ECOVACS Deebot R98 Vacuum Cleaning Robot

I've purchased 3 different model vacuums and I returned 2 of them. This one I am keeping. Here are some Pros and Cons. I may update this list if I remember to. We haven’t used the mop piece yet.Pros:Does a good job at picking everything up.Maps the house without issues. (Make sure to cover mirrored surfaces)It doesn’t detect inclines as an obstacle which other vacuums have (We have a 15" long 1.5" high incline from living room to kitchen for a wheelchair)Handheld vacuum is super convenient to grab for vacuuming off furniture and other items.App is easy to use and after the initial floorplan scan you can set virtual boundaries.--As an example we have put a boundary around the cat water bowl area so it doesn’t bump the bowl and get water everywhere.Cons:Handheld doesn't have a lot of suction power in comparison to other handheld vacuums.Auto Emptying only works about 25% of the time for me.--This is supposed to empty the dust bin from the robot into the handheld after every run and it does try to do so, but with 2 cats it mustn't be able to dislodge the balls of cat hair and 75% of the time I have to manually empty the smaller dust bin myself. It is good to check after each floor cleaning.The screenshot I attached from my android phone shows a map the robot created in our house. It shows the areas it cleaned last (I told it not to clean the kids room or master bathroom in this case)

...was very impressed with its performance out of the box...i bought it specifically for two reasons, its ability to map the house and i could set up boundaries and virtual walls on the app and the self emptying feature of the reservoir, (so i dont have to empty the tank everyday )...all this worked great for few days and then the robot went dead...i charged it all night and still wont respond and it is offline on the app...trying to figure out how to get hold of their customer service..i went to their website but didn't find a local number to call

