covacs Deepoo (or Deebot) D76 is a member of a very exclusive group of robotic vacuum cleaners: there are only three robots on the market at the moment that come with a dust bin cleaning docking station, and the D76 is one of them. Recently I had the chance to use it for about six week in my house to see how it compares to other, better known products.

Introduction

Ecovacs Deepoo D76 is the top of the line model of the Deepoo (or on some markets Deebot) family that currently has 5 different devices. The line starts with the $199 Deepoo D54 that comes with a docking station, but designed for small apartments, and each model above this gradually offer more features and better accessories bundle.

he Deepoo D76 has got all that Ecovacs has on shelves today: scheduling, docking station with vacuum cleaner, remote control, virtual wall, magnetic stripes and accessories to convert the docking vacuum into a fully functional hand held vacuum cleaner. Pretty impressive, to say the least, but I will only recommend it if all these bells and whistles deliver as promised.

Undoubtedly the self emptying dust bin is the most unique and trendy feature of all. As misleading it is, it's not the dust bin that empties itself, but the external vacuum cleaner attached to the top of the docking station is the one that regularly sucks the dust and debris out of the inner dust container of the robot. The idea is far from being new; the first such robot was pushed to the market nearly 10 years ago by the German manufacturer Kärcher. The Kärcher RC3000 was designed to work for most part of the day in short, 20-30 minutes runs, returning to the field as soon as the battery has permitted it. Despite all the great features of the german robot, neither Kärcher, nor other manufacturers had interest in using the idea again.

Why is it so exciting to have a vacuum cleaner built into the docking station? If you are new to robotic vacuum cleaners, you better know that those small (0.3-0.8 l or 10-30 fl oz) dust bins fill up very quickly, requiring you to take care of them after each cleaning session. It is arguably easier than to do the whole cleaning instead of the robot, but in my opinion a robot should be as autonomous as possible. It should run for weeks or even months without me taking care of the robot. While the reality is far from this, in certain homes, if the dust bin is emptied automatically and the robot is smart enough to always return to the docking station, the robot could possibly run for weeks on its own.