Eufy Omni E35 review: I tested this £999 robot vacuum in my awkward cottage

I’ve long maintained that my small Cotswolds cottage is probably the worst possible environment for a robot vacuum.

Our rooms are irregular, furniture legs are everywhere, the floors change from hardwood to rugs and carpet, and even on the same floor there are small thresholds to negotiate. Surely, I thought, even an expensive robot vacuum would spend half its life confused, stuck or asking to be rescued.

That made the new Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E35 an interesting test.

Priced at £999 and on sale from September 4 on the Anker-Eufy website, the E35 sits firmly at the premium end of the robot vacuum market. Eufy says its combination of powerful suction, improved navigation, obstacle crossing and self-cleaning mop technology makes it particularly capable in more complicated homes.

I have now been using it for two weeks and, according to the cleaning history in the app, it has completed 16 sessions across our cottage.

Most have been downstairs in the kitchen and living room, but I have also tested it in the conservatory and carried it upstairs to tackle two bedrooms, the landing and bathroom.

And as someone coming to this as a complete robot vacuum novice rather than a veteran of several generations of machines, I’ve been surprised by just how capable it is.

Buy the Eufy E35 for £999 here.

What I liked about the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E35

The first thing that impressed me was the cleaning performance.

My colleague and resident robot vacuum expert Gareth Butterfield had warned me that one of the weaknesses of some robot vacuums is their ability to properly lift dirt from carpets.

That has not been a concern here.

Eufy claims the E35 produces 35,000Pa of suction, but the number matters less to me than what it actually does on the floor. In the areas it can reach, I would say it has done at least as good a job as our old Shark upright vacuum.

Crumbs, dust, bits of food and both human and cat hair have all disappeared without fuss.

Hair has also not become wrapped around the main roller, which is something anyone who has spent time cutting strands from a conventional vacuum brush will appreciate. The smaller side sweepers have occasionally picked up tangled hair and needed clearing, but that has been a relatively minor job.

It is particularly impressive when moving between surfaces.

Our living room combines hardwood flooring with rugs of several different thicknesses. The E35 detects when it moves from hard flooring onto carpet and adjusts what it is doing accordingly, switching between vacuuming and mopping without me having to intervene.

That gets plenty of use in our house.

It also passed one of my biggest tests with flying colours. There is a threshold of around 2.5cm between our kitchen and living room, which I had assumed would cause problems. It negotiates it remarkably well.

The E35 is not completely unstoppable, though. It definitely does not like tasselled rugs, and one particularly deep lambswool rug made it work hard enough that afterwards the app effectively admitted defeat and suggested I create a no-go zone around it.

I appreciated that more than I expected. Rather than repeatedly getting itself into trouble, the mapping system allows you to exclude problem areas.

The mopping function has probably made the biggest difference to everyday life.

You can change both the amount of water used and the thoroughness of the clean. I have used that to build a schedule where the E35 carries out lighter vacuuming and mopping most days, then performs a more intensive clean twice a week.

That should become even more useful as autumn and winter arrive and muddy shoes start coming through the house.

There are some old, dried-on patches on our kitchen floor that it hasn’t managed to remove, but that seems a slightly unfair test for any maintenance cleaner. My suspicion is that once those have been manually scrubbed away, regular scheduled cleaning should stop the same build-up happening again.

The most telling evidence comes every few days when I empty the dirty-water tank. It is very obvious that the E35 has been removing dirt from the floors.

I’ve emptied the waste water and topped up the clean-water tank twice during my two weeks of testing. I have not yet needed to touch the dust bag.

The station also washes and dries the mop automatically. There has been no unpleasant smell from the dirty-water system, and once the robot has finished you largely leave the station to get on with maintaining it.

Noise isn’t an issue either. There is an ultra-quiet setting that is perfectly acceptable for everyday cleaning, while even the more powerful modes are no more intrusive than a typical upright vacuum. Emptying dust into the station is louder, but only lasts briefly, while mop drying produces little more than a low hum.

