With iOS 18.4, Apple added support for robot vacuums to HomeKit. There are a few Matter-enabled robot vacuums that can be added to the Home app for use with Siri, including the Deebot X8 Pro Omni from Ecovacs. I've been testing the X8 Pro Omni for the last several weeks to see if it's worth upgrading to a robot vacuum with Matter support to integrate with Siri and HomeKit, as well as to check out its cleaning capabilities.
Design
The X8 Pro Omni is a circular vacuum that can both vacuum and mop, so it is an all-in-one floor cleaning bot. It comes with a base that has a dust bag, section for cleaning fluid, a tank for clean water, and a tank for dirty water.
This is not a small robot vacuum, and it's not going to be ideal for small spaces. It's almost 14 inches wide and about four inches tall. I have a TV stand that's four inches high and the vacuum does not fit underneath it, but it is short enough to get under most furniture, including my couch, bookcases, bed, and desks. Because of the width, it cannot get into spaces that are tight, such as a chair close to a table leg, or two chairs that are close to one another.
The base station is 21 inches tall, 14 inches wide, and 11 and a half inches deep, and you need to have enough area around it for the robot to dock itself. The X8 Pro Omni is black and gold, as is the station, but it's not garish. It blends right in, and even though the charging station is large, I was able to tuck it away in a corner.
There is a built-in camera at the front of the X8 Pro Omni, which is used for navigation, room mapping, and obstacle avoidance, plus it has a microphone for listening for voice commands and a speaker to respond and to ask for help if it gets stuck.
Cleaning
I've always been skeptical of robot vacuums, but I was impressed with the X8 Pro Omni. It has serious suction power (Ecovacs says 18,000 Pa) that was able to clean up cat hair and everything else on my floors, and running it regularly kept my floors a lot cleaner than my typical weekly vacuuming. The suction power is adjustable, and higher suction is noisier, but I mostly used it in the higher mode to get everything off of my floors.
I'm able to work in the room with the X8 Pro Omni running even at its highest suction, but I probably wouldn't take a phone call. It's the loudest when vacuuming, and is usually between 50 and 60 decibels with the standard mode. The mopping is quieter, and emptying the dust is the loudest operation.
There's a little spinning brush on the side that's meant to get around the edges of a room, and in the weeks that I've been using the vacuum, it's done a good job getting into nooks and crannies. There's also a mopping feature, and the mop that Ecovacs included is something special. It's a roller mop rather than the spinning mop that other robot vacuums have, and I think it cleans stains like dried cat food better than my other vacuum that has spinning mops.
With two passes, it was able to get most of the little bits of dried food off of my floor. I even tested it with dried ketchup that I put on the floor, and while it didn't get everything off in one go, it got close. The idea with robot vacuums is to have them clean daily or several times a week, and the X8 Pro Omni was able to keep my floor spotless with a schedule.
The Ozmo Roller, as Ecovacs calls it, is cleaned off with a water nozzle as the vacuum mops the floor, so dirty water is scraped off and clean water is reapplied. I like that concept better than a robot vacuum dragging dirty water along the floor, and it did seem to be effective. I don't wear shoes in the house and my floors are relatively clean, but the waste water was always dirty, so grime was coming up with every cycle. The X8 Pro Omni can clean the floor with just water, but it does accept cleaning solution that you can put in the base to fill the vacuum. Ecovacs recommends using its own cleaning solution to avoid damaging the vacuum.
I have wood floors, and I am careful with them. The X8 Pro Omni has not done any damage, but I do check the wheels and the mop to make sure nothing gets lodged there. The wheels are rubber and the mop is soft, so it doesn't seem like there's anything that would cause an issue.
I don't want to go on forever about the cleaning capabilities of the robot, so I'll wrap up by saying it did a great job, but there are a few caveats with navigation and obstacle avoidance.
The X8 Pro Omni needs to be able to get to the floor, and it will have a hard time in rooms with a lot of furniture or items on the floor. I have to do a pass before I have it clean to move cat toys and whatever else I might have on the floor. While cleaning, the robot will empty its dust bin on its own, wash its mop, and recharge, so you just hit the start button and it goes about its chore on its own.
It does require my attention with rugs, because it can't handle them. I have some thin area rugs that I don't have any kind of rubber padding under, and the X8 Pro Omni cannot deal with these. It routinely sucks up the tassels on one of my rugs and gets itself tangled up, and getting up to fix it every two minutes when it's doing that section of the room is frustrating.
It does better with the thicker rugs I have in the bathroom that do have a sturdier backing, and it can navigate and vacuum those with fewer issues. I have one large area rug that isn't a problem, and it does fine, but that is the extent of the carpet in my house so I haven't been able to test carpet suction beyond my rugs.
For context, it takes two hours for it to deep clean a 600 sq ft room, of which it can access about 400 sq ft (because of furniture). A standard clean is closer to an hour. I've locked it in my office for this review, but were it to clean my whole house, it would take several hours and would likely need to recharge. The two hour deep clea... Click here to read rest of article
Article Link: Review: Ecovacs' X8 Pro Omni Robot Now Works With HomeKit
