Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Well priced
- Good all-rounder
- Solid feature set
Cons
- Needs to avoid carpet after mopping
- Mop pads need to be added and removed by hand
- Not good at spotting cables
Our Verdict
This self-emptying robot vacuum is a solid all-rounder and its self-cleaning brush makes it a solid option for homes with pets, although in our experience, it doesn’t mean you’ll never have to clean it by hand.
Price When Reviewed
$649.99 (bundled with self-emptying base)
Best Prices Today: Eufy X8 Pro
$649.99
If you want a robot vacuum that does it all – high-quality mapping, decent mopping, self-emptying – it’s an expensive proposition. But these features will make a big difference to how much work it can take on, and how much less you’ll have to do day-to-day, both in terms keeping your home clean and how hands-on you need to be with your robot vacuum.
Enter the Eufy X8 Pro. It’s by no means cheap but for £599/$649.99, or just £449.99/$499.99 if you forgo the self-emptying station, it does a lot for its price point.
Design & Build
- 9.5cm/ 3.75in high (approx.)
- 270ml dustbin
- Station fairly compact at 38 x 19 x 13cm
The X8 Pro has a familiar build, with a circular body and a raised Lidar tower that allows its laser navigation system a wide field of vision. Including the tower, it’s only 9.5cm/ 3.75in high, giving it a good chance of it getting under the bed and sofa to clean.
It’s around 34cm/ 13.4in in diameter and has a grey cover and black sides and bumpers.
Emma Rowley / Foundry
The X8 Pro has a spinning sweeper on one side, which helps it to clean along edges and in corners but, inevitably, if you have items along your walls that it needs to avoid, it won’t reach every spot.
Onboard, there’s a 270ml water tank and a 335ml dustbin. It’s a fairly small bin but if you get the self-emptying station, that’ll be moot.
That’s because inside the station is a much larger bin, in the form of a 2.5 litre antibacterial dust bag. Depending on how often you need to vacuum, you’ll likely get around a month and a half of use before you need to empty it.
The X8 Pro is an effective vacuum that can convincingly clean both carpets and hard flooring
As for the station itself, it’s in discreet black and is fairly compact (38 x 19 x 13cm), which means it’s easier to place than mammoth rivals. A bag is already in place when you unbox it, so all that the station set-up involves is to find a spot for it and plug it in.
The best home for it is in an uncarpeted room, as when the mopping pad is attached, you won’t want it to cross any carpet.
There are drawbacks to a self-emptying dock, apart from size. You’ll need to buy replacement dust bags, plus the self-emptying process is not exactly quiet. When the robot docks, there’s a few seconds of loud noise as the onboard bin is emptied via vacuum suction.
You can, however, switch this setting off for a while by using the Do Not Disturb mode in the app. And overall, a self-emptying station is well worth it for the ability to schedule cleaning and forget all about it.
Setup & Mapping
- Editable maps for custom cleaning
- Voice control
- Eufy app well laid out and easy to use
Setup is straightforward. One the robot has charged, you’ll need to download the Eufy app, which is free and available for iOS and Android, and it’ll walk you through the Wi-Fi connection process. It was quick in our test and once you come to use it, you’ll find that the app is simply laid out and easy to use.
On the X8 Pro’s first sortie, it’ll create a map of your home. The map was accurate but fairly basic – there’s no 3D option and you can’t add items of furniture the way you can with pricier models (like the iRobot Roomba i7+) – but once it’s complete, you can edit it. There’s also the option to save multiple maps.
If the robot hasn’t got your map quite right, you can merge and section rooms. Once it’s to your liking, you can then set custom cleaning settings for each room, choosing the water level (when mopping), suction power, and whether it cleans the room once or twice.
Foundry
You can also send it out to clean a single room, which is useful if you want the bathroom mopped after a shower, or the kitchen cleaned after dinner prep.
The X8 Pro can also be used with Alexa or Google Assistant, so you can set your robot off with a voice command. I tested it with Alexa, and linking it to my Amazon account was quick and easy.
Vacuuming & Navigation
- 8,000Pa suction
- Can’t spot low obstacles
- Good with pet hair but still tangles
This model is equipped with twin turbines, each with 4,000Pa suction, giving it a whopping 8,000Pa overall. It’s impressive, on paper. But how does it perform in real life?
The X8 Pro is an effective vacuum that can convincingly clean both carpets and hard flooring. It’s not the best at edge cleaning but that’s never really a robot vacuum’s strong suit: the heavy traffic areas of a room are where it performs best.
