With many robot vacuum cleaners costing the same as 16 full professional cleans of a two-bedroom apartment, it can be difficult to justify the expense. However the new Ecovacs DEEBOT 710 is only $500, which would pay for a mid-level Dyson but not the person to wield it.
The first thing you notice when you plug the 710 in is that it talks. It has a no-nonsense female voice, and lets you know when it’s starting to charge, starting to clean, and stopping the clean to go charge some more.
The DEEBOT 710 has its issues, but it’s a great vacuum for $500.
To test it out, I first let the 710 roam free in my apartment of hardwood floors, occasional rugs, and excessive cables. I quickly learned that, unlike my usual Samsung PowerBOT, the 710 needs constant supervision around cables. It wants nothing more than to consume all the cables it can reach. It doesn’t care if it’s the wider power cable of an electric drumkit, or the thin cables that connect a Bose surround system. All are fair game.
It has a relatable approach to heights: climbing up is easy, but getting down is hard. It happily climbed up a bass drum pedal, but when the time came to get down it behaved as I did the last time I went rock climbing, and stopped completely until someone came to rescue it.
The first clean wasn’t particularly efficient, as it was still building the map. But once it finished building an eerily good map of my apartment, subsequent cleans were much faster and I was able to be more specific about which areas I did or did not want cleaned. Unfortunately, its sense of direction is not perfect, so when I tried to exclude the couch area from the clean (because of the cables), it would either exclude a nearby area, or I’d have to mark too much of the living room as a no go and vacuum that area separately, mildly defeating the purpose.
That said, it did manage to pick up a reasonable amount of dust and dirt that I didn’t know was there, and only needed to recharge once midway through the 95-ish square metres. Granted, most of the robot vacuum cleaners I’ve used didn’t need a charge break when doing the apartment, but this one is substantially cheaper.
The 710 needs to charge quite often, and may not let you know when its bin is full.
To test it on carpet, I took it to a meeting room that gets professionally cleaned twice a week. On carpet it was super quiet. Almost too quiet. And it spent a large amount of effort getting itself stuck on chair legs and being unable to get down, but too stubborn to ask for help.
Half an hour in, or about halfway through cleaning this not overly large room, it needed to charge, and I noticed it had left a lot of carpet fluff in its wake. When I forced it to restart an hour later, it only had enough charge to clean for five minutes and did a terrible job. It was only then that I thought to check the dust bin, and found it completely full of carpet fluff. It had managed to give the carpet a deeper clean than the professional-grade vacuum cleaners that are so often employed on it, which was impressive. What wasn’t impressive, though, was the amount of time it wasted by not alerting me to its bin being full. Not putting a sensor in there is going to waste a lot of time and battery over the life of the vacuum cleaner, especially given how small the bin is.
In the end, though, it’s a more than competent vacuum cleaner that’s a bargain at that price, but will require some vigilance from users to make sure it’s not consuming cables or wasting time with a full bin.
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