An Effective Self-Cleaning Robot Vacuum and Mop – Review Geek

The new Deebot T20 Omni robot vacuum from Ecovacs is revolutionary in so many ways. It’s equipped with powerful 6000Pa suction, TrueDetect 3D technology to avoid obstacles when you don’t have time to straighten, and mopping pads that can self-clean with hot water and hot air drying. Even with all those features, it’s only $1099.99.

The latest Deebot T20 Omni vacuum from Ecovacs makes big promises, and it delivers on all of them! It avoided clutter on my floors like a pro, mopped my kitchen disgustingly well, and left me impressed with how much cat fur it sucked up. It was almost a perfect vacuum for me.

Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni robot vacuum retails for $1099.99, which is an absolute steal for all the features you get. It’s equipped with 6000 Pa suction power, two spinning mop pads that can lift up while vacuuming carpet, and a base station that washes the mop pads with hot 131-degree Fahrenheit water, and then hot air dries them. Then, there’s the highly-rated Ecovacs mobile app that gives you a ton of control over how your vacuum behaves.

I said this was almost a perfect vacuum for me, and that’s because my experience with it wasn’t effortlessly positive. Virtually every product can stand to improve in one way or another, including the Deebot T20 Omni. It got confused when I flipped it over after detangling the side brushes, and made my high-pile carpet slightly wet while I was experimenting with different cleaning modes.

That said, there are way more things I love about this vacuum than things that perturbed me. Almost every annoyance I had with the vacuum had an easy fix, like a quick remapping or a different cleaning mode. But enough with the vagueness—let’s get into the full review.

Unboxing: No Setup, and a Modern Look

Most of the robot vacuums I’ve tested in the past haven’t had much setup. Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni has practically none.

When you first open the box, you’re greeted by the handy Quick Start instructions to help you get started as fast as possible. I love that many robot vacuums seem to feature a large, easy-to-follow Quick Start guide because companies understand people want to start playing with their new toy right away.

Because everything comes mostly pre-assembled, you’ll receive a large and tall shipping box. The base station inside already has the bottom tray attached, which the vacuum uses to slide into its charging place. You lift out the base, take off the plastic covering, and remove any protective sticky tape.

The clean and dirty water tanks are already inside the base, though there is a piece of styrofoam between the two you need to remove. The first dust bag is already pre-installed for you as well. Then, you pull out the vacuum from its protective cloth covering and remove the accessories from their box.

Ecovacs recommends not attaching the mop pads just yet for the first quick mapping session and the first clean. So the only two accessories you need to attach at this point are the two side brushes, which are marked by color to ensure that they’re installed correctly.

Unfortunately, the Deebot T20 Omni doesn’t come with any extra dust bags or bonus accessories, which is never a given, but it’s pretty common with new robot vacuum purchases. I especially wish that Ecovacs had included a sample bottle of its proprietary cleaning solution, which is supposedly the only cleaning solution you should use in the water tank. One liter of the solution is $24.99, so it’d be nice if a tiny bottle was included so you could see if it’s worth the price.

Once everything was unboxed and unwrapped, I got to marvel at the unique white and silver design. Many robot vacuums come in one color—usually black or white—and I haven’t seen this white and silver combination before.

The silver top piece on the vacuum is held in place only by magnets and it comes off completely, making it easy to manually empty the dustbin if you want to. Then, the silver piece on the base lifts up to reveal the two water tanks. I don’t know that a robot vacuum will ever truly look stunning, but the Deebot T20 Omni’s design is clean and modern.

With the base station plugged into a wall and the rest of your components laid out in front of you, your hands-on setup process is complete. The majority of the setup process is done through the Ecovacs app (Android/iOS).

The App: So Much to Customize

To set up the Deebot T20 Omni vacuum in the Ecovacs app, you need your Wi-Fi password and some patience. It takes a few minutes to get everything connected, and then update the vacuum with the most recent firmware. There’s an easy QR code to scan underneath the silver top piece to quickly identify your correct vacuum.

