Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: A stripped back vacuuming expert with a surprising drag and wipe mop

Eufy now has a plethora of robot vacuum cleaners in its range and the Eufy Clean X8 Pro sits at the affordable end of its recent X Pro series. It hits all the marks when it comes to vacuuming, including a compact self-emptying charging station that’s pleasingly compact.

However, it only offers the most basic mopping function, with a small reservoir at the rear that you can attach a cleaning cloth to. This lets the robot wipe the floor behind it as it vacuums. In our tests, mops with rotating pads tend to be more effective, with the cloth dragging method just being too light-touch to clean up our test messes effectively. Here, however, Eufy is promising 6N of pressure will be pushed onto our test stains, which could give it the edge over rival robot vacuums.

Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: What do you get for the money?

The Eufy Clean X8 Pro will set you back £549 and comes in two parts – the robot and its base station. The robot is a traditional puck-shaped affair, with a small turret on the top for it to fire out its rotating room-scanning LiDAR laser. It uses this to locate itself and create maps on the fly.

It has two 4,000Pa suction engines to vacuum up dirt, which operate in opposite directions, pulling dirt into the 335ml collection bin. Using two doesn’t double the suction, but Eufy claims it sucks in 80% more air and operates at around 1.8 times the suction power of a single 4,000Pa device, such as the Lefant M1.

Underneath there’s an innovation that we haven’t seen before, even on Eufy’s more expensive robots: a hair-clearing comb, built into the roller cavity. Every now and then the robot will self-clean its roller, which it does by putting the roller into reverse, so the comb can pull out hair that’s been wrapped around.

The results are good but not perfect. During my time with the robot it didn’t get rid of every tangle, particularly when it came to pet hair. However, in my hair-infested household most robots develop hair-clogged rollers within minutes of leaving their base stations. The tangles left on this robot weren’t so severe.

In contrast, the mopping function sticks to the absolute basics. It uses a detachable plastic plate with a cloth attached to it. This connects to a removable 270ml water tank that sits on the back of the robot at all times. When you want to mop, you fill the tank with water, attach the plate below it, and send it on its way.

What you don’t get here is any lifting mechanism to bring the mopping plate out of the way if it finds itself on carpet. Eufy’s advice here is to manually restrict the mopping function to hard floor by creating mop-friendly zones in the app. This is straightforward in rooms that have fully moppable floors, but not so easy in a room that has rugs and mats to mop around. You can set broad no-mop zones relatively easily in the app but getting them in exactly the right place is tricky.

The base station is small for a self-emptying model, standing at 19 x 15 x 38.2cm. It contains a 2.5l bag to capture the dust and dirt from the robot’s collection bin, emptying it each time the robot returns to the station. There’s nothing else to it, though, with no water tanks for the mop or cleaning area below.

It comes with a flimsy plastic tray that the robot can stand on when it docks, which protects the floor underneath. Don’t rely on this to protect your floor from the damp mop, though, as Eufy recommends removing the cloth as soon as you’ve finished mopping.

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Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: What is it like to use?

The Eufy Home app is used across all Eufy’s robot vacuum cleaners, including the Eufy Clean X8 Pro. The available features change depending on which robot is being controlled, but many of the base concepts are common to all and shared across the various devices.

That’s a good thing, because generally the app is robust, works well and comes with all the features you could want. Using it to set the robot up is simple and once it’s up and running it’s easy to control and use, even across multiple maps.

Maintenance is reasonably straight forward, too. Emptying the bin is handled automatically, so you’ll only need to change the bags at the station when they get full. The anti-tangle comb does a decent job of minimising roller maintenance, though it doesn’t eliminate it completely.

The biggest chore is looking after the mop. The tank that holds the water needs manually refilling, which is something you don’t have to do with the Eufy Clean X9 Pro and Ezviz RS2, as they have water tanks built in. Their base stations are significantly bulkier as a result, though. You’ll also need to remove the mop plate and give the cloth a wash when it’s done its work

Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: Is it good at finding its way around?

The navigation skills of the Eufy Clean X8 Pro are, on the whole, exceptional. The initial mapping run the robot needs to perform is fast and efficient, with the X8 managing to scan my entire 64m2 ground floor plan in four minutes. It doesn’t need to go into every corner for this, but because it scans the rooms with LiDAR as it passes through, you can configure no-go areas before the robot reaches them.

After that, you can break the floor plan down into rooms as you wish and the first proper cleaning run can commence. This is performed at a very reasonable pace of around 55 seconds per square metre.

I found the robot to be very respectful of furniture, largely approaching obstacles such as chair and table legs gently and working around them without too much impact. It even avoided hanging curtains, without needing to push into them. It also found its way around a complicated floor plan without any difficulties.

Getting over obstacles isn’t a problem either, with it climbing thicker mats and raised room thresholds without any difficulty. The one thing it can’t do is recognise and avoid dropped obstacles – I placed a charging cable, a sock and a joke shop pet poo in its path, and it didn’t attempt to avoid any of them.

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Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: How well does it clean?

When it comes to vacuuming, the Eufy Clean X8 Pro shows itself to be perfectly capable. Rice collection was its best trick, managing to gather 99% of my measured spill on hard floor and 96% on carpet, which is above average in both tests.

It was also above average in collecting flour from carpet, managing to pick up 57% of this problematic powder. It scooped 81% from the hard floor, which sounds better, but the average across other robot vacuums is very slightly higher.

The X8 stumbled when picking up pet hair, though. On hard floor it gathered about 70% of the dog hair clippings we put down, with the remainder getting pushed aside or caught on the wrong bits of the robot. It found carpet even harder, where it managed to collect only 59%. Both these results are below average across all the robot vacuums we’ve tested to date.

When it comes to mopping, I didn’t have high hopes because of the robot’s simple wiping method. In previous tests, I haven’t found this to be as effective as the rotary pads you’ll find on more expensive robots.

However, I was very pleasantly surprised. I deposited spillages of tomato ketchup, blackcurrant squash and garden mud onto my floor and let them dry. I then used the area wash setting on the app to send the robot off to where the messes were located.

The mud and the squash were wiped away in a single clean. That’s not unusual for a little mud but usually there’s some dried squash left around the edges that aren’t normally removed in one go, even with rotary mop pads. It removed the ketchup in three visits. Again, that’s unusual, matching the performance of the more expensive Eufy Clean X9 Pro.

Eufy Clean X10 Pro with Self-Empty Station review: Should I buy it?

For its price point of under £600 the Eufy Clean X8 Pro with Self-Empty Station is a decent purchase. It isn’t a superstar in any particular area, but nor does it fail at anything. The base station is compact and only empties the collection bin, but it does that as well you’d expect from more expensive rivals, not one of this price point.

Where it lacks features found in pricier rivals is in mop maintenance: you have to refill and clean this robot yourself. Its reliance on humans follows through to the actual cleaning work, where you’ll need to restrict the mop’s access to carpeted areas and rugs because the robot can’t do that for you. However, I remain surprised at the effectiveness of the mop in my tests, despite it not using the rotary mopping pads that usually significantly outperform this kind of dragged cloth mop method.