Editor’s Note: This product has been removed from our side-by-side comparison because it has been discontinued. You can still read our original review below, but Top Ten Reviews is no longer updating this product’s information.
The Ecovacs Deebot M82 has a low profile that helps it get under things competing robot vacuums could not, and the suction was pretty impressive. The customer support is weak for this product, though, and that could be a problem for something like this that represents a fairly significant investment for most families.
The Deebot M82 did a pretty good job on our suction tests overall, though it was sidelined by malfunctions at times. It really struggled to clean pet hair and had dramatically low numbers on the pet hair removal on multiple flooring surfaces. Our laboratory testers reported that it pushed hair into the carpeting rather than removing it. The pet hair clogged the brushes over and over again during testing, so this is an automatic vacuum to avoid if you have pets that shed a lot. On our other test materials, including kitty litter, sawdust and cereal, it was competitive. When we added up all of the grams of debris it recovered, the number was higher than almost half of the competitors in our robot vacuum comparison.
In our home testing environment it had some hits and some misses in navigation. It was low enough to the ground to get under a wooden chest that many competitors avoided, and it did a better job of getting its brushes to coax debris out of corners than others. It avoided other obstacles, though, and had a very strange cleaning pattern that kept it completely off of some area rugs.
A robotic vacuum that costs hundreds of dollars deserves a good supporting team around it, but we could not even find a phone number for Ecovacs and our emails went unanswered. If something on the Deebot breaks or you have a question, you are kind of on your own. The website is not that helpful either. The manual is in the box and available online, but it is not the easiest to understand.
This automatic vacuum was not the most user friendly either, so you may need some help. There is just the one light on top, unlike competitors, some of which have a screen that can display status codes or even complete phrases. We weren't always sure what was going on with this robot vacuum cleaner. Other units made it more clear when they needed charging or had been stopped by an obstacle.
The total amount of kitty litter, cereal, sawdust and other test messes extracted with the Ecovacs Deebot M82 was pretty impressive when taken as a whole. Also, its low profile was pretty helpful for getting under some low-slung furniture that competitors avoided. This one struggled to remove pet hair, though, and poor customer service is relatively frustrating for a product at this price point.
