At CES 2025, I lost my mind over the Eufy E20. Robot vacuum design has stagnated over the past few years, but this was something I’d never seen before—an adorable robot vacuum that had three functions in one! Run it as a regular robot vacuum to map and pick up your home. When it’s done, unclip it from its housing and use it as a cordless stick vacuum or a hand vacuum.
There are so many things to like about the Eufy E20. It has a remarkably compact footprint, the price is reasonable, and the design problems that it solves are very impressive. After several weeks of testing, I can acknowledge its ingenuity while also conceding that this is a device that’s only designed for light cleaning. It just doesn’t work as well as a dedicated, heavy-duty robot vacuum or Dyson stick vacuum. And that’s fine.
Petite Perfection
Photograph: Adrienne So
The first thing you’ll notice is that, in contrast to other home docking stations, the E20 is remarkably tiny. I measured it at 14 inches tall, 17 inches long, and 15 inches wide, barely bigger than the robot vacuum itself. The base is a simple self-emptying dustbin, not a gigantic station housing clean and dirty water tanks like higher-end models have. It was refreshingly easy to unbox, set up, and turn on.
The robot vacuum connects to the Eufy Clean app (iOS, Android). To start using it as a robot vacuum, connect it to the app and then set it off on a mapping run around your house. It uses a laser guidance system, so no AI-enabled cameras are wandering around taking pictures of your butt and sending them to Mexico or storing them on device.
Screenshots courtesy of Adrienne So
On the other hand, a laser-guided navigation system is not quite as accurate as some of the other navigation systems that I’ve tested, like camera navigation or simultaneous localization and mapping. It avoided obstacles adroitly and mapped my rooms relatively accurately, but when I tasked it with cleaning only one room at a time, the E20 sometimes left a little trail of grime on the room’s borders. It also took the vacuum several tries to figure out that I’d made a no-go zone.
To transform the E20 into a cordless vacuum, you push the big red button and click the handheld section out of the base. Eufy also sent a wall holder to store the two stick vacuum and handheld attachments. It would have been nice if there were storage options on the dock, but that would’ve made the dock quite a bit bigger.
Photograph: Adrienne So
The E20 in vacuum form is quite light and maneuverable! It’s at least a pound or two lighter than my Dyson V15, which makes it easier to use on stairs and other hard-to-reach places. You hold the power button down for a few seconds to turn it on, and click the button to cycle it through several modes, the highest of which has a purported 30,000 kPA of suction power.
That is quite high, but using the E20 demonstrated the limits of high suction power when it comes to cleaning. We have a newish puppy that has been shredding almost everything in our house. While the E20 can pick up debris that’s the size of a quarter or smaller very well (see images for comparison), it has trouble with smaller things, like dog hair. The Dyson V15’s roller brush is more effective at agitating my carpet and releasing dog hair to be cleaned; the dustbin for the E20 gets only half as full when cleaning my carpets as the Dyson V15 does.
The hand vacuum is fine. I like that the attachment is stored directly in the body of the robot vacuum itself. One less thing, you know?
Take Out the Trash
That doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. The first problem with housing a whole handheld unit in the body of the robot vacuum is that the dustbin is much smaller. Most dustbins are around 0.6 liters; the dustbin on the Eufy is 0.3 liters, or half that size. I solved this problem by sending the vacuum back to the docking station more often to empty itself, but that also wastes a lot of time and power.
Photograph: Adrienne So
The small dustbin affects the handheld’s utility. To empty the dustbin, you click it back into the robot vacuum housing. The E20 will auto-empty if the handheld has been running for at least 10 minutes, but since the dustbin is so small, I rarely ran it for that long. You can rotate the dust cup to empty the bin manually, but it’s kind of gross. I ended up just clicking it back into the housing to collect dust via the app, but that’s annoying and took a long time. Disposal on some other vacuums is as easy as putting it back on the dock.
Also, the battery light indicator is on the right-hand side of the vacuum when it’s a handheld. This is convenient and easy to check when the E20 is a robot vacuum but much less so if you’re a right-handed person, as most of us are. You can’t just glance down to check the battery—you have to twist the vacuum around to look at the other side.
With the suction power jacked up to the maximum, as it always is in my house, it took about 15 minutes to run the stick vacuum down to 20 percent power. As a robot vacuum, it took about an hour to clean 505 feet, which reduced the battery to 30 percent—far shorter than Eufy’s estimated 180 minutes of cleaning time.
Photograph: Adrienne So
Eufy’s recharging times, however, were accurate—the E20 has fast-charging technology which bumps the battery back up after 2.5 hours. That is much, much shorter than other robot vacuum charging times (most robot vacuums take around 4 to 5 hours to recharge). It’s also important, because after running the robot vacuum, I would often find bits of schmutz around my washing machine and dryer that I would use the handheld vac to pick up.
Automated dust collection tends to leave the disposal chute clogged. To keep the chute clean, I have to keep entering the app to select Deep Dust Collection. Again, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s an extra step for what should be the easiest part of the cleaning process.
None of this would be as much of a problem if I were a single person or someone in a couple who didn’t live with two children and two dogs who were determined to make my life as filthy as possible. My primary concern isn’t convenience or space constraints—I care less if my cleaning devices are cute, small, or easy to grab. I just want the most thorough, effective cleaning devices possible.
If, however, you live in a small apartment and won’t fill the dustbin several times over in your daily cleaning run, I wholeheartedly recommend it. For $550, you get a convenient, reliable robot vacuum, a light and maneuverable stick vacuum, and a hand vacuum for stairs and cleaning out your car. If you have only 0.3 liters of gunk around your house, I am thinking about you and envying you deeply as I install another monster robot to scrub away as much as possible.