Once my vacuum was paired to the app, I did a quick mapping of my home, minus a few rooms I didn’t feel like straightening. For the quick map, it’s recommended that your floors be free of clutter. However, when the vacuum is actually cleaning, it avoids obstacles in the room really well, even if it’s something small like a cat toy.

After I quick-mapped my home, I could see a basic outline of each room. The vacuum split some rooms into two or three smaller rooms, or combined a hallway and a room that I wanted to be separate, but this was all easy to fix. You can combine adjacent rooms, divide a room into more sections, and label rooms so you can easily say, “OK YIKO, clean the living room.” If you don’t want to use Ecovacs built-in voice assistant, you can use Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.

Once your home is mapped, there are four different cleaning modes to explore: Area, Auto, Furniture, and Custom. Area mode lets you select specific rooms to clean, Auto mode just lets the vacuum loose to clean your whole home, and Custom allows you to draw a customized square where you want the vacuum to go, starting with an 11.2 x 11.2 foot square. Furniture mode sends the vacuum through your home to identify your furniture and build a 3D map.

Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni also features a Housekeeper mode, which is designed to take some of the stress out of users customizing the app. Housekeeper mode can intelligently adjust cleaning parameters according to your specific home and cleaning preferences. It’ll learn where most of the home’s messes typically are and how often the home needs to be vacuumed to stay clean.

There are four different cleaning preferences for the vacuum and mop functions, including Vacuum-Only, Mop-Only, Vacuum & Mop, and Mop After Vacuum. You can tell the vacuum to clean once, or go over everything a second time to pull up extra dust, fur, and dirt. The vacuum has four suction power settings: Quiet, Standard, Strong, and Max+. When the Deebot T20 Omni goes from hard flooring to carpet, it’ll automatically switch to Max+ power unless you specify otherwise.

The app also shows you information about the cleaning station at any given time, like whether it’s cleaning the mop pads, emptying the dustbin, or hot air drying the mop pads. Right now, when the vacuum is washing the mop pads, it won’t let you do anything else in the app until the process is completed. There also wasn’t a way to cancel washing the mop pads, which was a bit frustrating when trying to learn how to use the vacuum. I think I wasted a lot of water cleaning the mop pads three or four times more than necessary.

You can set the mop pad wetness to be low, normal, or high, and the hot air drying time to two, three, or four hours. The cleaning efficiency can also be changed between standard, deep, and fast, depending on how intense of a clean you need.

You can even customize the order in which you want rooms cleaned by setting a cleaning sequence. Or, you can go a step further and set up daily routines, customizing the suction power for individual rooms and whether you want the vacuum to go over a room once or twice.

The app starts with square meters as the default measurement, but you can change this in the settings to square feet. When you view your cleaning log in the app’s settings, you can see all your past cleans with the time, square footage cleaned, and how long the clean took. The app also shows all of your vacuum’s accessories in the settings and an estimated length of time they have left before they need to be replaced.

An app’s available features mean nothing if they don’t properly communicate with the vacuum. Luckily, Ecovacs has both plentiful app features and a responsive robot vacuum with the Deebot T20 Omni.

Performance: Powerful Suction and Effective Mopping

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve vacuumed, which put the Deebot T20 Omni to the perfect test. I have long hair that sheds a lot, and I have two cats who shed quite a bit too. With three total brushes to capture the hair and 6000Pa suction power to pick up everything else, this robot vacuum picked up everything with ease. It took the vacuum almost 80 minutes to clean about 665 square feet.

During its first clean, I had to detangle the two side brushes and the middle roller brush twice. The detangling process took less than a minute each time, and it was much easier to remove the hair from these brushes than from any upright vacuum I’ve had in the past.

With most upright vacuums, there are screws preventing you from easily ripping the hair away from the middle roller. Most of the hair was captured by the two side brushes that look like little spiders, and it was super easy to remove the hair. Since this first clean, I only need to detangle the brushes once toward the end of the cleaning session.

My cats don’t shed nearly as much as long-haired cats, but they shed enough to make daily vacuuming a must. The Deebot T20 Omni handled their fur with ease, creating a little fluff ball inside the dustbin. Toward the end of the second or third cleaning spree I sent the vacuum on, I checked the dustbin, and there was a huge fluff ball inside. Still, there was plenty of room for extra dirt and debris.