It’s particularly good at picking up pet hair. One of its selling points is its self-cleaning brush bar. This feature should, theoretically, mean that you don’t have to clean it by hand. It did work on pet hair but once this was combined into an unholy tangle with long human hair, it was the same old story and I had to tear strands of hair from the brush bar – and the spinning sweeper.
Emma Rowley / Foundry
But cleaning is only half the story with a robot vacuum. Navigation is just as important. If it often gets itself stuck, it makes scheduled cleaning pointless as you’ll have to be around to rescue it.
The X8 Pro’s navigation is good – overall. It stopped short of obstacles and cleaned carefully alongside them. But there’s an exception. It regularly charged into low items, like pet bowls, mats and cables and then dragged mats behind it or became tangled in cables.
Low objects and wires are a common blind spot with robot vacuums. As long as you set up no-go zones around obvious trouble spots like nests of cables and pet bowls, it won’t be a problem.
The X8 Pro has an on-paper ability to cross a 19mm threshold. During testing, it was able to cross a taller and wider 22mm threshold, although not without some Austin Powers-style back and forth manoeuvring.
Mopping
- Three levels of water flow
- Mops can’t be raised on carpet
The X8 Pro isn’t a completely hands-off robot vacuum. If you want to mop, you’ll need to fil the water tank and attach the mop pad (and then empty and clean it afterwards).
Once the mop is fitted, the mopping option will appear in the app and you can customise water levels for each room. You should note that once it’s mopped the floor, it will leave a slightly damp trail behind it. So, if the fastest way for it to return to its charging station is across a rug or carpeted area, you’ll need to add a no-go zone on the map.
Although you can’t specify that it mops some rooms and only vacuums others on the same outing, you can schedule or send it to only mop a specific room, like a bathroom or kitchen.
The mop can exert 0.6kg of downward pressure, which is enough to clean up dried toothpaste or tea stains. It won’t lift more stubborn gunk and it won’t clean right to the walls, but for day-to-day mopping, it works well enough to be useful.
Emma Rowley / Foundry
I found it to be better than some other models that use the same drag-across-the-floor method of cleaning and which are pretty feeble. More expensive models now tend to use spinning mops, which do a much more thorough job.
Price & Availability
The Eufy X8 Pro is available for £599/ $649.99. In the UK, you can buy it direct from Eufy, from Amazon or Argos but at the time of writing, there’s no price advantage from any retailer.
US readers can get it from Eufy, Best Buy or Amazon. Currently, Best Buy has the best deal at $599.99.
Depending on where you are and what the competition is, the X8 Pro looks a little different.
In the UK, when compared to rivals with a similar feature set, the Eufy X8 Pro is very well priced. The iRobot Roomba i7+, which also has automatic self-emptying, costs £799. (The i7+ has better, more in-depth mapping but it doesn’t mop.)
It’s a different story in the US, where you can pick up the i7+ for $399.99 (see it on Amazon) and there’s also competition from Yeedi, whose Cube robot vacuum is excellent value.
If you’re thinking of buying, as well as replacing mop pads and the spinning sweeper, you’ll also need to factor in the cost of replacement bags for the station.
In the UK, you can get a six-pack of replacement bags from Amazon for £29.99. US readers can buy a 10 pack for $29.99, also from Amazon.
Still, once the X8 Pro is set up, you’ll get a code via the app within 20 days that’ll entitle you to two free dust bags for the docking station. The code must be redeemed before the end of the year and we don’t know if later purchases will also receive one.
Should you buy the Eufy X8 Pro?
It’s not a flawless robot vacuum but for its price point, its feature set and quality make it a tempting package – especially if you’re in the UK. We wouldn’t recommend trying to save money by buying the robot vacuum without the station: it’s really the combination of the two that makes such a good deal.
But, if you have pets and long-haired family members, don’t believe the hype: there’s no way to completely escape the miserable task of dealing with hair on the brush bar. But if you buy the X8 Pro, at least you’ll know it’s not on your floor.
Not the perfect robot vacuum for you? have a look at our round-up of the best robot vacuums we’ve tested.
Specs
- 8,000Pa suction max
- Height: 9.5cm (approx.)
- 270ml water tank
- 335ml onboard bin/ 2.5l in dock
- Lidar navigation
- Mopping: Yes
- Auto emptying: Yes – with station