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- Good cleaning
- Solid navigation and app control
- Versatile options
- Lacks anti-tangle
- Not best in any class
The Eufy Robot Vacuum E20 is an intriguing proposition. It makes a valid claim to be a robot vacuum cleaner that could genuinely replace all the other vacuums in your house.
That’s not because Eufy has created a robot that can do all the things that robots normally fail to do, such as tackling the stairs or removing cobwebs from high corners. Instead, it’s a three-in-one – the handheld unit sits in the robot’s chassis, powering the robot as it does its rounds. When it’s not busy, you can lift this off the robot for small cleaning jobs or attach its extension wand and floor head to convert it into a fully functional cordless stick.
What do you get for the money?
Let’s start with the robot element of the Eufy Robot Vacuum E20. The biggest difference between this and most other robot vacuum cleaners is its appearance. While most robots are sleek and smart looking, the Eufy E20 looks a bit like it’s had its lid removed, exposing its inner workings below.
The main features we’ve come to expect from good robot vacuum cleaners are all present. It’s a puck-shaped unit with a bumper at the front and a LiDAR turret on the top. It also has windows at the front and on the right hand side, behind which are additional lasers used to detect and avoid obstacles. The robot itself measures 350 x 350 x 118mm (WDH).
It also comes with a self-emptying charging station. This is a relatively small tower (250 x 387 x 187mm), which sits against the wall and the robot parks against it when it needs to charge. Each time it finishes a cleaning run (or even during the run, if you set it to) the robot can reverse up and have the base station empty out the rubbish. It’s collected in a large 3l collection bag, which can be easily lifted out and replaced when full.
The handheld unit doubles up as the motor, battery, filters and collection bin of the robot. To use it in handheld mode you release it from its resting position on the top of the robot by pressing a button in the handle. You can’t use the robot and the handheld or cordless stick functions at the same time, though.
There’s a small crevice tool also attached to the robot, which is handy as you’ll never have to go and look for it. It also comes with a combi funnel, dusting brush, a motorised floor head and an extension wand to convert it into a full cordless stick.
What is it like to use?
In robot mode, the Eufy Robot Vacuum E20 is straightforward to set up and use. The Eufy Clean app needs installing on your smartphone so you can use it to connect the robot to your Wi-Fi network, then control it remotely afterwards. This is a straightforward process with few surprises – Eufy has developed the app through numerous generations of robots, and it’s now a mature and refined control centre.
The first time the robot goes out it performs a quick exploration of every room it can reach, and builds up a map. This is fast, only taking a few minutes, because the LiDAR scanner can measure a room in seconds, without having to travel to its extremities.
Once that’s done you can adjust the map, naming rooms and changing the position of thresholds if the app has assigned them incorrectly. You can select the cleaning options you want, such as the suction power and whether you want a single or double pass. You can also send the robot out to clean the entire area, a particular room or group of rooms, or just draw a rectangle around the space you want cleaning.
Is it good at finding its way around?
The Eufy Robot Vacuum E20 is an excellent navigator. Its LiDAR-created map of the house appeared as accurate as you’d expect from its precision laser and the robot found its way from one room to another without any problems.
As you’ll see from the chart below, it didn’t stand out as particularly faster than other LiDAR-guided robots. It’s faster than the iRobot Roomba Combo 10 Max, though, which suffers because it doesn’t use LiDAR to find its way around.
When it comes to obstacles, the various laser-guided sensors did an excellent job of spotting and circumnavigating problems such as chair and table legs. It approaches the obstacle, stops just before it and circles around. Occasionally it misses and touches something with its front bumper, but I didn’t see anything other than a soft-touch, low-speed collision.
It also did reasonably well around hazards. I test a robot’s ability to avoid trouble with a dropped sock, a charging cable and a joke shop pet poo. In my tests it worked its way flawlessly around the sock and the poo, but it clipped the edge of my dropped charging cable and hooked it into its own path. Obstacle avoiding experts such as the iRobot Roomba Combo 10 Max are better at this kind of thing, if your house is occasionally quite messy.
How well does it clean?
The Eufy Robot Vacuum E20 performed well in most of my cleaning tests in its robot mode. I tested it with measured amounts of rice, flour and pet hair on both carpet and hard floor. It cleared most of the rice from both surfaces, and did a great job with flour and pet hair on hard floor. It stumbled a little on carpet, where it left a smudgy residue of flour behind, as well as a visible layer of pet hair. As you can see from the chart below, we saw better results from the Eufy Clean X8 Pro and the Shark Matrix Plus RV2620WAUK.
I also tested the vacuum in stick mode, to see how it compared to cordless vacuums in general. It also performed well here, with only a few of our test Cheerios escaping the floor head’s clutches. It left a little too much flour behind in both carpet and hard floor tests and left a little hair behind in both, too. Nonetheless, it was an impressive enough performance considering it’s not really its primary function.
I also tested its battery in this mode, using the usual test of letting it run down from a full charge while operating the motorised floor head. I tested in both its most and least powerful modes. Here it did well too, lasting just short of 49 minutes in its most economical setting, which is plenty of time to get around a modest-sized house. At full power it lasted for 13 minutes, which is a good length of time for cleaning up a trickier spillage.
If there’s one area I wasn’t happy it’s with how quickly the rollers got clogged up with hair, both on the robot and the cordless stick. There’s no anti-tangle technology on either brush bar, so if you have long haired people or pets in your house, you’re going to end up having to maintain the rollers. I found I was having to cut hair off more often than I had to empty the collection bin in the self-emptying station, which is a significant annoyance.
Should you buy the Eufy Robot Vacuum E20?
As a self-emptying robot, the Eufy Robot Vacuum E20 is a competent and efficient cleaner. The app makes it easy to control, the mapping is good and it did a decent job in most of our tests. If there’s one failing it’s that it doesn’t take care of its own roller, which rapidly became clogged with long hair in my household.
The fact it can also be used as a handheld or cordless stick is something of a bonus. If you already have a decent model then this is unlikely to be an upgrade, but anyone looking to purchase both devices at once is getting a bit of a bargain here. Having the handheld unit tied to the robot is slightly inconvenient as it might not be fully charged when you want it, and you certainly have to bend down to the floor to retrieve it. For many though, that will be a small price to pay.
If you want the very best of both worlds then we’d advise you to purchase separately. The Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station is a similar Eufy robot at a similar price, but cleans faster and better than the E20. It also has a mopping function, which might be a more useful add-on for those who already have a reasonable cordless stick vacuum cleaner. You can read more about the best cordless stick vacuums here.