When the vacuum quick-mapped the home and then performed its first clean in Auto mode, I straightened up the floor. I left the centers of each room free of clutter and shoved excess junk to the edges of the room. I was impressed by how well the Deebot T20 Omni navigated around the home and got as close as possible to walls, boxes, and other objects without touching them. The TrueDetect 3D technology and built-in sensors are truly top-notch.

I’ve previously tested Roborock’s S7 MaxV Plus and S5 Max, and though these are both excellent robot vacuums, they sort of map the area out by gently knocking into things. Robot vacuums are equipped with bumpers to minimize damage and help map areas, and Roborock utilizes this feature. With Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni vacuum, it seemed to rely more on its sensors and barely knocked into anything, even when moving towards it at a pretty high speed.

For the next few cleans, I didn’t worry about cleaning up shoes or cat toys in the middle of the room, and the TrueDetect 3D technology got a chance to shine again. This vacuum won’t push objects out of the way when they’re in its path. Instead, it’ll detect that it’s there and go around it.

I recently purchased these catnip crayon toys—which I’d highly recommend if your cat likes catnip—and all three of them were scattered across the living room floor. I forgot about the toys while I let the vacuum loose in Auto mode, but when I walked through the living room later, I saw the toys in relatively the same places they were in and the floors around them vacuumed.

The Deebot T20 Omni impressed me with its mopping skills as well. This vacuum is equipped with an OZMO Turbo 2.0 pressurized spinning mopping system. There are two mop pads that spin 180 times per minute, rather than a stationary mop pad that simply drags behind the vacuum. The base station wets the mop pads for you with hot water, and then washes and dries them after the job is done.

As you can see from the pictures below, it did a disgustingly good job of mopping my kitchen and laundry room. The mop pad wetness was set to Normal, and I had the vacuum set to Vacuum & Mop. It took 11 minutes to vacuum and mop 129 square feet. After mopping, I had the hot air drying time set to two hours, and the mop pads were completely dry after two hours had passed.

There’s a raised transition strip where the flooring switched from the linoleum in the laundry room to the carpet in the front room. Even though the mop pads stopped spinning instantly when the vacuum detected carpet, it still brushed them a little bit with the wet pads. The carpet was damp to the touch right after it happened, but in less than a few minutes, the carpet was completely dry.

The vacuum uses an ultrasonic sensor to automatically lift the mop pads up to 9 millimeters, which Ecovac boasts is the highest lift of any robot vacuum cleaner. In the manual, it’s not recommended to use the vacuum with high-pile carpet, which I think is what my carpet would classify as. If you have low-pile carpet or only have non-plush rugs in your home, the Deebot T20 Omni is almost flawless.

Despite it not being recommended for my carpet, I did try to use the vacuum in Vacuum & Mop mode throughout the entire home. It left a damp path on its way from one room into another that dried within a minute or two, so I stopped the clean and returned it to the base.

If you have high-pile carpet like me, this vacuum could still work for you. I tried out Mop After Vacuum mode and had much better results. In Vacuum & Mop mode, the vacuum wets its mop pads first so it can vacuum and mop simultaneously in the necessary rooms. In Mop After Vacuum mode, the vacuum leaves its base to go vacuum the whole house and then returns to the base to wet its mop pads. So I only had to deal with slightly damp carpet for a few minutes at the transition from linoleum to carpet.

The only negative thing I have to add regarding performance is minor. During a clean, I flipped the vacuum over to detangle the two side brushes, and when I flipped it back over, I couldn’t remember which direction it had been facing. The vacuum wasn’t able to remember where it was, and it thought it was in a different place on the map and started forming walls in the middle of previously mapped rooms.

It even struggled to find its base station again, and it took a few minutes to finally figure it out. I ended up redoing a quick mapping session, which only took about 10 to 15 minutes. To be fair, I think this is a common problem among robot vacuums because no matter how smart they are, they’re not sentient and can still get confused if you pick them up and put them down in another spot.

Plus, this is something that could be improved with firmware updates. As technology improves, the robot could get better at determining its current location based on cameras, sensors, and so on.

