Robot vacuums: what makes one worth keeping

None of the 10 robot vacuums we scored has an official replacement battery on sale to owners in Spain. For Ecovacs DEEBOT T90 PRO OMNI, SwitchBot Robot Vacuum K11+ and Narwal Flow (Basic Dock), the brand says its service replaces the battery. For the other seven, we found no official battery path at all.

That matters more than any spec sheet. Under the Fair Standard, a robot with no battery path gets a red flag and can never be a Fair Pick.

Every brand sells brushes and filters for its current models. The real test is the model it launched five years ago. Only Cecotec still sells the battery and most key modules for it (the 2020 Conga 5490). iRobot sells wheel modules, brushes and filters for the Roomba i7, but its battery was listed as unavailable when we checked. For Dreame L50 Ultra AE, Roborock Saros 20, Xiaomi Robot Vacuum 5 and eufy Omni C28, only wear parts are left.

For the current models we scored, we found only consumables on sale: no wheel module, motor, bumper or mainboard for any of them in Spain.

Bags, mop pads, rollers and filters add up. Where the maker publishes a price and a replacement interval for every core consumable, a year of them costs 18%–47% of the robot’s price (106 €–279 € a year). For the robotic lawn mowers we scored, it is 0.6%–8.8%.

Six of the 10 don’t publish enough to work it out: at least one core item (dust bags, mop pads, a brush or a filter) has no official price or replacement interval. We don’t fill the gap with a guess, so these show as “Not disclosed”. For Xiaomi Robot Vacuum 5, we haven’t finished reading the prices yet.

Most robot vacuums will start a clean from a button on the robot. What usually needs the app, an account and the maker’s servers is everything else: maps, zones and, often, schedules. Dreame says scheduled cleaning is skipped while the robot is offline; Ecovacs says that offline you have to start each clean by hand. Seven of the 10 score “partly offline”, and for the rest the brand doesn’t say.

Local control is the way out: Dreame L50 Ultra AE, Roborock Saros 20, SwitchBot Robot Vacuum K11+ and Narwal Flow (Basic Dock) are Matter certified, so a compatible home hub can control them on your own network. None of the brands has published a commitment that its robots keep working if its cloud shuts down. What happens when the cloud goes away.

Spain’s legal guarantee is 3 years, and nine of the 10 offer nothing beyond it. Some brands advertise less (a 1- or 2-year commercial warranty), but the 3-year legal guarantee from the seller still applies. Dreame is the exception: its warranty explicitly covers the battery for the full 3 years.

Security updates are promised for 3 years by Dreame L50 Ultra AE and Ecovacs DEEBOT T90 PRO OMNI, and for 2 by Roborock Saros 20, SwitchBot Robot Vacuum K11+ (a brand policy that doesn’t name this model) and Xiaomi Robot Vacuum 5. The others publish no period. Your rights in Spain.

Four of the 10 carry a camera: Ecovacs DEEBOT T90 PRO OMNI, Roborock Saros 20, Narwal Flow (Basic Dock) and Cecotec Conga X100. Only Roborock Saros 20 says its obstacle recognition runs on the robot and obstacle photos stay on it, with video calls off by default; the others don’t say where images are processed. Ecovacs’ app privacy policy allows device logs and home maps to be used to target ads.