Review: ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo – a brilliant hands-on and truly autonomous cleaning system that does it all

The ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 lineup is one of the more high-end, powerful, and intelligent systems out there in the robotic vacuum world. While the base models have been out in the wild for some time now, ECOVACS is officially launching the new ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo today – an enhanced version of the DEEBOT X2 system complete with a larger docking station to accomodate the add-on hand vacuum system. I have had a chance to give it all a try around my place for the last couple weeks, and you’ll find my impressions and thoughts on the just about perfect cleaning experience below.

ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo review

For those unfamiliar here, let’s quickly go over the main feature set and aspects of the system. The ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo package consists of the robotic vacuum and mop that makes its way around your place as well as the separate hand vacuum and an updated Omni docking station that houses it all. The dock automatically charges the bot as well auto empties its dust bin, cleans its mop pads, and refills its water tank – there’s both a clean water tank and a dirty water tank hidden with the top compartment of the Omni station.

The DEEBOT X2 vacuum/mop robot also comes complete with an onboard camera and talk-back system to double down as a security bot of sorts – you can set it on patrol through your space, view the camera feed remotely, and even drive the unit around manually from your phone.

The next part of the system is the companion app, this is where you can customize the cleaning experience, view/edit the map of your space and set schedules, as well as access controls to drive the bot manually, the camera feed, stored videos and still frames, and engage talk back, among other things.

• ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo $1,499 (Reg. $1,599)
• ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Omni $1,100 (Reg. $1,500)
• ECOVACS DEEBOT T10 Omni $500 (Reg. $1,100)
• ECOVACS DEEBOT X1 Omni $800 (Reg. $1,500+)

Specs/Features at a glance:

• Vacuum Power Adjustment – 8700Pa
• Dust Bin Capacity (ml) – 420
• Vacuum Components – Main Brush, Side Brush
• Carpet Detection – Yes
• Floating Main Brush – Yes
• Obstacle detection/avoidance system – RGBD
• Navigation Type – Semi Solid State LiDAR
• Cleaning Mode – Vacuum-Only/Mopping/Vacuum & Mop mode/Mop after Vacuum
• Size of Robot (φxH,mm) – 320x353x95
• Noise Value (dBA ) – 64.9
• Battery Specifications (Type, mAh) – 6400mAh
• Working Time (min) – 186
• Charging Time (H) – 5.5
• Rated Power of Robot (W) – 45
• Working Voltage of Robot (V) – 14.4

Room Mapping

The mapping tech, on this cleaner bot and others like it, is an important part of the process and feature set. It not only helps the robot’s accuracy and effectiveness, but also enables much of the smart functionality, be it the ability to ask YIKO – ECOVACS’ voice assistant – to vacuum and/or mop certain rooms, but also more complicated tasks like, vacuum under the bed, clean the ensuite bathroom, or to task the machine to go clean the kitchen floor and under the dining table after cooking and dinner. So it’s integral the system in place does its job, effectively and accurately mapping out your space. And the ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 setup does just this. 

After you have unpacked, setup, and plugged in the unit, engaged Bluetooth, and connected it to your Wi-Fi, you can simply task the machine to begin its mapping process. While obviously the amount of time that takes will vary depending on how large your space is, the robot unit simply makes it way around your space, into each room, effectively taking a look around, and creating a map of your space you can then access within the app. It managed to do this quite accurately on its first go in my testing, creating almost perfectly accurate wall layouts, hallways, door openings, and so on. The mapping process also includes furniture and things of that nature to accomodate accurate cleaning jobs and support specific cleaning tasks. 

During its auto mapping procedure, the system automatically added a bed asset in the right place and correctly labeled almost every room in my condo. You can manually add furniture pieces and label the rooms on the map (from a preset list of common room names) after the auto-generation process is complete, but ECOVACS already knew where the bed was, the couch and coffee table, and correctly labelled just about all of the rooms – kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. In fact the only reason I’m saying “just about all” of the rooms is because the system couldn’t have known I have repurposed what is clearly one of the bedrooms into an office space of sorts. 

As mentioned above, once the auto map generation is complete, you can dig in and edit it to create a completely 1:1 recreation of your space, adding everything from cabinetry and bookshelves to tables, chairs, pet supplies, and even floor mirrors and plants to the layout. This is also where you can help out the auto-generation by manually adding room dividers, combining spaces under a single label, and creating virtual boundaries – you can create rectangular boundaries and virtual walls to tell the vacuum to, say, never mop this space, never enter this space entirely, and so on. 

