The Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid vacuum/mop is, prima facie, a clear upgrade over the Roomba 650 that raptly held my attention when I bought it five years ago. But while the Eufy might do a lot more for a great price, but you don’t really want a vacuum that just does more You want one that also does it all really well. Sometimes it flubs that up.
Physically slight, the Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid is nowhere near as buxom as my Roomba, standing slightly more than 2.75 inches at its tallest point, and spanning just over a foot in diameter. Like most vacuumbots, it is a circle. Beneath, it looks very similar to the robot it replaced, minus one beater brush, with a single side brush and two large wheels, and one swivel caster in the front. The dustbin pops out with an intuitive sliding catch, and the same catch lets it fall open when emptying its contents. Inside lies its HEPA filter, which is washable — commendable, Anker! The whole thing feels pretty sturdy, with most, if not all, wearable parts replaceable.
Fans of cable management will like the dock, which features a cavity in the back for winding up the excess slack, keeping visible only the amount of cable needed to place your robot where it needs to go. In addition to the basic dock, the G30 Hybrid comes with a waterproof pad that the robot fully rests on when it’s done with its basic mopping — more on that, later. It’s got some neat features, too, like mapping and returning to charge and, if it wasn’t done when it had to charge, going right back to the spot it was when it needed juice to finish the job. Neat!
Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid
What Is It?
Eufy's updated RoboVac. Now with a mop!
Price
$US370 ($480)
Like
It's quiet, methodical, and can mop if you need it to.
No Like
It has a tendency to scatter larger debris and then fail to come back and pick it up.
Control of the lil’ guy is tucked into the EufyHome app — Anker’s bespoke home control centre. Presented as a customisable widget on the app’s home screen, it gives you quick controls that get more granular as you expand the widget, ranging from simple play/pause to suction power control and charging. Tap on the widget, and you get a clean interface with a little cartoon version of your RoboVac cleaning or sitting on its charger, depending on its current status. Up top, there’s the name of your robot, current status, estimated square footage of the cleaning area, and the amount of time it has been working. The controls are at the bottom of the app, where you can, with a tap or three, initiate cleaning, pause it, adjust suction power, send it home, start spot cleaning, set up a cleaning schedule, and view its cleaning history.
Digging in, you’ll find four suction power options — Standard, Turbo, and Max, with a fancy BoostIQ mode that adjusts power based on need. The map icon gives you an Atari 2600-level layout of your home, filling out as the robot moves. Scheduling is pretty nice — each day has its own toggle and individual start time, and you can even set the robot’s suction power for each specific clean! This is some thoughtful design.
Back on the RoboVac home screen, the gear icon in the upper right corner gets you to the vacuum’s settings. Here, you can adjust the robot’s voice volume, set Do Not Disturb, and switch to manual control. There’s even a section that estimates how soon you’ll need to replace its parts. Of particular note is that there are detailed instructions, with pictures, on replacement of these parts. Obviously, Eufy will sell them to you, too. A multinational corporation’s gotta eat!
If you like, you can connect the RoboVac to a smart assistant. It’s compatible with Google Assistant and Alexa, and using either gives you basic voice commands, letting you start or stop cleaning, send the robot home, or get it to emit chimes so you can find it. I tested these commands, and they’re fine. Initial integration, however, was a little fraught. Connecting the eufyHome app ostensibly worked, but the Google Home wouldn’t acknowledge that I had connected the vacuum. After some troubleshooting, I ran out of time and gave up, only to find it working the next morning. Suc….cess?
That’s all well and good, but how about the actual, you know, cleaning? Well, I immediately noticed that I could barely hear the dang thing. It was a whisper of a dream, it was. I’m exaggerating, but it was very quiet; unlike the industrial metal show that is the Roomba 650. As it moved around the room, its S-shaped cleaning pattern was far more satisfying to watch than the chaos of random-pattern cleaners. However, it seemed to move to the edges of a room too soon, leaving bits of dirt in the middle of the floor that it never got around to going back for. This would turn out to be a pattern I would see over and over again. Also, though it climbed on all of my rugs pretty easily, it didn’t seem to pick much up from any but the low-pile runner in my hallway.
After doing a few normal cleans, I tested the G30 Hybrid on specific objects. I found that while it did well with just general dust, and other small objects like glass bits, it had trouble with scraps of paper, glass that was roughly dime-sized and up, twist ties, and bobby pins. After that, I spread out some sugar, flour, and rice — all regular thorns in the side of anyone trying to clean a kitchen floor.
It did not go well.
I mean, depending on your goals. If the aim is even distribution of powder, rice grains, and saccharine granules to coat your feet with when you walk through, the G30 Hybrid is a contender! But, for cleaning up these materials, you’ll still need to get out a broomstick, you primitive screwhead.
