Deebot X5 Pro Omni: so good it’s practically human

It’s no secret that I love to get creative in the kitchen. A less well-known fact is that I am a 100 per cent messy cook. Last night, I made a batch of fresh pasta with a pork fennel thyme ragout. It was delicious. Unfortunately, the kitchen looked like a small nuclear war had been waged.

While I clean it up, the one part of housework I despise is pulling a vacuum cleaner around behind me. Thankfully, at Cassa Pilch, this is a non-issue as a particularly clever robot does all the work for me.

Using a robot to do the hoovering might not be anything new as I’ve reviewed a metric shit-tonne of them in the past, but this one works where it counts. And it cleans almost as well as a human, which is huge news.

Over the years, none of the robots I’ve reviewed have managed to do as good a job as I could do manually when it came to vacuuming, until now. The Deebot X5 Pro Omni has a nifty trick that sees whichever mop is closest to the kickboard being popped outward on a robotic arm to deliver edge-to-edge mopping. This handily means that I don’t need to chase around afterwards with a vacuum cleaner or mop and do a manual tidy-up. Brilliant!

Design-wise, the Deebot X5 Pro Omni has a rounded back end, but in a break from the traditional round design, it has a square front and sides. This gives it the same shape as most walls so that it can get into the edges better. Its base station also resembles the unit supplied with the earlier Deebot X1 Omni, in that it’s a knee-high silver-on-black base which has a bin for the X5 to empty into. It also has a tank of clean water to replenish its mops and a dirty water tank for wastewater from the mops’ hot wash and dry whenever it goes back to base.

AI plays a big role with the X5, and to this end, I did what few other reviewers have done: I gave it time to learn our house before reviewing. I let it have a crack at vacuuming and mopping several times a day for a week. While its first few attempts were average, its machine learning soon figured out the quirks of our home. With each run, it improved, reaching the point where its cleaning was comparable to what I’d normally get done manually. All I had to do was tell Yiko, its built-in smart assistant, which room I wanted to be cleaned by saying, “Okay, Yiko, clean the dungeon,” and it’d trundle off and get busy.

The baked-in AI system is much more precise in terms of room coverage, and unlike earlier models, it did a solid job of getting into most corners. Better still, the number of tangles with the tassels of the many Turkish rugs scattered about our home (or socks and other bits that found their way onto the floor) was vanishingly small. All told, the Deebot X5 pro Omni is a lot smarter than earlier robo-vacs I’ve previously tested.

While the Yiko assistant has improved markedly, I did bump into an issue with the X5 and the many Alexa units around my house. Using the Ecovacs Alexa skill, I used to be able to ask Alexa to get particular rooms cleaned, get the status of the robot (or its base station), and so on. This time around, Alexa refuses to play nice. After saying, “Alexa, ask Deebot to clean x room”, I get the standard reply, “Your Deebot is now cleaning”, but it isn’t. Instead, it stubbornly stays put in its base station. Here’s hoping one of the many software updates issued by Ecovacs resolves this glitch.

Ecovacs has tweaked the cleaning settings available in its app. I was particularly impressed with the “Instant Remop” feature. Once the Deebot X5 Pro Omni had given the wooden Rimu floors a good mopping, it went back to check its work and gave some spots another scrub if it detected any dirt it’d missed. Unlike many competing robo mop brands, Ecovacs has gone to considerable lengths to allow users to customise how the X5 cleans.

The Deebot X5 Pro Omni can also lift its mop pads when approaching a rug or carpeted area. This allows it to vacuum (the strength of the vacuuming is selectable in the app) without the mops damping the carpet/rugs. In one room, we have an extremely expensive heirloom Iranian silk rug, and the Deebot X5 Pro Omi vacuuming left it looking pristine and, most crucially, dry. The other cool feature is a built-in camera. When I am out, I can patrol my home with the X5 and get a live HD video feed of each room by remotely driving the X5 around.

Our house is a large old Victorian villa. Its size means that most robo vacs ran out of charge long before they’d cleaned all its rooms. The Deebot X5 Pro Omni covered two-thirds of our home before running low on juice. This is no problem as it keeps enough charge to trundle back to its base station and recharge, picking up where it left off once fully recharged. How clever is that?

If by now you’re thinking I’m impressed with the Deebot X5 Pro Omni, you’d be right. It is the first robot vacuum cleaner I’ve used that comes close to achieving a human level of cleaning. Best of all, there’s no effort required on my part, and my inner lazy bastard fully approves. Simply put, there’s nothing quite like going for broke in the kitchen, knowing I don’t have to clean up the mess afterwards. (The mess on the floor, at least). It might cost, but being able to send in a robot to clean, knowing that it’ll do a near-human level job, is priceless.

https://www.ecovacs.com/nz/deebot-robotic-vacuum-cleaner/deebot-x5-pro-omni