Ecovacs DEEBOT N10 Plus review

When you become a parent, you are usually inundated with loads of advice. I know, I know, all those unsolicited opinions are really grating, and the best piece of advice is to, well, ignore everyone’s advice. But if you’ll indulge me with just *one* piece of parenting advice to make life a little easier, let it be this:

Delegate. Your. Housework.

And your first stop should be letting this tiny little robot slave vacuum cleaner look after your floors. The Deebot N10 Plus is the latest offering from Ecovacs and is yet another device in a long line of impressive appliances from the brand. Coming in at just under $1000, it’s cheaper than previous models but leaves your floors looking *chef’s kiss”.

I received the Deebot N10 Plus when I was around 35 weeks pregnant— by this point the floors had been neglected for at least two weeks and I was tiptoeing around a fairly gross layer of dust, hair and the odd sultana or two.

The idea of pulling our clunky vacuum out of the linen cupboard to clean my floors filled me with despair.

If you are a new parent, about to be a new parent, know a new parent, are a furbaby parent, or have been a parent for 40 years— I implore you to check out this bad boy.

Like the T9+ before it, you can download the ECOVACS HOME app as part of the setup. It’ll create a map of your home with its ‘TrueMapping laser-based mapping and navigation technology’ and lets you customise further for things like schedules, cleaning paths, no-go zones and different cleaning modes. The Deebot N10 Plus has sensors that create 360 degree scans that let it cleverly work out how to navigate your home - but be warned. When it suggests moving objects out of the way, do it. I accidentally left a laptop charger hanging off the table and onto the floor, and I needed to perform some top-level tech surgery to untangle my charger from the depths of the robot's clutches. We also have some letter lights - and ‘A’ and ‘K’ leftover from our wedding that we display on the floor, and our robot vacuum had a real vendetta against these two items, as I often found them down the hallway.

The app was easy to download and follow instructions - as was the minimal amount of assembly of the vacuum itself.

One of the best features is the large 2.5L auto-empty station with a disposable dust bag. Be warned, when your Deebot N10 Plus ‘heads home’ after a clean and empties itself, the noise is quite loud - louder than when it’s cleaning the floors. But there is something extremely satisfying about not having to empty the vacuum after every clean. I’ve come to love the sound.

The Deebot N10 Plus has an impressive suction power of 4300Pa, and is said to easily remove dirt, dust and debris from even the toughest crevices and deepest carpet fibres.

We have three different types of floor in our apartment; floorboards, carpet and rattan. Floorboards and carpet were easy for the robo-vac to handle, but the rattan proved to be a little more of a challenge. Rattan is hard to vacuum anyway, leaving dust in its crevices, so it’s not a surprise that a smaller vacuum would struggle to keep it as clean as it does the rest of the apartment. Our robo-vac also *really* didn’t like the tassels that fringe the rug in our bedroom, and I had to brush them back into place (Narrator: she did not brush them back into place, she just thought about it and left them looking chaotic).

But from dust, to my long hair that I leave around the house like I’m the witch in Hansel and Gretel, to the trail mix that somehow ends up on the floor, the Deebot N10 Plus kept the majority of the apartment looking absolutely spotless, getting into hard-to-reach places like under our kitchen table, under the TV cabinet and under the couch.

In our review of the Deebot T9+, Georgia says “the mop is about as effective as you could hope for, given it doesn’t really mop in the traditional sense, but rather wipe a wet cloth along the floor, dirt and all. Still, it’s certainly better than nothing, and it should reduce the frequency with which you have to actually do it yourself.”

The same can be said for the Deebot N10 Plus. It’s not going to replace a regular mop - rather it gives your floorboards a nice wipe and keeps it looking clean, but it’s certainly not a deep scrub. Still, our mopping has reduced significantly while we’ve reviewed the vacuum, so that’s a win in my book.

As I said, we have a mixture of floorboards and carpet, and if you’re the same, remember to move the mopping attachment if you want the carpet vacuumed, otherwise the Deebot N10 Plus will avoid it.

The Deebot N10 Plus has a very capable battery capacity of 5200mAh, which equates to about 5 hours of cleaning on a single charge. I don’t know how big your house would need to be to warrant a five hour clean in one go, but for our two-bedder two-bathroom apartment it’s more than enough. And if for some reason our robo-vac went on a mad five hour cleaning spree, it knows to just head back to the charging station when it starts getting low on battery.