When it was all said and done, the mapping process was a fairly simple one. It did almost all of the work for me, and ended up being kind of fun in a way to simply drop down some of the details onto the map – it only took about 10 minutes. 

Cleaning experience

As for the actual effectiveness of the vacuum and mopping action, it’s hard to find much to complain about. Once the mapping job is done, this little robot cleaner does everything else on its own really. It has left my floors cleaner than any other robot vacuum I have used and really never misses a spot. It has a spinning brush on the bottom to ensure it gets in the corners and right up against the base boards, handles the hardwood, tiling, and area rugs with ease, and just generally does a great job. 

The only really issue it was having when it comes to vacuuming was with the very small area mats/rugs I have outside of the showers. They are sort of light and cheap, and a little fluffy and thick, made especially to deal with wet feet, and the robot does not like having to go over these. There is a super quick fix though, just create a small rectangular virtual boundary in the app, and problem solved – this is in fact a handy way to mitigate any of the issues the vacuum might have with your particular space and the things in it. 

There are some areas in my space, like say for example floor space in and around where my speakers rest, and a few small corners where the placement of the furniture won’t allow the DEEBOT to penetrate, but I can’t fault the unit for this, it’s simply just too large to squeeze into these small spaces – something any robot cleaner would struggle with. Perhaps we need a DEEBOT X2 mini, X2’s tiny little brother that finds his way into the little nooks and crannies many of us have in our spaces….DEEBOT X2 robot cleaner bot’s mini robot cleaner bot! Okay I’ll stop now. 

Mopping

The mopping action is effective and easy to use – fill the clean water tank, and it takes care of filling the cleaner bot and emptying the water in the dirty water tank periodically. It will even head back to the docking station in the middle of mopping jobs to empty the dirty water when needed and to get a refresh too.

You have to use ECOVACS cleaning solution, according to the instruction manual. I didn’t get any of that from the brand for this review, and I couldn’t test out the regular cleaning solution you’re not supposed to use in the review unit. While the water only option left the floors quite clean, I like a bit of diluted cleaning solution normally, so I’ll be giving the ECOVACS solution a try at some point, and almost certainly an extremely diluted run of basic cleaner a go anyway. Just something to keep in mind here.

Another small issue I had on the mopping side of things was getting it to recognize one of the area rugs in my office. It for some reason would not recognize this one carpet in the mapping process. While normally not a big deal, that, I would presume, is why it didn’t appear to lift the mopping pads in this area. But again, with the manual boundary setting, you can quickly create a virtual boundary around the problem area and simply ask the system to only vacuum within it.

Hands-free cleaning – “OK YIKO”

There’s no Siri or Google Assistant, only YIKO and Alexa. ECOVACS has its very own home virtual voice assistant and its name is YIKO. Some might have preferred to have the vacuum integrated with their smart home ecosystem of choice, and I might even have preferred some Siri integration, but YIKO works really good. In my testing, the system has been entirely responsive, understanding each of my commands with no issues or frustration. 

YIKO ties in with the auto mapping system detailed above – once the system has identified the various rooms and elements of your home, YIKO will understand just about all of it in my experience – very rarely did I need to repeat a command. The system knows where your bed, kitchen, dining table,  etc. and so does YIKO. This means you can simply say “OK YIKO…clean under the bed, or clean under the table,” and so on. Again, it works well and I haven’t had any big issues in my time with YIKO, but depending on how complicated your home and furniture layout is, the actual room by room furniture specific-cleaning can be a touch hit or miss – this is why the mapping process and its accuracy is so important. It, for some reason, will always clean under the bed when I ask it to, but in a few cases, when I asked it to clean the bedroom, it wouldn’t completely do every nook and cranny the way it does during a general home cleaning job.