Maintenance: You Don’t Need to Do Much

Thankfully, there’s not much maintenance for the user with Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni! The vacuum does a lot of regular maintenance tasks for you, and Ecovacs even estimates that you could go months without needing to touch the dust bag.

From the manual, there are maintenance recommendations from Ecovacs for the vacuum, cleaning base, and accessories. These are general recommendations, so depending on how many pets or people are living in your home, you might find that you need to perform certain tasks more or less often than what the company recommends.

You’ll never need to regularly maintain the washable mopping pads because the base cleaning station does it for you. However, it’s recommended to replace them every one to two months. Then, the dust bag only needs to be replaced when the robot’s voice prompts you to, but there’s no guess on how frequently you’ll need to do this because needs vary.

The dual-sided brushes should be maintained once every two weeks, and the floating rubber brush once every week. If anyone in your home has long hair, you might need to maintain these brushes more frequently. The vacuum tells you when the brushes are tangled and can’t spin anymore.

There’s an included brush tool that has a slanted blade on one end to help you get under and cut through any that’s caught in the brushes. It’s recommended to replace the dual-sided brushes every three to six months, and the floating rubber brush every six months to a year.

Though the dustbin never needs to be replaced, the filter for the dustbin should be replaced every three to six weeks. The filter can be maintained once per week by popping it out, rinsing it gently with water, and letting it fully air dry before putting it back.

The dirty water tank should be emptied after each mopping, but how often you’ll need to fill the clean water tank depends on how much of your home needs to be mopped and how wet you set the mop pads to be in the app. You should clean the clean water tank at least once every three months. Neither tank should need to be replaced.

The cleaning sink is where the robot vacuum parks itself and places the two mop pads. When the mop pads are automatically washed, a slight amount of water fills the cleaning sink. You can manually add water to the cleaning sink—when the vacuum is safely out of the way—by pressing and holding the button on top of the base for 5 seconds.

Using the included brush, the cleaning sink should be scrubbed once every two weeks. To drain the water, you press and hold the same button on top of the base station. There are also filters in the clean water tank and the cleaning sink that can be removed, rinsed, dried, and replaced.

The dust collection cabin inside the robot vacuum should be maintained once per month to improve functionality, but it shouldn’t need to be replaced. Then, you should wipe down the base station once a month and wipe down the sensors, bumper, charging contacts, pins, wheels, and other external features once per week with a clean, dry cloth.

That might sound like a lot of maintenance, but in practice, it doesn’t feel like it. Most of the regular maintenance tasks that should be completed once every week or two take only 30 seconds or a few minutes. When you compare these quick maintenance tasks to an upright vacuum that you have to empty—sometimes multiple times—every time you vacuum, it’s not too intensive.

Plus, many people don’t carry out the maintenance recommendations for their upright vacuum. I’m not saying you should, but let’s be honest, remembering to maintain your vacuum gets lost in the millions of other things on your to-do list.

With Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni vacuum, you can at least comfortably forget about maintenance sometimes because the vacuum does so much of the important maintenance, like emptying the dustbin into the dust bag, washing the mop pads with hot water and drying them, and washing the cleaning sink. One dust bag can hold up to three liters worth of dirt and debris, which could last you over 60 days, depending on how much dust, fur, and dirt your home accumulates every day.

Verdict: Worth Every Penny, Especially If You Have Hard Floors and Low Carpets

The Deebot T20 Omni is easily one of my favorite robot vacuums I’ve tested so far. It nearly got a perfect score from me, but it wasn’t quite “absolute design nirvana” for me. However, all of the cons for this robot vacuum are so incredibly minor.

You can’t stop washing the mop pads mid-wash or do anything in the app while they’re washing, the time-saving Vacuum & Mop mode won’t work if you have high-pile carpets, and I experienced a slight mishap where my Deebot T20 Omni forgot where it was after I detangled the side brushes and flipped it over mid-clean.

Other than these three minor grievances, my time with Ecovacs’ Deebot T20 Omni has been excellent. And at $1099.99, this is a full-featured robot vacuum/mop combo that’s a relatively affordable option among its competitors. I’d highly recommend it!