New robovac user -- pleasantly surprised.
Initial one-week-in review. Will update if anything changes. The Eufy 15C is my first go-round with robovacs. I did quite a bit of research and wanted to strike a balance between functionality and budget. My goal was to cut out some sort of chore as much as possible in an effort to free up time, as our young family seems to have a schedule requiring only the most adept acrobatics to even have a slim hope of accommodating. We vacuum on a borderline constant basis due to pets in the house, children who like to destroy things and create messes, as well as me simply being allergic to nearly everything in existence. The Eufy works on a somewhat random pattern. When I fired the gizmo up at first I found myself sitting there simply watching it and feeling rather convinced it wouldn't be able to cover a whole room due to the random stab at directions it was taking. It ultimately covered all tracks and I found myself growing more "trusting" of it getting the job done. This was helped by me staging some crushed cheerios in different piles around the kitchen and letting it run unattended. When I returned a bit later, it was still doing laps and all of the cheerio piles were done. Fancy. We don't have many carpeted areas in the house (just the two upstairs bedrooms), but I let it run in those rooms unattended. When I returned the vacuum patterns were random and all over the place, but covered the entire span of the rooms. Given how much time had elapsed since I left the vacuum I didn't expect it to be done already -- it was still running but it was clear via the carpet patterns that it had hit every area during its pass. Good stuff. I was hesitant to go the "C" route with it being wifi-connected as (tin foil hat moment) I work in IT and question devices connecting to my wifi that arguably may not need to be. I found the app to be easy to set up and opted for a consistent schedule to kick things off. So far, so good. I've been keeping an eye on my DNS server logs as well and to date I haven't seen any suspicious behavior of the Eufy (truth be told I haven't seen any traffic at all outside of the initial login of my Eufy account), which was nice to see as I was expecting to firewall the thing into oblivion, but it seems to be largely unnecessary so far. Some other models I looked at were controlled exclusively by smart phones alone. This 15C comes with a remote on top of the smart phone capability. I find the remote is a nice added touch as there are times I have my phone elsewhere charging and I want to kick off a vacuum session outside of the scope of the set schedule, so it's nice being able to punch a button on the remote and let it rip. Another area this comes in handy is if someone is at my house watching my kids (in-laws for example) and a mess needs cleaned up. Whoops, owners not home, smart phones not home, thus no way to control it -- enter remote. They really should be standard on all robovacs as I consider it downright foolish to not include a simple remote, but it was nice seeing the Eufy came with it despite the smart phone capability being existent as well. Overall the thing does a good job and it's great not having to run the bigger vacuum on a constant basis. It runs on a schedule and does its job. It's much quieter than I expected. Not "run at 3 am" quiet for fear of waking up the kiddos, but still quieter than I expected. In terms of the actual vacuuming performance, I'd say it's pretty darn good. As I said we're running this on a daily basis. Now, please understand we're not running through the woods and tracking in an obscene amount of dirt intentionally, nor are we brushing shaggy pets prone to heavy shedding in the middle of the living room every hour, but I've made it a point to empty the dust bin from the Eufy at some point every day so it's ready to go for the next scheduled run. Every single time I empty it, it's nearly full. I have no idea where this thing is finding all this dirt, but it's a testament to the vacuuming capability of the unit itself. From now on it appears our former vacuum will be downgraded to be for steps only. Downsides? Eh, if anything, the need to empty the bin on a pretty consistent basis. It comes with the territory though as these devices are inherently smaller than the large canister vacuums. Nothing that can be done about that so it's difficult to really ding the robovac in this category, but it's something worth mentioning and be aware of. Beyond that I can't find any complaints to note. It does its job and does it well. P.S. - Having a robot vacuum may or may not instigate a cleaner house beyond the scope of simply vacuuming. We told our kids toys need to be cleaned up or the vacuum will "get their toys" in the morning (9 AM schedule) and it's prompted a pretty swift cleanup job every night before bed. It takes far less arguing than it did in the past, and that, I'm pretty okay with. :) Read more
