Review: Ecovacs Deebot M81 Pro

For the first week that I ran the Ecovacs Deebot M81 Pro, I kept finding it knocked off its base, its battery uncharged. It was aggravating, and mystifying. What could be happening? I’ve been testing robot vacuums for months by plugging them into this one location.

After a day of observation, I figured out the problem. My eight-month-old son was crawling over to the botvac, and turning it on and off by slapping the glowing blue button. While every other robot vacuum made him wail in fear, this one was unobtrusive and approachable.

Finally, a robot vacuum I can operate while the kids are awake! Success!

With robot vacuums, you get what you pay for. More expensive models have powerful suction, smarter mapping capabilities, and navigational abilities—but not everyone can pay almost a grand for a household appliance.

With the Deebot M81 Pro, Ecovacs makes a series of acceptable compromises. The suction isn’t as powerful as a more expensive botvac, but it’s quieter. I measured it at around 60 dB. For some reason, neither my dogs nor my children seemed as bothered by it as by other robot vacuums.

In my cleaning tests, the Deebot M81 Pro took longer to clean the 500 square feet of infant, toddler, and double dog-haired mess I call my house. More expensive vacuums can be counted on to clean the same space in about an hour, but it took the Deebot two. It took two hours to charge the vacuum, and then two hours to run down the battery until it had to return to the charging base.

But—my house was left relatively clean. The floor didn’t look as spotless as if I’d run the push vac—fragments remained under cabinets and around table legs. But the more obvious trails of dirt and sand by the front door, and crumbs underneath the kitchen table, were gone. It did its job with nary a navigational snag, either, although it was stumped by wire chair legs.

You can operate the Deebot either with the included remote, which lets you set timers, schedules, or different cleaning modes like spot cleaning, edge cleaning, and intense cleaning. You also use the remote to connect it to your home Wi-Fi—just hit the network setup button, then select the botvac on Ecovacs’ companion app. I found this procedure significantly easier to figure out than with competing Wi-Fi enabled vacuums. However, the app can’t replace the remote, as--weirdly--it doesn’t have a home button to return the botvac to its base. But it does have the same manual directional controls, and you can also check your battery’s status.

The Deebot also has an optional wet mop mode that might be more trouble than it’s worth, but more on that later.

Clearing the floor was annoying. Unlike the Neato or Roomba botvacs, Ecovacs does not provide you with any kind of physical or infrared barrier to cordon off problem areas. As with every house, we have rat nests of cords in certain corners, and my rolled-up-towel-walls didn't keep the Deebot M81 Pro at bay.

The wet mop was an interesting addition, but not necessary. It’s an optional attachment that you click onto the bottom of the vac. You fill a reservoir with a minute (about 80 milliliters) amount of water, stick on the optional cleaning mop, and select Auto mode. But, sadly, the botvac can't distinguish between hard floors and carpet, so open kitchens are a no-go. You also have to wait a little while for the water to drain from the reservoir and into the cleaning cloth.

I used the Deebot’s manual control to clean up a trail of dried milk barf (sorry, childless folk) that my son left on the hardwood floor in the hall. I filled the reservoir, clicked it onto the bottom of the vac, and used the manual control to direct it back and forth over the dried milk.

It was fun and easy, but as I stood there, steering it back and forth, I wondered if it might’ve just been easier to grab a wet Swiffer instead. By the eight or ninth pass, with traces of vomit still present, I gave up. You should probably reserve the mop mode for light maintenance cleaning in a small, enclosed area, like a bathroom. Otherwise, it's not an efficient use of your time.

I couldn’t make out that much of a difference between the Auto and Intensive cleaning modes; Intensive was only a few decibels louder, and it ran down the battery faster to no noticeable effect. And unlike the Neato or the Roomba models, the Deebot didn’t alert me when the bin was full, only when something got stuck. And then there was the roller brush—between me and my long-haired daughter, it regularly wound ropes of hair that were so thick that I’d have to cut them off with a pocketknife. I made it a habit to check the brush whenever I emptied the dustbin.

The Deebot doesn’t have many of the features of more expensive vacuums that I’ve come to know and love. Its random “go in a straight line until you bounce off something at an angle” method of cleaning seems haphazard once you’ve seen the methodical navigation style of a Neato or a Roomba. I also didn’t see the level of clean that you might expect with a midrange vacuum from the Neato or Roomba line.

But—and here’s the thing—it’s cheaper, and not by an insignificant amount. If you live in a space with both carpeted and hard surfaces, and you want to buy a robot vacuum and pay off your mortgage this month (who are you, Bill Gates?), the Ecovacs Deebot M81 Pro is a great option.

Even if it doesn’t provide as deep a clean, it’s more convenient to run it more often. You don’t have to wait until your children or dogs are asleep or otherwise occupied. It also won’t pester you for attention like many other robot vacuums—even when it probably should, like when a rope of hair has started to disguise itself as part of the cleaning brush.

And isn’t that all anyone who needs a robot vacuum wants? A little more time to be left alone? That’s well worth three hundred bucks.