Here’s a few more examples of commands at your disposal (there are a lot more than this too and most of them work with Alexa as well, but i do not use Alexa so I could not test out this side of things):

• “Start vacuuming under the sofa”
• “Vacuum around the shoe rack”
• “Go mop the floor around the living room sofa”
• “Mop the kitchen”
• “Start cleaning now”
• “Begin cleaning”
• “Clean my house”
• “Start quick mapping”
• “Make a new map”

COMBO – Hand vacuum add-on

Now let’s talk about the unit’s add-on hand vacuum – something only included with the DEEBOT X2 COMBO package. As you can see in the imagery. The Omni base station, not only includes all of the water tanks for the mopping, mop pad cleaning, vacuum bag for the auto-emptying action, and auto charging, but also dedicated compartments for the hand vacuum. It neatly holsters in the top of the unit – this not only stores the hand vacuum but also charges it back up – and there’s a nice pop-out storage compartment for the attachments (crevice tool, motorized brush add-on, and more). This setup is really good for me, it keeps everything neat and tidy, and it works exactly as intended. The actual hand vacuum unit, for those who care, also looks really nice, combining the hard black and charcoal treatments with a bright blue LED battery indicator, easy to use trigger, and sort of luxury-like shiny accents. It also automatically empties into the same dust bag as the robot vacuum.

While some might feel as though an extra hand vacuum is overkill and perhaps defeats the purpose of having such a high-end and intelligent robotic cleaner, I, for one, really appreciate the bonus cleaning action. It can be great for quick spot cleans, and for places a robotic vacuum of any sort just can’t deal with – I love using the hand vacuum for the top of my desk, and it really comes in handy for upholstery (couches, chairs, and more), as well as the stairs. But the latter of which highlights my only gripe on this part of the package. 

Update: ECOVACS has now made us aware that while the standard package does not ship with the extension wand for the hand vac (as detailed below), it does offer a COMPLETE package exclusive to Best Buy with the bonus attachments included.

ECOVACS doesn’t ship the DEEBOT X2 COMBO with the extension wand for the hand vacuum. I guess it’s not a huge deal, and you could argue having a full upright stick vacuum here really does defeat the purpose of having a robot vacuum, but you’d be wrong and it also seems like a relatively affordable inclusion for the brand. With an extension wand you can tackle the rest of your space, things like the stairs, vents, lighting fixtures, and up at higher elevations the robot will never get at. Including the extension wand in the package would really complete the setup here, and I wish it was in there. It’s not a huge added expense, but it’s one I feel customers shouldn’t have to make after spending this much for a robotic cleaning system. 

Onboard camera and talk-back

As a fun and arguably useful bonus to the intelligent cleaning action, the ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 is outfitted with an onboard camera and talk-back system. This effectively allows the robot unit to double as a home monitoring system. It delivers live video feeds to the app, you can choose to start recording the video at any time and save it to the app’s gallery, and you can even snap still frames as well. Your new cleaner meets home security robot can be set to go out on patrol with the push of a button on the app and leverage all of the aforementioned functionality while the little bot is roaming around your space. 

The onboard microphone setup means you can place a voice call to the robot from your phone whether it is docked in the station, on a cleaning job, or roaming around the home. It is really more like engaging two-way audio as opposed to a call where someone would need to pick up on the other end. 

I can’t personally think of a serious reason why this would be useful outside of creeping my wife out after I send the robot into her room unsuspectingly to talk to her, or maybe perhaps for folks who want to get the dog to stop doing something they shouldn’t be while you’re out. I have indeed been greeting friends coming over at the front door as a talking floor robot with eyes and a voice though – from within the camera app you can also manually navigate or drive the robot through your space, and it’s a total blast. I might want one of these even if it didn’t do the vacuum and mopping to be honest. 

ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo – Final Thoughts

While there were some small hiccups in the experience, this is indeed hands-down the best robotic cleaning system I have ever used. The more affordable options pale in comparison to the effectiveness and overall intelligence on display here. It leaves the floors sparkling clean without a spec of dust left behind anywhere it has vacuumed. DEEBOT X2 almost never haphazardly bumps into things in the space, dinging off walls and other obstacles in its path, it even navigates around some of the smaller items that might have been left on the floor for the most part. You’re going to want to make sure the floors are relatively void of anything you don’t want it to try and clean up just in case – I don’t have pet messes to test out here folks – but it for the most part does what it says. And with such a deep mapping system, with both automatic and manual customizations, it quickly becomes the most intelligent cleaner bot I have had the pleasure of testing out.

Buy the ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Combo

Subscribe to the 9to5Toys YouTube Channel for all of the latest videos, reviews, and more!