Finally, I wanted to see how a mid-range robot vacuum in 2020 fares against a basic Roomba from 2012. So, I devised a simple test: I created two rectangles out of magnet strips, a virtual wall, and rolled-up rugs, measuring to make sure they were as close to the same size as possible, then spread out whatever various dirt and detritus I could collect from outside, using a broom to attempt to evenly disperse everything. I set both robots approximately in the centre of their rectangle, then simultaneously started them.
Apart from the thrill of my brief tenure as King of the Crawling Circles, I was transfixed anew at their work, watching the Roomba zip around, jerking at every boundary and flitting off in a new, random direction, while the Eufy took a slower, more measured approach, and they occasionally met and politely separated, I imagine doing a little robotic curtsy. At a little more than 14 minutes, the Eufy declared its job done — it wasn’t. I reactivated it and watched it continue to ignore dirt in favour of meticulously combing the edges of this mundane Thunderdome, until I finally let the Roomba — which had long-since completed its task — take care of the remainder.
In the Eufy’s defence, it was a lot of junk to throw at it, and the dustbin, when I looked, was full, so it’s not really it’s fault. Even so, I was genuinely surprised that the Roomba did as well as it did by comparison.
The next test was ledge detection. For this, I placed it on a cardboard box about half a foot off the ground and watched it impotently rage against its invisible barriers for a few minutes, and I finally set it on solid ground once more for its final trial: mopping.
Let’s get this out of the way: mopping with the G30 Hybrid is not really intended to clean serious messes, so much as get the last dusty bits the normal vacuum job missed. The instruction booklet expressly forbids the use of cleaning solutions, advocating instead for plain water. This is placed into a water tank you clip onto the bottom of the dust bin, to which you attach either the washable mop pad or one of the replaceable ones included.
Once you’ve set it up to mop, you simply put it on the ground and press the start button. It uses no special mode for this; it simply snakes through the space, leaving behind a glossy, thin layer of moisture. I spilled random liquids of varying viscosity on the floor, and all were wiped away, but it didn’t make a dent in the bit of paint left by my daughter earlier in the day — not that I expected it to. The mopping consists strictly of dragging a wet pad across the floor, after all, with none of the agitation that would be needed to scrub harder-to-remove stains and encrusted dried liquid. In all, my floor looked better.
Testing out of the way, I decided to take a look at what reviews said about this robot’s predecessor, the RoboVac G30 Edge. Complaints mostly centered around mapping and wayfinding — the G30 would get lost a lot, get stuck cleaning one area obsessively, or not find its way back after cleaning. I saw all of this happen, but having owned a pretty dumb vacuum for going on 5 years, I’ve already identified most of the problem areas and taken steps to block them off, and I dared not let the vacuum go to any of the obstacle courses that are our bedrooms or office. Also, it only ever seemed unable to return home if I started it in another room, blowing up whatever map of my home it had stored. I can only speak to my own experience, but none of the complaints I read about manifested in any unsurprising ways.
In the end, the eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid seems to have its fans for a reason. It tips the bowl of inequity that contains those features you only get if dropping twice this much money on a fancy auto-broom seems reasonable to you, letting a couple of them spill over. Physically, it’s a sturdy machine, and I like the fact so many parts are replaceable. App control is easy and responsive, too. The mopping, however, seems like perhaps too little benefit for the hassle of setup and parts maintenance afterward. I reckon it’s nice to have, though, even if its apparent virtues may only exist in my imagination. Alas, it seemed to phone it in a bit in the one area you would expect, almost 2 decades into a world that has robotic vacuums, it wouldn’t: actually vacuuming. Every time I ran it, I found little bits on the floor afterward that the screaming banshee that is my Roomba would have gotten — after randomly ping-ponging around the room for 45 minutes.
I don’t think this is necessarily a failure of hardware — it generally picks up most things in its path — but those side brushes can sometimes kick things away rather than bring them in. Its reluctance to return to the middle of the room once it begins edge cleaning means any pieces flung away from it can remain forgotten, waiting for my barefoot to discover later. Ultimately it does an adequate job of cleaning and would be fine in a household where you can run it on a schedule without fear of it eating your kid’s toys.
With a clean, fairly robust app interface, extremely quiet operation, and easy maintenance, the Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid sits pretty comfortably at its price point of $US370 ($480) — a good value for those who keep things tidy enough to be cleaned on a schedule by a little geometric friend, when it releases later this month. Just remember — as with most, if not all robot vacuums, don’t expect wonders.
README
- The Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid is quiet, fast, and great at edges.
- But it sometimes flicks dirt around instead of picking it up.
- The mop is a nice idea, but kind of a goofy hassle.