Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: Eufy’s top-of-the-range robot vacuum is still more affordable than most

Eufy has done an outstanding job of bringing the price of robot vacuum cleaners down to an affordable sub-£300 price without compromising too much on their usefulness. However, the RoboVac G30 Edge is Eufy’s top-of-the-range model, costing £340, is closer to the kind of price you might expect to pay for cleaners from more expensive brands. Is it worth breaking through the £300 price barrier and getting Eufy’s best? Let’s find out.

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Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: What do you get for the money?

As with most robot vacuums, the RoboVac looks like an oversized hockey puck, with a radius of 320mm. It stands 70mm high from the ground and doesn’t have any protruding sensors, so it’s capable of ducking under relatively low furniture to clean underneath.

It comes with a charging base station, which the RoboVac automatically returns to when it’s finished cleaning or needs charging, and it’s also supplied with four metres of magnetic tape, which you can stick to your floor to block off areas you don’t want the robot to clean.

Other accessories include a spare filter, a spare spinning corner/edging brush, a cleaning tool and a packet of cable ties to encourage you to tidy up any tangles of electrical wires that threaten to tangle up your robot vacuum.

Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: What’s it like to use?

The charging block plugs into a wall socket and needs to be left at the edge of the room. It needs plenty of space around it, so you can’t hide it away in a corner. The RoboVac G30 Edge is controlled through the EufyHome app, which is a universal mobile app for controlling all Eufy’s smart home devices. It’s a simple app compared with more expensive rivals but the plus side is that this makes the vacuum very easy to use.

Tap the app’s “Clean” button and the RoboVac sets off. It trundles away from its base, finds a space it can clean and gets on with it. The app also lets you control the suction level, so you could have it operating for longer over a larger area by reducing the power used. You can send it back to its station for a charge or set up a simple schedule.

There’s also a spot clean option, which sets off the device in a spiral motion to clean a specific area. You have to move the device to the area you want cleaning, which you can do with the remote control function in the app. This is hidden away in the app’s Settings, and lets you move the device forward, or rotate left and right to change direction.

It also integrates reasonably well with voice assistants, working with both Google Assistant and Alexa. It’s limited – all you can do is ask the robot to start and stop cleaning, to return to the charging station and to make a noise to help you locate it – but it works well enough.

As with most robot vacuums, the dust collection bin isn’t particularly big – only 0.6 litre in capacity – so you’ll need to empty it fairly regularly. Fortunately, this is easy enough to do and accessing the washable filter is straightforward as well.

Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: Is it good at finding its way around?

While more expensive robot vacuums use lasers and other technologies to map out the area to clean, the RoboVac G30 Edge is less precise. It still builds up a map but does it on the fly, every time it cleans. It does this by sensing its immediate surroundings using infrared and gently bumping into obstacles as it cleans.

This builds up a picture of the immovable objects around it, whether they’re walls or items of furniture. It cleans in regular back and forth patterns as it does this, cleaning empty spaces and remembering where it’s been and where it can’t get to.

Once it’s covered as much as it can of one area, it trundles off to find more spaces it hasn’t covered yet but where it hasn’t already been blocked by walls or other obstacles. Eufy calls this “Smart Dynamic Navigation” and it’s an improvement over the system used in previous models, such as the RoboVac 15C Max.

However, it isn’t as efficient as more expensive models, which build up a map of their environment using lasers or cameras and store this map to use on subsequent cleans. This means the RoboVac is slower, because it will struggle with the same tricky spaces every time you set it off, without remembering how it got in and out of them previously.

There’s also no way to set virtual no-go zones in the Eufy app, which is something you can do with more advanced rivals like the Neato Botvac D7 Connected. To stop the RoboVac visiting certain areas, you have to apply the supplied tape to the floor.

This is worth doing if you can’t tidy a particular knot of cables out of the way, as I did experience some problems with it getting tangled with cables lying on the floor. However, it did a good job of climbing from hard floor onto rugs and even doormats without getting beached.

Speed is middling. The G30 took 25 minutes to clean my modest 12m2 living room, with most of the time taken up with backing in and out of tricky corners, before announcing it had finished and heading back to its charging dock. Eufy claims the battery can keep the vacuum cleaning for up to 110 minutes between charges, which should be more than enough to cover one floor of a modest house.

Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: How well does it clean?

Eufy rates the suction on the RoboVac G30 Edge at 2,000Pa, which is as powerful as its robot vacuums get. This is the same suction power as the RoboVac 15C Max but is significantly more than the 1,500Pa suction of the RoboVac 30C.

I tested the G30 Edge using the standard Expert Reviews robot vacuum test of flour and rice, on both short pile carpet and hard floor. First impressions of the RoboVac’s spot-cleaning skills weren’t good, because the spinning brush at the front of the device catapulted rice over an extended area, rather than neatly gathering it into the vacuum’s innards. It was a bit of an optical illusion though: in fact, the RoboVac cleared 90% of the rice on hard floor and 92% on carpet, with most of what escaped on both counts simply being pushed outside the unit’s spot cleaning area.

Flour proved a tougher task, with the RoboVac’s suction unable to get into the carpet pile. It scooped up 74% of the flour on the hard floor but only 26% on carpet, leaving a significant residue behind. This lags a long way behind the best robot vacuum cleaners around, with the £800 Dyson 360 Heurist managing to pick up 98% of flour on carpet.

The other problem is that the spot cleaning mode isn’t quite as logical as it ought to be. The icon on the button that controls the process looks like it should start in the middle and work its way out, cleaning in an increasing spiral shape. However, in my experience, the centre of the cleaning area appeared to move as the RoboVac’s arcs got wider, sometimes moving away from the area I wanted cleaned.

As we’ve noted in reviews of other models in Eufy’s range of robots, the 145mm-wide suction area sits between the wheels, which means cleaning close to the edges of your room is left to a single rotary brush. This will flick some of the dirt from the edge of a room into the vacuum but you’re going to have to go around the edges with a handheld if you want a thorough clean.

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Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review: Should I buy it?

Eufy has added some significant navigation skills to the G30 Edge and they’re worth having. The G30 Edge isn’t as sophisticated at map building and learning about its environment as rival models like the Neato Botvac D7 Connected but the basic mapmaking displayed here is better than the trundle and bump navigation we’ve seen on Eufy’s cheaper models, such as the 15C.

The question is, is it worth the premium over Eufy’s cheaper machines? I think it falls between two stools. On the one hand it isn’t a big enough improvement to warrant a wholehearted recommendation over the cheaper 15C Max. On the other, it isn’t as powerful or clever enough to compete with more advanced models like the Neato Botvac D7 Connected or the pricier Dyson 360 Heurist.