Eufy RoboVac X8 review: When turbine action meets unavoidable collisions

When it comes to smart appliances, robot vacuums have managed to rise up and dominate. It’s not an unwanted invasion though, as nothing beats an automated cleaning assistant that hovers around your home, scooping up debris on a pre-determined schedule. The best robot vacs use advanced laser-scanning tech to build blueprints of your home, maps that the vac will reference when going about its cleaning route, and maps you can access in the vac’s companion app. Other features, like object-avoidance and voice assistant controls, are fairly standard these days, too.

There’s no shortage of smart home brands touting “the best” robot vacs on the market, which can make the buying process a difficult one. Eufy, a sub-label of parent company Anker, is a prolific producer of some of today’s leading smart tech — from cameras to health monitors. Going up against the hordes of robot vac makers, Eufy’s all-new RoboVac X8 is hailed as one of the company’s premiere vacs. Is it worth the investment? We got our hands on a test unit and have plenty to say about it.

Unboxing

The RoboVac X8 is packaged with a handful of essentials to get you started. In the box, you’ll find the X8 itself (with the side-sweeping brush already attached), the charging dock with power cable, an extra filter, and an extra side-sweep brush, along with a user manual.

Unlike other robot vacs on the market, the X8 does not come with a dual-purpose charge dock/dust collector. This means that you’ll need to keep tabs on the vac’s dustbin so you can manually empty it when it’s full. To be honest, those towering canisters can be a real eyesore, depending on the home décor you have to pair it with. So for me, it wasn’t a major deal that the X8 wasn’t packaged with one.

The X8 itself is about 4 inches tall (factoring in the top-mounted lidar scanner) with a 13-inch diameter. The vac’s black casing is a fairly low-key aesthetic that will do well in most homes. Branding for the vac’s Twin Turbine feature is placed right on top of the vac — a black label with a blue stripe to the left and a red one to the right.

The 600-milliliter dust box features a purple lock tab that you push down on to pull the tank out. The washable filter is located right inside the dust box. To access it, just pull on both sides of the tank and it will open up clam-shell style. Flipping the vac over, you’ll find a centralized rolling brush, two beefy tumbler wheels, a front-facing, surface-adaptive wheel, and a single side-sweeping brush (removable).

The charging dock doesn’t take up much real estate — although you’ll want to allocate a decent amount of space for the X8’s docking process. Whenever I would send my test unit home for a recharge, the vac needed a good amount of space to comfortably waltz around before docking (kind of like the dog that needs to spin a few times before landing in the doggie-bed).

Setup

Once your X8 is out of the box, the first thing you’ll want to do is download the EufyHome app (for iOS and Android devices). Once you launch the app, EufyHome will request access to your device’s Bluetooth to be able to detect your vacuum. After a few seconds, you should see your X8 pop up in the list of available devices. Select it, enter your applicable Wi-Fi info (the X8 only works with 2.4GHz network bands), and wait for the vac to connect to your network.

Do note that you’ll need to set aside at least an hour or so for the X8 to get charged enough to function. My test unit wouldn’t register my Wi-Fi until it had docked for a little while. Once everything is live, you’ll be prompted by the app to send your vac off on its first cleaning. During this initial run, the lidar (light detection and ranging) and other image-mapping features will be actively operating, creating a cleaning map of your home for both you and the vacuum to reference.

Performance

The RoboVac X8 comes loaded with several cleaning features. Chief among them is the much-advertised Twin-Turbine Technology. Each turbine brings 2,000pa of suction to the equation, making for a vacuum experience that’s double the power of many competing bots. The Ultra-Pack Dust Compression feature is a solid consideration for a vac with no auto-empty canister/charge dock. Essentially, all of the debris that the X8 pulls in is heavily pressurized, reducing tank volume by up to 127%. Combined with intelligent lidar mapping and close to three hours on a single charge, this should make for an incredible cleaning experience … right?

Not exactly. The RoboVac X8 lived in my home for several weeks. Through the many cleaning rounds I put it through, I found the overall performance to be quite average — maybe even less than average in some instances. Let’s start with the top slice of bread in the compliment sandwich.

