Review: Ecovacs Deebot T9+

Last year, I reviewed Ecovacs’ Deebot (6/10, WIRED Review). It was an expensive and massive mopping robot vacuum that came with a ton of extra functions that, to be quite honest, didn’t make much practical sense. My 8-year-old, for example, is used to her mother occasionally doing strange things around the house. She accepted when her mother was talking to her through that robot vacuum’s walkie-talkie, but she didn’t exactly like it.

That’s why, this year, it made more sense for me to try the Deebot T9+, which at $800 is the midrange model in Deebot's 2023 line. There’s also this year’s Deebot N10+ ($650), which is the lower-end model, and the Deebot T10 Omni ($1,200). While the Deebot T9+ does not come with a dock that’s big enough to pass for Snoopy’s doghouse (as the previous one I tested did), it does have an updated navigation system, a new oscillating mop, and—get this—an air freshener.

To be honest, I thought the air freshener would be as useless as the walkie-talkie. But I now react in a way that can only be described as Pavlovian to the automatic air-freshening. The T9+’s subtle, refreshing wafts of cucumber and oak were as soothing as knowing that my floors would be clean before friends came over. If you’re looking for a combination robot vacuum and mop, this is a pretty great pick.

The Deebot T9+ looks pretty much the same as any standard robot vacuum, with a white auto-empty tower. It’s about 4 inches tall and comes with a plastic plate to put under the dock to make it easier for the vacuum to roll back onto the charging ports at the end of a cleaning job. I used to think this step wasn’t necessary, especially if your vacuum is on hardwood, but it really is.

The T9+ doesn’t have Yiko, Ecovacs’ proprietary voice assistant that made last year’s Omni so easy to use, but the Ecovacs app is now much easier to navigate. I paired the vacuum and named it “4 Blue Heelers” after the number and types of pets that my kids are bugging me to get. The first run mapped my house accurately and took 85 minutes to clean 850 square feet, with about 10 percent battery left.

We have come a long way since dual vacuum-mop robots just asked you to stick a slightly damp cloth on the bottom to clean the floors. The T9+ is not quite as sophisticated as the T10 Omni, which like last year’s Omni washes the reusable mopping pads with each use and dries them with hot air to prevent bacterial growth and odors.

However, I find its disposable mopping pads to be an order of magnitude easier than other reusable pads that I’ve used. To mop, swap out the bottom bracket for the mopping attachment, fill the tank with water, and stick a disposable cleaning pad on with Velcro. It’s easier to use than the reusable pads on the Shark AI Ultra (8/10, WIRED Recommends); you don’t have to hand-wash cleaning pads in the sink. It’s not great for the Earth, but on days when I’ve had to run the mop consecutively—for example, when my kids made cupcakes that covered the floor in sprinkles, then an hour later made pizzas that covered it in flour—I was really happy that I could swap out cleaning pads instantly.

The T9+ uses an oscillating mop system—you can watch the little bottom scrub up and down on your floors, and the aforementioned sugar did get mopped up. No sticky spots here! 4 Blue Heelers used about half a tank of water and took about 27 minutes to mop 280 square feet using about 10 percent of the battery life. That’s comparable to most other mopping robots I’ve used, which normally take about a half hour.

Unlike with a more high-end mop like the iRobot or the Omni, I found that it took a long time for the water tank to soak through the mopping pad. I always had to make sure that the pad was wet before 4 Blue Heelers started cleaning, which is an annoying pain point. There’s nothing worse than stacking chairs off your kitchen floor in anticipation of a mopping session and then finding out that it didn’t even happen.

The T9+ has TrueDetect 3D 2.0, a navigation system that uses lasers to create a 3D rendering of all the obstacles in your room. The 3D-generated map of my house was a little disappointing. 4 Blue Heelers got the dimensions of each room right and picked out our kitchen table and one of the sofas, but it missed pretty major furnishings, like the other sofa and my favorite armchair. It also didn’t quite detect the change in floor surfaces accurately—I had to redraw the room boundaries when I discovered that it was getting the entrance to the living room slightly damp.

However, what laser detection really means to me is that, unlike with other robot vacuums or even the high-end Omni, there are no cameras taking pictures of my home. I much prefer to see a 3D-generated table than have grainy images of my real kitchen table stored either in the cloud or on the robot vacuum itself, no matter how many security protocols are put in place.

In practice, TrueDetect 3D 2.0 worked really well. I’ve been cleaning with it daily, or even twice daily, for a month now, and I’ve had no missed cleaning jobs or stoppages where it trapped itself in the bathroom or got inextricably tangled in embroidery floss or several large Lego pieces.

There is only one pain point that’s annoying, and even that is not so bad. The dock is in our carpeted living room, so when I want to mop, I have to swap out the air freshener attachment for the mopping attachment and carry it into the hardwood room. When it’s done, it can’t go back, because the living room is carpeted. Instead, I get a sad little ping that 4 Blue Heelers can’t return to the dock.

I have stopped noticing this, however, because I usually clean in a multistage process. Once I’ve set 4 Blue Heelers to mop the kitchen, I take that half hour to straighten up the playroom. Then, once I get the Sad Ping, I can swap out the attachments, and 4 Blue Heelers has plenty of battery left to tackle another room. 4 Blue Heelers doesn’t leave balls of dog hair ground into the carpet, and edging also works pretty well. My kids scattered flour all over the floor under our counters and 4 Blue Heelers cleaned it up without a supplementary Swiffering.

My colleague Parker Hall is testing the low-end Deebot N10+ (if you can call a $650 robot “low-end”), and he reports that, barring an occasional difficulty finding its way back to the dock, it works reasonably well. 4 Blue Heelers usually makes it back to the dock. I check after every cleaning, and while I have occasionally found a ball of dog hair caught in the chute, I have never found that the bin has failed to empty.

I also generally hate most artificial fragrances. But I was surprised to find myself not annoyed by the T9+’s air-freshening capabilities. Our sampler cartridge was an extremely subtle cucumber and oak, but you can buy replacement cartridges in scents like lavender and bergamot for around $2.50 a month.

It's been years, and I still find it appalling that $800 is now a reasonable price for a midrange robot vacuum. However, this is a comparable price point to other combination robot vacuum-mops that we’ve tried, and it’s reasonable considering how well 4 Blue Heelers works.

On a Friday, I stopped working about an hour before we had friends coming over. I had one hour to pick up my kids, pick up food, and pick up the house. Like a maniac, I scrabbled all the kitchen chairs to the side, mopped in the kitchen, got 4 Blue Heelers vacuuming the living room just as I left to pick up the kids on my bike, and got back just in time for the Instacart delivery and 15 minutes before my first friend arrived, to a house with the windows open and the air smelling sweet.

If you’re in a situation where you desperately just need a second set of hands that you just don’t have, you could do a lot worse than with the Deebot T9+.