Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus hands-on review: In the bag

I’ve never used a robot vacuum before, but I keep hearing amazing things. The thing that’s held me off testing one is overthinking how my two cats with very different personalities would act with it. There’s Cosmo the Maine Coon who’s currently small but is destined to be very large. He likes to play with anything that moves.

And there’s Snowy, the rescue cow cat who’s equal part skittish and willing to bash any inanimate object (and me, and Cosmo) he doesn’t like with cobra-like speed and roo-like strength. Given I also had the weekend with the Ecovacs Deebot T30 Pro Omni, I split my apartment in two and had the N20 Plus doing its thing in the back half of my apartment, which houses the bedroom, study, bathroom and a small connecting hallway.

The study is where Cosmo eats and does the less impressive post-eating stuff. While he’s very good at burying his business, he’s just as good at making it rain litter. That’s not great news for the little Lego-like landmines that litter the carpet—well, not for my feet anyway—but it is very convenient for putting a robot vacuum through its paces.

No-bag design: I used to put off vacuuming because I hated changing the bag. Then Dyson changed the game by popularising bag-less vacuums. Mercifully for vacuum-avoidants like me, the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus offers a premium bag-less feature built into the base station. The extraction is louder than the N20 Plus at max volume, but it only took a few seconds to exchange dust from the robot vacuum to the cylinder.

That cylinder is opaque enough to stop it from looking like you’re displaying dust but visible enough to know when to empty it. Emptying is a cinch, too. Detach the cylinder, then pop the blue side lever when you’re ready to dump the dust. There’s enough room inside the cylinder, too, to clean out any lingering nastiness.

Cat-friendly companion: This goes beyond not terrifying my cats and encompasses its cleaning ability. Snowy was standoffish but curious, which is actually an achievement for him as he’s terrified of my go-to Dyson stick vacuum cleaner. Cosmo tried to fight the N20 Plus and was particularly enamoured with the side brush. He did play chicken with it for too long a couple of times, and while the tip of his tail made it to the roller, he got away unharmed.

The N20 Plus also does a good job of readjusting when it hits obstacles—Cosmo or my foot while I’m making review notes—so I was eventually comfortable letting it do its thing unobserved. As for the litter, it got rid of almost all of the mess. Considering Cosmo’s tendency to mess up the study multiple times a day, it’s nice to know that something like the N20 Plus can tame it.

Fast operator: Everything about the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus is zippy. Unboxing is straightforward. Physical setup takes minutes. And the companion app portion of initial configuration is a breeze as well. More importantly, it only took three minutes to map the vacuum-able space in the back half of my apartment. It took about 19 minutes to vacuum those four rooms on the first run, then 26 minutes on the second with cat interference and what appeared to be a bonus double-clean approach (despite the single-pass cleaning option selected).

Navigation pro: There were some potentially tricky areas that I was curious to see how the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus would handle. The first, a lumpy rug that’s a potential blockage leading under some display shelves. It had no issues. Next was the slight raise between the carpeted adjoining and tiled bathroom, which it got over without any issues.

The N20 Plus even comfortably tackled a rather chunky desk leg in the study, raising and powering over it as it vacuumed around the tight turns. I also appreciated that it cleaned as far as it could under my chest of drawers in the bedroom before it bumped its head.

Initial setup guidance: I mentioned upfront that this is my first time using a robot vacuum, and I would have appreciated some more handholding. The included quick-start paper guide does a mostly okay job of putting everything together, but the companion app could have offered some setup images or video guides.

I’ve been reviewing a lot of networking equipment lately, and one of the things modern routers do particularly well is image-rich configuration steps and/or video guides to help first-timers comfortably set up everything. For the N20 Plus, I even went looking for official setup instructions and couldn’t find a written guide or anything on YouTube. The included instructions around the mop attachment and its preinstalled mopping chamber are particularly thin, and you’ll need to remove the mop attachment if you want to vacuum.

Side brush and corners: Potentially linked to the lack of guidance above, the initially disconnected side brush was a little bit fiddly. I thought I clicked it properly into place, but either I didn’t or it’s a bit temperamental. After feeling its way around the towel beneath Cosmo’s litter tray, it must’ve got a bit stuck and, in trying to free itself, the N20 Plus lost the side brush. I paused the cleaning process in the app and clicked it back on easily enough, which is where it stayed for the rest of the vacuum. There was quite a bit of hair wrapped around it after those two test runs, though.

While the N20 Plus seemed to handle the bathroom and bedroom corners well, there’s still a fair chunk of litter stuck between the edge of the carpet and the closet sliding doors in the study. Admittedly, it did have a better crack at those corners on the second ‘cat round’ of cleaning, but it’s no replacement for the crevice attachment on a stick vacuum.

No manual dust transfer: During the round-two clean, the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus was impressively overzealous in that it started cleaning into my lounge. I hit the ‘return to station’ button instead of ‘stop cleaning’, and it didn’t empty when it returned to the base. While that may be down to my incorrect input, I couldn’t find a way to manually instruct the N20 Plus base station to extract the dust.

Battery life and recharge times: Even though the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus had juice out of the box, I did an overnight recharge before testing. That first run with default settings only used up 6% of battery, which is great. But by the end of the second clean, it was down to 62%. Max suction was always going to use up more battery (and the app does flag that), but I reckon it’d be close to low or empty on max settings for cleaning my entire apartment with two passes. I measured about 23% of recharge per 90 minutes, too, so expect to wait a while for a full charge if your automated clean is interrupted for low-juice reasons.

It’d be easy to talk yourself out of a robot vacuum with a base station because the prices can stretch into multiple thousands of dollars. But for a whisker under $1,000, the Ecovacs Deebot N20 Plus boasts a comparatively attractive price for a feature-rich robot vacuum. My cats didn’t end up smashing or riding it, nor did the N20 Plus do any harm to them. What you get is a speedy and powerful robot vacuum whose value is even better if you can nab it on special.