ECOVACS DEEBOT X2 Omni Robot Vacuum and Mop, 8000Pa Suction, 15mm Lift, Omni Station with Hot Water Mop Washing, Self-Emptying, Hot Air Drying, Auto-Refill, Obstacle Avoidance,Black

Like many, I obsess over researching products I am interested in, especially big-ticket items. Most of the reviews and recommendations on numerous sites gave the Ecovac DEEBOT x2 glowing recommendations. I was looking for a dependable, easy-maintenance cleaning machine that had the intelligence to know the difference between tile floors and carpet. I wanted a machine that would clean and dry its mopping heads to prevent odors and bacteria growth between uses. Voice control would be nice but not essential.I saw rave reviews about how well this machine worked for them. I am happy to see that it works for them, but my review will be flowing upstream against the many glowing reviews. Regrettably, nearly everything I wanted, what I demanded, was missing from this product. For the price that was paid for the DEEBOT x2, this was unacceptable! Your mileage my very.First of all, I read the instructions. I like instructions. I want to know how to best use my equipment. The instructions that come with the cleaner are horrible! Practically non-existent. There are quick start instructions but any other information requires internet research. It is more like discover a problem, go get information on the web. Discover another problem, go back, and try to find a solution. It would be much better if there was a comprehensive set of instructions in hand to show you how to set up the machine, use the App, and then troubleshoot common problems. The internet and Customer service would then fill in the blanks in knowledge. The App is archaic, one of the worst I have tried to learn and use. Truly disliked the APP, a key part of the whole system control.Speaking of Customer service, it was painful trying to get a resolution to any problem. For example, the machine frequently and repeatedly would go offline. I have pretty good wifi coverage in my house. No problems running all of my internet-connected things. I did not have any problem resetting the connection to the wifi when it went offline. The problem would be that the machine would, at some time after being reset, go offline in its station and fail to run any program to clean. We would notice that we had not seen the machine in some time only to discover that it was offline. I called Customer Service and they tried to tell me it was my mesh internet's fault. I needed to change my wifi. Ridiculous! My wifi had no problems identifying the machine and linking on the 2.4 GHz frequency. I could see this on my router info page. With so many homes using mesh network routers, if this is a real cause of failure, then this product is not ready for market. It should not be working in a huge number of homes.Initially, the machine log shows that it was running 150-190 minutes to clean the house. By the end of my frustration period, the log showed it running 15-20 minutes and cleaning only 225 sq ft per run. It would then announce it was returning to the station to clean the mops or recharge. Once it entered the station, it failed to come out and finish the clean as it should have done. Often, a check of the machine would show that it went offline again.On the subject of self-cleaning and drying mops, repeatedly, I found that the mops were soaking wet in the station. I mentioned this to Customer Service I was told that I should go into the App and tell the machine to initiate the cleaning and dry cycle manually. I thought the purpose of having an automated machine was that it would do what it was supposed to do, automatically! Cleaning and drying the mops was one of my requirements for the machine choice. I lost faith that it would be doing the cleaning and drying function as I expected. When I retrieved the machine from the Station to return it, the mops were dripping with water. The machine had been in the Station for two days, it should have been already cleaned and dry.The next glaring problem is battery life and charging. I can't tell you the number of times the cleaner would return to the station after 15-20 minutes of operation, announcing it had to recharge. Or the machine was in the Station, sitting there doing nothing, it would announce that it was shutting down due to low battery. I was checking the App and could see the battery was depleted. Often, when the machine had not automatically run its scheduled cleaning program, I would manually tell it to run the cleaning. The machine, most of the time would come out of the Station with 84% or less battery charge. This was after being in the Station for a long time.I wanted to like this machine. I tried using the internet to find solutions to my problems. I called Customer Service twice. The first time it was the wifi's fault, not the machine's. The second time, I called them to try to anything that would help to prevent me from sending the machine back for a refund. They were going to send me an email containing information on possible solutions I was willing to try. We verified my email address a couple of times, but, I did not receive this email. That was the final straw. The machine was going back for a refund.

I've owned several Deebots over the last several years, none were perfect by any means but the software they have keeps drawing me back plus their features combined with price are always are better buy than the competition. I felt the X2 would be similar & for some reason, silly me thought Ecovacs would have actually improved by now after learning about customer experiences. After owning the X2 for 45 days I'd have to say not much of the above is true. Yeah, they still make excellent software but what good is it if the software itself has several bugs and the robot just fails to live up to expectations. The biggest 'fail' just started happening days after the extended Amazon holiday return period had come & gone--pet & people hair that get scooped up by the roller that don't get sucked up instantly are quickly pushed off to the sides of the roller where they jam it tight & cause an error. Took me a while to figure out how best to attack this problem as trying to squeeze my large fingers in there to pull it out little by little is not only exasperating but time consuming. I may as well just vacuum & mop myself for the 30-45 minutes it takes to get it unstuck. The problem is that the hair not only gets wound around the side roller but also underneath & in between the main roller & the sides, forcing those 2 little side rollers against the body of their frame. The easiest way to fix this is with a thin screwdriver to wedge in between the roller & frame so you can gently pull it up. The first 30 days this didn't happen once, had it done so I would have sent it back immediately. Now it happens twice each time the robot is tasked for cleaning. There have been a couple of software glitches the worst of which is the robot thinking my throw rugs & runners are extreme dirt h trying to 'erase' the pattern! The X2 will spend a good half hour or more on a 3' x 5' kitchen rug, on super high speed, twitching away. As if this isn't bad enough it first tries to do the perimeter of each rug & it's movements twist the rug up into a small pyramid. It's ruined 2 beautiful design throw rugs that we can't find anymore. If I pick the rugs up then it happily goes about vacuuming & or mopping all the tile but it has this quirk of going along the edge of a carpet at super high suction, then back over the tile at low suction, then back on the carpet, repeating this the entire length of whatever carpet it's working on. The constant ramping up to super high suction & back down again is not only ridiculous but pretty annoying to anyone who's around while this is going on. There is a setting to prevent it from increasing suction on carpet but with my golden retriever I really need that feature.The amount of time the X2 wastes trying to erase my throw rugs & then going back & forth across the width of a hallway instead of making just 3 passes down the length of the hall causes it to need to recharge much too soon.Then there's the AI setting, don't know where to begin with that. Let's just say when I first got the X2 I figured I'd use all the features but they obviously didn't program their AI good enough as it IS pretty artificial but not very intelligent. It would meander all over the place, missing large areas of the house while taking forever to do so. Took me a couple of days to figure out how to turn it off but it hasn't been on since.All this isn't to say it might not be a bad robot for some, namely those without pets or people with long hair. It does a pretty good job mopping especially considering I do have a large, hairy dog. He's well trained & doesn't go out in the mud or for walks in the rain so it's not like my floors get real dirty & if you look at them you'd say they were pretty clean but the dirty water tank still has some sediment in the bottom along with the water being cloudy. It also does a pretty good job vacuuming. I have a large macaw who makes a mess shredding newspapers h dropping nuts out of the cage & the X2 not only picks it all up but has never once had a problem emptying, unlike previous Deebots we've owned.All this being said, I would NOT recommend this to anyone with a pet based solely on the problems I mentioned at the beginning.