Navigation is generally impressive too.

Its rounded-square shape and extending side brushes allow it to work closely around edges, furniture and chair legs, and I’ve watched it repeatedly return to an area until it appears satisfied that it has cleaned it.

Upstairs, you simply carry the robot up and allow it to map and categorise the rooms. Despite having no base station upstairs, it recognised the top of our staircase and sensibly avoided the drop.

At around 25 minutes for a typical downstairs session, battery life hasn’t been remotely troublesome in our relatively small home.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give it is that I have already started leaving it unsupervised.

The attraction isn’t simply avoiding vacuuming. It is that our house now feels consistently cleaner during the week, rather than gradually accumulating crumbs, dust and debris until we tackle the chores at the weekend.

What I didn’t like about the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E35

For all its cleverness, it isn’t infallible.

The biggest concern came at the entrance to our conservatory. There is a roughly 10-inch drop onto a stone step followed by another similar drop to the floor.

When the E35 originally mapped the area, the door was closed. On two later occasions when it happened to be open, the robot continued towards it.

It became grounded on the raised door threshold before reaching the point where its sensors should have detected the drop, so it didn’t actually fall. But it is something I would now make sure was covered by a no-go zone.

Navigation has also occasionally been inconsistent.

There have been times when the E35 has cleaned most of a room but left a narrow strip untouched, and on a couple of occasions it appears to have forgotten a more substantial section it had successfully cleaned previously.

I was using a pre-launch test version of Eufy’s app, and Eufy has told me the consumer version will be more intuitive, so I am reluctant to judge the finished software too harshly. I also suspect there is more I can do to refine maps and settings as I continue using it.

But at £999, consistency matters.

The bathroom highlighted that problem particularly clearly. In what is, unusually for our cottage, a fairly simple square room, I watched it leave a gap between two mopping runs and another strip beside the vanity unit.

The actual mopping was good and streak-free. The coverage just wasn’t perfect.

Physical dimensions are another limitation.

The robot is larger and taller than I expected. The weight isn’t a problem - even carrying it upstairs is straightforward - but it cannot get underneath our sofas, whereas our Shark vacuum can.

The Omni station itself packs its water tanks, dust collection and cleaning system into a reasonably compact unit, but you also need manoeuvring space in front of it.

We eventually found a good position tucked behind the sofa in our living room, although I have to pull the sofa forward slightly to give the robot enough room to park and leave cleanly.

And however capable it is, it doesn’t completely eliminate conventional vacuuming. Stairs, tight gaps and some awkward corners in an old cottage still need doing manually.

Overall verdict: is the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E35 worth buying?

The Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E35 has proved me wrong about one important thing: a robot vacuum absolutely can work in our awkward little cottage.

It negotiates our threshold, copes impressively with different flooring, vacuums extremely well and mops effectively. Most importantly, scheduled cleaning means our living spaces now remain noticeably cleaner and fresher throughout the week. That is a genuine improvement to everyday life.

What makes the verdict harder is the £999 price.

In a much larger home, particularly one with extensive hard flooring and a significant amount of cleaning to keep on top of, the time-saving argument becomes considerably stronger.

In our relatively small cottage, however, £999 is difficult to justify. There are now numerous robot vacuums available for substantially less, and anyone with a smaller home should investigate what they genuinely need before committing to a four-figure machine.

At somewhere closer to £699, I would find the E35 significantly easier to recommend.

There are also still a few rough edges. Navigation hasn’t been completely consistent, certain rugs are beyond its capabilities and it cannot reach everywhere a conventional vacuum can.

But after 16 cleaning sessions, I am considerably more convinced by robot vacuums than I was before I started.

For our home, the Eufy Omni E35 remains an impressive luxury rather than an essential appliance.

If it disappeared tomorrow, though, there is one feature I would immediately miss: the scheduled cleaning that keeps the floors under control before I even start thinking about doing them myself.