Step 1, pull it out of the box and power on. Step 2, connect to wifi. Oh wait, it doesn't work in the presence of any modern wifi.I read that this device does not work on 5ghz wireless. That's fine, my wifi provides both 2.4 and 5ghz. Fine Print: No, it won't work, like at all, if you have 5ghz wifi present on the same ssid as 2.4ghz, like oh, any sane person would do. Please disable your good wifi and replace with bad wifi.I use currently Samsung Connect AP's, that provide excellent, simple, wifi with a common SSID between 2.4ghz and 5ghz spectrum. It is not selectable, I can't disable one or another, they are both there, and works with like every other device on the face of the earth, except Ecovacs Deebot apparently. Instead, Ecovacs wants me to get a 2.4ghz wireless device circa 2002, for their 2018 robot. They could have saved everyone some grief just including a 5ghz chip. Why is this even an issue?!After an hour of troubleshooting this stupid vacuum, and hour of research, and and hour of anger, I'm ready to box this back up and send it back unless I get a suitable response from support like soon.Just don't buy it, save yourself the grief.** edit 4/20/185 hours later, I've ripped out all my modern wireless, put in a 15 year old linksys on 802.11b, and still can't get this thing to see any sort of wireless. Now I'd really just like to return this thing in pieces. Did they put in a foreign radio on a different band or something? How does something like this pass any sort of quality assurance?** edit 4/28/18After almost a week of fiddling with this, and absolutely no real help from support, I figured out how to hack around their entirely broken wireless pairing methodology. First, if you have 5ghz radios, as they tell you subtly in support docs, it simply refuses to work. As someone that does networking for a living, and particularly enterprise wireless, I found this absurd, and have never found another device broken in the same ways. My Samsung AP's don't allow me to split the 2.4ghz and 5ghz, or disable just 5ghz, so it was incapable of allowing me to hack around their stupid limits. I ended up busting out my 10 year old AP again, and found that setting up my SSID and password the same, with only 2.4ghz enabled, and finally after some trying, got the Deebot to pair up. I then disconnected the old router/wifi, and reconnected my normal 2.4/5ghz samsung mesh ap's again, and then it seems to work fine.Sending emails to support got me nowhere - I ended up having to threaten to return the device, and the 3rd party seller actually reached out to get them to contact me on their behalf. After no contact back from them, calling them got me to clueless support, that refused to transfer me to this person, and then conveniently hung up on me before getting into much actual support. Calling them back 3 times after, I could never get a human, and almost 2 days later to get a call back from even their phone queue.Once I got the robot working, I'm finding it does a decent job of mapping, and getting around, but the suction on the device is too weak to deal with my birds tossing food around the ground. It handles the basic cleanup and floor tasks adequately, but it's far from "good"...I'm having a hard time justifying keeping this device. The support from Ecovacs is pretty terrible, unresponsive, and even when you do get them, they just tell you to rebuild your home wifi with old devices to suit them. The device as a vacuum is pretty lacklustre, even if it does map and get around the house nicely - a big upgrade from my roomba 10yr ago when they'd break after 2 months of use, but not as good performance cleaning. Likewise, the hand-held unit is lacklustre as well, having pretty weak vacuum.I just can't really justify $800 dollars for the device, but cheaper than a wife/girlfriend to probably accomplish even less cleaning than this does.** edit 5/6/18Device has been working marginally well when used, still not at all effective for pets, particularly my parrots. Then not.I finally just enabled the scheduler, and that worked for 2 days. A few days later, I noticed it wasn't kicking off, and wasn't online. Moving and kicking it around on the charger base didn't seem to work. Finally I noticed the spinning brushes were actually full-on covering the charging pads where they parked. No wonder no juice. Who the hell thought this was a good idea to place the charging pads directly under the brushes where they randomly land, hmm? Fail. Moving the brushes got it to charge again. YaY.Then I noticed again a few days later, it still hadn't charged or kicked off. I restarted the unit, redid the brushes so they weren't covering the charger AGAIN, and juiced it up. Today I kick it off, it comes off the base, turns around, and re-docks. And again, and again when starting it from the app. Here we go again.I pull the bin, it's empty, but dirty. Hella dirty, this thing attracts dust with static like a magnet to shavings. Even the weak arse hand-held vacuum can't suck the dirt collecting in the dust-bin or hole in the deebot with the static cling. I get it out though, and do some other inspecting. I notice the brush at the bottom is pretty torn up, and behold doesn't move. Ripping that apart I found a nut (birds, remember) jammed into the unit. Progress.I cleaned the brushes, and noticed it was heavily glossed in grease, that was now heavily jammed with dust, hair, and whatever else it collected, which I just imagine will wear out whatever bearing that feeds to eventually. Put it back together, and again it roams the pastures of my house.I really have to ask why the hell the app simply can't tell me it's jammed and needs service? Isn't the point of the app? It sure told me constantly with 100 error messages in android as I dismantled it, but not that it refused to work for being jammed.Really now guys, does someone think for your product and app teams? If doing wifi cleaning robots as long as they seem to have, it would seem these things would have been fixed and resolved by now. I'm starting to regret not buying a roomba, or well anything else. Please read some customer notes here Ecovacs.And please add some actual suction to your hand-held attachment please, it's useless aside from light dust. I want a replacement v2 model that actually works when you figure it out, please. The least you could do was make a traditional part that worked, or copied someone else that does.** edit 5/8/2018I found that kicking about the deebot to work at a 45 degree angle improved almost every aspect of cleaning, as it cares about the edges, and hits across the lateral movements it insists upon to move and continue. This is annoying, provide some options to move at 0, 180, or 45 degree motions so this actually cleans things properly.I would like to recommend the option to move at 90 and 45 degree angles as part of the rotating routines. If I clear the map, and move it at 45 degrees, it's actually comprehensively cleaning the areas. If I move at only 0 or 180 degrees as it wants to do, I miss so much debris around my birds it's terrible to walk.Thus the kicking. If I tell it to start, and basically kick it until it gets confused enough to run at a roughly 45 degree angle, it works great. If not, you anger me with not doing useful function to keep my birds from defeating you with mess.Please note comments and support notes of folks that try to help you vs. outsourced labor that barely understand english for general support of like, how to plug it in.** edit 8/12/2018So almost from the first month of having the device, I'd been getting steadily increasing Laser Distance Sensor malfunctions, where usually I'd clean the device, wipe it down, and reset it, and it would work again. Finally these began occurring more frequently until within the past month, it just simply throws the error after starting any time, even after a factory reset. They're offering to replace the unit, seeing it died after only 90 days or so, but offer no advanced replacement, and want me to ship the entire thing back, which is very oddly shaped to find boxes for that I've not been able to in the past month. Ugh, crap service and warranty!Not at all pleased the device didn't even last 90 days, and having the extended warranty, it seems I should keep a "repair quarterly" box kit around to send this back not if, but when it dies again.

I have the R98 and two N79. The R98 keeps dumping the map every couple of days and also dumps the virtual barriers this is very frustrating. I have called support several times and explained the problem they say they will have technical support investigate and contact me no answer this is very frustrating. Until they fix the problem suggest the N79. R98 firmware version is 0.6.21. to find your version select the R98 on the iphone or Android ecovac app and then select the the 3 dots in right corner and select firmware. Anyone else with map dumping problems?

This thing is TERRIBLE! Loses map constantly, and it basically becomes a brick. The "auto-empty" feature only works half the time. The software is clunky. It will map sections of your home, and then the next day when you go set up a schedule, it won't allow you to select a section of your home, even though it cleaned and mapped it the day before!! To their credit, Ecovacs has already replaced this once, and they will now be doing it again, but this time for the Ozmo 930. Here's to hoping the new software and machine are better than the R98. Do not buy!!

Worked One Time.Model Has Been Discontinued By Manufacture !!!