(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
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BERLIN—The Ecovacs Deebot X11 Pro Omni is a robot vacuum and mop hybrid with the soul of a sport utility vehicle. Thanks to its four-wheel drive, it can navigate uneven flooring and climb thresholds as high as 1.6 inches. On display at IFA Berlin, the robot itself has a refined roller mop and powerful suction. The impressive base station quickly charges the robot's battery as it empties the dustbin into a bagless canister.
Ecovacs sent me a unit to test in my home for a full review, even before I spotted the Deebot X11 Pro Omni here on the IFA show floor. The vacuum itself looks similar to the Ecovacs' other flagships this year, the Deebot X8 and the Deebot X9. However, the base stands apart, with a giant canister in the middle of its body that clearly differentiates it from its rectangular predecessors.
The canister compacts and stores the debris the robot picks up, a departure from most other self-emptying robot vacuums, which use disposable dust bags. The base can also supposedly top off the robot's battery while it’s making a pit stop to drop off dirt and wash its mops. During my initial at-home testing, the base did seem to be keeping the robot pretty close to full charge throughout a run.
Thanks to its four-wheel drive, it successfully avoided getting stuck during these first runs and handled all of the thresholds in my home with ease. It efficiently mapped my home and effectively vacuumed up litter, pet hair, and other dirt without getting tangled or leaving any dust bunnies behind.
The base washes and dries the mop as expected for a high-end hybrid, but it has one other unique feature in the form of two separate containers for detergent, in addition to the usual clean and dirty water tanks. One detergent container holds the ordinary formula, and the other a special heavy-duty solution, both available separately from Ecovacs. I dislike the idea of needing to buy an extra bottle of cleanser, which goes against the canister’s purpose to reduce maintenance costs, but the idea of the robot autonomously switching between the two to tackle different types of stains is cool.
The Deebot X11 should be able to tackle heavy stains. It retains its predecessors' excellent self-refreshing roller mop design and supposedly has a higher density of bristles for an even better scrub. Based on my early test runs, it looks up to the task of powerful scrubbing, but I’ll need to confirm with more extensive, measured evaluations.
Ecovacs oddly hasn’t specified the X11's suction power, an unusual omission for the company, but it features the boosted large-airflow suction technology (BLAST) that helped the X9 do well in our suction power stress tests.
The Ecovacs Deebot X11 Pro Omni is available now, starting at $1,499.99 in the US. We’ll put it through our normal gauntlet of tests to see if it lives up to the other high-end models that the company has debuted this year, and see if it can unseat the X8 for the top spot in our list of the best robot vacuums.