This is not the best robot vacuum I have tested.
The Eureka E10 is fairly affordable in the face of other robot mop-vacs; our recommendation for an affordable option is $800, while the E10 is $600. You might think to yourself, why buy a more expensive model then? Why spend more if I don’t have to?
The Eureka is a little dumb. It bumps into so many things you’d think it’s wearing a blindfold, and if I move the vacuum around too much–like flipping it over to cut the hair on the brush, or my toddler gets curious and pushes it around–it will forget where it is and wipe my home map from its memory. It’s adorably dumb when it can’t figure out how to get around my husband’s office chair, and infuriatingly dumb when it gets itself stuck on the same patch of rug-to-carpet transition five times in a row.
It’s not a bad vacuum. If you can find it on sale and mostly want it for carpet cleaning, you’ll likely be satisfied. I was plenty happy with how it vacuumed my carpet. But the mopping and built-in smarts left something to be desired.
B-Level Cleaning
The E10 is just a B student trying to survive out here in the world, at least when it comes to vacuuming my carpet.
I was pretty happy with the E10’s vacuuming. It left the satisfying vacuum lines and fluffy carpet behind that screamed “freshly cleaned!” But it wasn’t great at getting all the cat litter off the floor, and it tended to pool a little bit of litter underneath itself when it returned to base. Still, the vacuuming experience wasn’t much different than I got with the much more expensive Dreame X30 Ultra (7/10, WIRED Review), and the E10 was much, much quieter than the Dreame while it zipped around my home.
Photography: Nena Farrell
The difference is in the mopping job. Most robot vacuum-mops today have rotating scrubbers or refillable water tanks or self-cleaning tools. Not the E10, which has the same system as robot mops of yore where you pour water into a canteen in the vacuum that’s above the single mop pad. Then the vacuum drags the lightly damp pad around your house to mop your home.