Review: Eufy X9 Pro

I've been testing a lot of multimodal cleaning bots lately. They’re very expensive and very imposing. They also tend to be very fast and accurate, with long battery life, great software, and huge docking stations, complete with clean and dirty water tanks to wash the mops.

I love mopping robots more than I believed possible. If you’re a parent with small children and pets, you need one. On a recent Thursday, I mopped my kitchen three times in as many hours: Once while everyone was out of the house, again after I unwisely declared that tonight was Breakfast for Dinner and my 6-year-old spilled syrup all over the kitchen floor, and again after my husband made us celebratory cocktails post–Breakfast for Dinner and spilled Campari all over the floor. (It's hereditary, apparently.) If you don’t want mopping to rule your life, a robot is life-saving.

This one, however, has two Achilles’ heels: The giant docking station has no self-emptying bin, and you can’t use it on medium- or high-pile carpeting. If you have carpet that’s not just short, heavy, dense, office-building material, the robot just can’t lift the mop high enough to get over it properly. If your floor isn’t mostly hard, I would recommend a different bot, like the Shark AI Ultra (8/10, WIRED Recommends) or TP-Link Tapo RV 10 Plus, where you switch the mopping base on and off.

Photograph: Eufy

The X9 Pro (I named it Bun Bun in the app) has a docking station that’s about 17 inches high and 16 inches wide. Bun Bun is 4.5 inches high, which isn't slim, but it's short enough to fit under our couches. The docking station doesn’t have a self-emptying bin, but it does have two enormous water tanks inside, one for clean water, and one for dirty.

I have to warn you: You will forget that you have a dirty water tank in there. You need to take it out and rinse it and let it dry every other day or so. Otherwise, it will smell. The smell will be awful.

OK, carrying on. I ran quick mapping in the app, and Bun Bun used a combination of laser navigation and an AI camera to create a map of my house, with obstacle avoidance, within a few minutes. Like the Deebot X1 Omni, it meets the TÜV Rheinland privacy and security certification; TÜV certifies devices to meet the specifications of ETSI TS 303 645, which is a prominent internet-of-things security standard.

I’m less concerned about the X9 Pro than I was about the Deebot, because the X9 doesn’t have an upward-facing camera. Eufy also assures customers that the images aren’t saved or uploaded anywhere, but the company’s track record is a bit spotty, and Eufy doesn’t offer basic protections like two-factor authentication—just another thing to consider when purchasing cameras that live in your house.

Bun Bun has 5,500 Pa of suction—more than twice the suction of some robots I’ve tested. Bun Bun sucked up full-size pencils and paintbrushes into the roller before I rescued them. The bin has a relatively small capacity, however, and there’s no self-emptying capability. If you have a large house, you will need to empty the bin by hand multiple times during one clean or else find little dust balls on the side when it has run out of room.

Bun Bun also has all the normal smart robot things. You can save multiple maps for multiple floors, set cleaning schedules, or use manual controls in the app. It has the usual compatibility with Google Assistant and Alexa, and there is also a pretty cool and necessary child-lock feature where, if it’s running, the buttons on the robot are locked. I found a neighbor kid hitting poor Bun Bun with a stick when he sneaked into our house while we were out in the yard, so a child lock came in pretty handy there.

Photograph: Eufy

The mopping is awesome. Once you start a mopping session, Bun Bun takes several minutes to wash the mops. Then it trundles off to the cleaning area, where it applies about 2 pounds of downward pressure with two mops that each rotate at 180 rpm. You can toggle on auto-mop washing or change the mop washing frequency. Even with a mop washing frequency of every 10 minutes, it still took Bun Bun only 30 minutes to mop the 258 square feet that included my kitchen, laundry room, and bathroom.

It never got stuck or trapped itself behind a door. When I ran it over the floor where my son had spilled—I swear to God—at least a half-bottle of maple syrup, I walked back and forth over it in pure disbelief. It was clean. My feet didn't stick! Amazing.

Once Bun Bun has finished a cleaning session, it trundles back to the station where the mops are dried with 104-degree-Fahrenheit air over the course of hours to prevent bacteria and odors from forming. I’ve used Bun Bun for two weeks, and while I do detect a hint of odor in the mopping pads, it’s nowhere near as strong as the odor in the dirty water tank (I’m sorry).

The only problem is when it comes to cleaning the rest of my house. Bun Bun can lift the mop up to 12 millimeters to clear the carpet. That’s 0.47 inches, which is, unfortunately, the depth of my carpet—the pile is 0.5 inches long. I never considered my carpet to be particularly lush until now. It’s just a normal carpet that isn’t office flooring.

If you, too, have normal and not-office carpeting, you have a couple of options. For example, you can set your carpet cleaning mode in the app to wash and dry your carpet, just as you would mop a hardwood floor. You can also take off the mopping pads manually, although the Velcro surface will also attract schmutz. I ended up toggling on a routine where I set Bun Bun to vacuum only the whole house, which took about 90 minutes to clean 800 square feet, and then an additional job of mopping the hardwood and tiled floors, which took another 30 minutes.

Bun Bun had enough battery power to do both, although it cut the power capacity awfully close. Still, I was mildly grossed out by Bun Bun dragging the mop over the carpet to the docking station when it switched over from vacuuming to mopping. I felt the carpet every time Bun Bun finished mopping, and it was perceptibly damp. It's just a little hard to ignore.

As with the Tapo RV 10 Plus, there is a very specific use case in which the Eufy X9 Pro would be indispensable. After all, carpet sales have been declining in the United States since the turn of the millennium. I'm beginning to wonder whether the problem isn't with any particular vacuum manufacturer but rather with a family home being carpeted, against trends and all common sense. However, since it is billed as a cleaning robot for all surfaces, I have to say that that isn't strictly accurate. If you're looking for a vacuum instead of a mop, you have a few other options.