The Twin-Turbine Technology pushes the vac to some impressive levels. Going over carpeting, the X8 got deep into the fibers, pulling up dirt, hair, and other debris that wasn’t visible on the surface. With BoostIQ enabled, the vac also did a great job of automatically adjusting suction when moving from carpeting to tile and hardwood surfaces. Set to Pure (the default soft-suction setting), the vac is fairly quiet, although the volume quickly increases when moving to the next suction level. More on that below.

Collision avoidance

Now let’s move to the meat of the sandwich where I shall complain. I’ve tested some other vacs (and owned a few models) that had pretty lackluster object avoidance. This, combined with heavy collisions into the un-avoided obstacles, made for a nerve-wracking experience whenever I’d let the vacs loose. Unfortunately, I found the Eufy to be no different. On the one hand, the X8 did an okay job of not slamming into furniture when it encountered a chair or ottoman, but there never seemed to be an active effort on the vac’s part to actually avoid the obstacle. Several times I had to jump in to rescue the vac from under a chair or between two items, which requires you to manually resume its cleaning cycle every time.

Additionally, the side-sweeping brush proved to be nightmarish when laying down test oatmeal on my kitchen’s laminate surface. Whenever the sweeper would encounter the oats, it would whip them into cracks and crevices that the vac would never navigate to. I had to pull out my cordless hand vac to clean these messes later. There were also a few times where the X8 would simply stop and fail to pair with the home map it had created. After a few moments of buffering it would come back online, but it was strange to walk by and see it stumped.

Out of complaining and into the bottom slice of bread. Fully charged, my X8 never needed a recharge during a full clean of my apartment. It would cover the entire floor-plan in less than an hour (1,300 square feet), with only minimal human babysitting required during operation.

Software

The EufyHome app is your go-to resource for all X8 preferences and customizations. Once the vac’s lidar sensors go to work, a detailed map of your home will be available for viewing on the Home Screen. From here, you’ll be able to track your vac’s progress and battery life as it cleans the home, label rooms, send the vac off to spot-clean certain areas, and adjust suction power.

If there are sections of the home you want the X8 to stray away from, you can tap Edit Map and then designate one or more No-Go Zones for the vac to avoid.

For suction, you’ll have the option to move between four different presets (Pure, Power, Turbo, and Max), with Pure (the softest setting) being the default. You’ll also be able to toggle BoostIQ on/off. This is the X8’s ability to automatically adjust suction based on the surface it’s vacuuming over.

Several useful features are tucked away in a near-missable, separate Settings menu. To access, you’ll need to tap the gear icon in the top-right corner of the Home Screen. Here you’ll find options for creating vacuuming schedules, a cleaning history report, and map management tools. My thinking is that the scheduling feature should be a quick-tap button on the app’s main screen.

Visually, I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the super-dark overlay that dominates the main map screen. It may sound nit-picky, but considering the EufyHome app’s other sub-menus are bright-white, the X8’s black backdrop made navigating to certain features a little difficult — at least for me.

Price and warranty

You can find the Eufy RoboVac X8 on sale for $599 through Eufy’s site. Similar to other Eufy products, the X8 also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, as well as a one-year limited warranty.

Alternatively, there’s also the Eufy RoboVac X8 Hybrid, which tacks on the function of a mopper. For the extra $50 cost, it certainly seems like an added value given its 2-in-1 vacuum and mop capabilities.

Our take

I can’t actively sing the praises of the RoboVac X8. Yes, it’s got a great app and the promise of powerful and intelligent cleaning technologies to get your house spotless. In my personal experience, the X8 often made more work for me, requiring several rescues and resets, with a handful of glitches thrown in now and then, too.

Is there a better alternative?

Yes, several. From Roomba’s entire lineup to competitively priced vacs from Roborock and Neato, there are plenty of robot vacuums that will get your house clean without as many hiccups along the way. Some that come to mind around the price range include the iRobot Roomba i3 Plus with its self-emptying dock and efficient cleaning, as well as the Roborock S7 with its sonic mopping action.

How long will it last?

My guess is that the Eufy RoboVac X8 will last for several years. The outer shell is well-protected, the app seems like it will successfully stay up-to-date, and with the option to replace the main brush-head and side-sweepers, it seems like there will be plenty of support from Eufy’s end. It does come with a one-year limited warranty that protects it from defects from the date of purchase.

Should you buy it?

It’s not a total dud by any means, but your money is better spent elsewhere.