Superior, But Could Be Superior

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.

Eventually, I desired to see how a mid-assortment robot vacuum in 2020 fares against a primary Roomba from 2012. So, I devised a simple test: I made two rectangles out of magnet strips, a digital wall, and rolled-up rugs, measuring to make sure they ended up as shut to the very same sizing as doable, then distribute out whatever several dust and detritus I could accumulate from outside, making use of a broom to attempt to evenly disperse every thing. I set each robots roughly in the middle of their rectangle, then simultaneously began them.

Aside from the thrill of my brief tenure as King of the Crawling Circles, I was transfixed anew at their do the job, viewing the Roomba zip around, jerking at just about every boundary and flitting off in a new, random course, while the Eufy took a slower, additional measured strategy, and they from time to time fulfilled and politely separated, I picture carrying out a minimal robotic curtsy. At a very little extra than 14 minutes, the Eufy declared its occupation done—it was not. I reactivated it and viewed it carry on to overlook dirt in favor of meticulously combing the edges of this mundane Thunderdome, until I eventually allow the Roomba—which experienced very long-considering that done its task—take care of the remainder.

In the Eufy’s defense, it was a lot of junk to throw at it, and the dustbin, when I looked, was entire, so it’s not really it is fault. Even so, I was genuinely shocked that the Roomba did as very well as it did by comparison.

The subsequent check was ledge detection. For this, I placed it on a cardboard box about fifty percent a foot off the ground and watched it impotently rage towards its invisible obstacles for a couple minutes, and I ultimately established it on good ground the moment a lot more for its last demo: mopping.

Let us get this out of the way: mopping with the G30 Hybrid is not seriously intended to clear serious messes, so substantially as get the previous dusty bits the normal vacuum task skipped. The instruction booklet expressly forbids the use of cleansing remedies, advocating rather for simple drinking water. This is positioned into a water tank you clip onto the base of the dust bin, to which you connect possibly the washable mop pad or one particular of the replaceable kinds bundled.

The moment you’ve established it up to mop, you merely put it on the floor and push the commence button. It uses no specific method for this it merely snakes through the area, leaving powering a shiny, skinny layer of moisture. I spilled random liquids of various viscosity on the floor, and all have been wiped absent, but it did not make a dent in the bit of paint left by my daughter previously in the day—not that I envisioned it to. The mopping consists strictly of dragging a moist pad throughout the floor, just after all, with none of the agitation that would be necessary to scrub harder-to-take away stains and encrusted dried liquid. In all, my floor seemed much better.

Testing out of the way, I determined to get a appear at what assessments mentioned about this robot’s predecessor, the RoboVac G30 Edge. Problems generally centered close to mapping and wayfinding—the G30 would get misplaced a lot, get caught cleansing one space obsessively, or not uncover its way again following cleaning. I noticed all of this occur, but getting owned a rather dumb vacuum for going on 5 yrs, I’ve previously identified most of the dilemma areas and taken steps to block them off, and I dared not let the vacuum go to any of the obstacle classes that are our bedrooms or business office. Also, it only at any time appeared not able to return residence if I began it in a further place, blowing up regardless of what map of my home it experienced stored. I can only speak to my own encounter, but none of the problems I go through about manifested in any unsurprising ways.