paramour who just so happens to live in a large open-plan apartment with a carpeted lounge and tiled dining area. So I threw the E25 in the car and took it for a demo.
Here, the E25 worked magnificently, hoovering and cleaning once a day with aplomb, then scuttling back to its dock with no stairs to hinder it. So impressed with it was my ex that she bought one, and two weeks later reports it as “…the best thing since sliced bread”.
In my small two-up, two-down, the E25 is, for obvious reasons, less effective, although I have to admit to a small frisson of joy when I come back from work and find the upstairs freshly hoovered. Would I pay £850 for that feeling? Probably not. But if I ever move to a more robot-vacuum-friendly abode, the Eufy E25 will be top of my list of house-warming gifts to myself. Top marks.
