I hate mopping, but I hate mopping robots more. And I especially hate robot vacuum-mop combos. During my years reviewing robot vacuums, I can’t count how many times I've had to unhook a minuscule water bin off the bottom of a robot, fill it with a thimbleful of water, and watch it laboriously drag a barely moist towel across my kitchen floor. It never seemed worth the effort when you just could grab a Swiffer.
That was until I installed the Deebot X1 Omni from Ecovacs. My 7-year-old had just shaken sugar off her toast all over the kitchen floor, so once she was off to school, I moved some chairs out of the way and plugged the mopping attachments onto the X1 Omni's bottom.
I summoned my bot with the command “OK Yiko,” and there was a massive rumble as it stirred. The mopping attachments rinsed themselves in a pool of clean water at the base of the machine before it trundled off. In 15 minutes, it covered my entire 200 square-foot kitchen floor, scrubbing furiously all the way. It never moved off the hardwood onto the carpet. (It did make a tentative pass into the open laundry room door, but only once.) Once it returned to base, the cleaning station used hot air to dry the little mops. After my floor dried, I took off my socks and walked hesitantly around. No sugar grains remained. The floor wasn’t even sticky. I finally found a mopping vacuum that can do its job.
Much to my surprise, I found the X1 Omni to be much more useful as a mop than as a robot vacuum.
A few years ago, I predicted that every robot vacuum would have its own cleaning station. The stations have arrived, and they keep getting taller. The X1 Omni’s tower stands almost 2 feet high, 17 inches wide, and 17 inches deep. We have a 2,000-square-foot downstairs, and the only place I could find to put it was directly in the center of my house, in the kitchen next to the trash can.
The vacuum itself is a pretty standard 4 inches tall, able to fit under the sofa with ease. It comes with two side brushes and two mopping attachments that you can easily detach and reattach. Inside the tower are two water bins, one for clean water and one for dirty mopping water, and space for a 3-liter disposable dust bag for the vacuum’s auto-empty function.
You'll need the auto-empty function, because the dustbin in the body of the vacuum is a relatively small 0.4 liters. (Most robot vacuums I've tried have 0.6-liter capacity or more.) Instead, the X1 Omni’s body houses Ecovacs’ (possibly overbuilt, but more on that later) camera, microphone, and navigation system.
Ecovacs’ proprietary navigation system is called TrueMapping, which combines two navigation techniques. AIVI, Ecovacs’ AI-powered camera vision system, identifies common household objects. TrueDetect 2.0 uses laser scanning to create a 3D map of your house.
It also has an onboard speaker so you can talk to your family from your robot vacuum. Yes, you read that right. And rather than tackling the complicated matter (pun intended) of integrating with third-party smart speakers, the X1 Omni has its own voice assistant named Yiko. Ecovacs also offers the X1 Plus, which has an auto-empty station but no cleaning station.
The Deebot surprised me a lot, but the first shock came when I initiated Quick Mapping. With nearly every robot vacuum, accurately mapping the cleaning area takes awhile. It’s usually three to five cleans, or a week where you have to stay home while it's cleaning to pick everything off the floor and be on hand to maneuver the robot around unforeseen obstacles.