I’ve been following Ecovacs Robotics’ growth in the robot vacuum market since 2018, having tested the Deebot Ozmo 930 and the Deebot 900 for TechRadar back then. I’ve seen practically every generation launched since that time in action – and tested four other models – and have been impressed with how far the company’s technological evolution has taken it.

Case in point is my Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: It’s a flagship model that I was so impressed by that, despite its higher asking price compared to something like the Deebot T30 Omni, I’d be comfortable recommending it to anyone keen on an all-in-one autonomous cleaner. The latter, however, if you can find stock, is arguably the best-value robovac I’ve tested to date.

Sadly it’s one of the successors to the T30 Omni to be the first Deebot to let me down. I was sent the Ecovacs Deebot T50 Max Pro Omni for review immediately after the aforementioned X8 – it would have been my seventh Deebot, if you’re keeping track – and, while things began well enough, it quickly went downhill from there.

Quietly misbehaving

Initial setup, as with every Deebot I’ve tested previously, was a breeze – pairing took seconds and mapping my one-bedroom apartment took five minutes. I then sent the T50 Max Pro Omni off (I called it Meryl Sweep – my sincerest apologies to the great actress) to clean the fully carpeted bedroom first, set at the highest suction setting.

Holy moly, it was the quietest bot I’d ever tested! It registered 61dB on DecibelX (a free iOS app I’ve been using for review purposes for a while), and I remember my visiting parents oohing and aahing over how silently it did its thing. Auto-empty was remarkably quick, which I was surprised by – I put that down to there not being too much dirt in the onboard bin.

It was on its second cleaning session that I began to question its first run.

Set to mop-after-vacuum the hard floors in my living room and dining room only – at its highest suction and a high waterflow rate – the T50 Max Pro Omni now sounded much louder than any recent robot vacuum I’d tested, registering 77dB.

While it seemingly vacuumed the living room area in a proper manner, Meryl Sweep constantly kept cleaning one half of the dining room until its battery began to run low. No mopping took place.

Annoyed, I stopped the ‘job’ and sent it back to its dock and the auto-emptying process now sounded, well, ‘normal’ – louder and longer, as I’d come to expect after the more recent Deebot reviews.

I set it to repeat the same living-and-dining clean at the same settings the next day, but it kept saying it was “unable to find the designated area”. I tried a different room; same response.

A complete factory reset and re-pairing did the trick – it vacuumed then mopped the living and dining rooms… only to fail again the next day when it couldn’t “find the designated area” for another custom clean.

Second time wasn’t the charm

Ecovacs Robotics was kind enough to replace my review unit and, again, setup was impressively quick. Sadly, the new unit’s inability to find its “designated area” began on its first run, which was a custom job similar to what I’d set the previous bot to do.

Turns out, it was these room or zone custom cleans that the T50 Pro Max Omni has a problem with. I set the second unit to do an auto cleaning session – now called Intelligent Hosting in the Ecovacs Home app – and it was fine moving away from its dock. However, here too there were issues.

Not only did it start in the wrong room (the map sequence I had it set to was starting in the bedroom, but it began in the living room instead), but it failed at one of the basic functions too.

Ecovacs’ automatic mode is a vacuum-and-mop setting, so you’d expect the mop pads to be washed before the bot leaves the base station. That didn’t happen, and I found the T50 Max Pro Omni dry mopping with the pads extended, despite me making sure the clean-water tank was full. It did, however, wash the mops after it returned to the base station.

A bug in the bonnet

This isn’t the first time a Deebot model has suffered from what is possibly a navigation (mapping?) issue. An old Reddit thread from before the T50 family was announced has a few users saying they’ve experienced similar problems and have offered various solutions, but they don’t specify if this affects just one model or different Deebots.

I can’t verify whether the entire T50 family is affected, but it’s clear there’s a bug affecting some models or, at the very least, some specific units, and Ecovacs ought to look into fixing this. Thankfully, neither the T30 Omni nor the X8 Pro Omni gave me such trouble, which is why I was so surprised shocked that the T50 wasn’t behaving as expected.

Ecovacs now has a large catalog of robot vacuums, each one at a different price point (from budget to flagship) and offering different features. I can’t imagine that the company would send products to market without thoroughly testing them first, but perhaps the T50 Pro Max Omni fell by the wayside and testing wasn’t complete – I mean, I can understand one unit being faulty, but two?

I so wanted to fall in love with the T50 Max Pro Omni: it has a bit more suction than the X8 (18,500Pa vs 18,000Pa respectively) at a much lower price than the flagship – $799 / AU$1,799 in the US and Australia compared to $1,099 / £1,099 / AU$2,499 (the UK doesn’t get the T50 Max model, but the T50 Pro Omni is £799 at full price). It doesn’t skimp on other features either, including Ecovacs’ Yiko voice assistant and Matter integration. On paper, it really is a fantastic machine – flagship features without the premium price. The main difference is that it uses the circular mop pads while the X8 Pro Omni’s roller is fantastic.

From a price perspective alone, it would be highly recommendable… if it worked. It’s a shame that this Deebot turned out to be a dudbot and I think it should be taken off shelves immediately.

You might also like…

• Check out our picks of the best robot vacuum cleaners to buy right now
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• This Deebot has the best mopping system we’ve seen

While she’s happiest with a camera in her hand, Sharmishta’s main priority is being TechRadar’s APAC Managing Editor, looking after the day-to-day functioning of the Australian, New Zealand and Singapore editions of the site, steering everything from news and reviews to ecommerce content like deals and coupon codes. While she loves reviewing cameras and lenses when she can, she’s also an avid reader and has become quite the expert on ereaders and E Ink writing tablets, having appeared on Singaporean radio to talk about these underrated devices. Other than her duties at TechRadar, she’s also the Managing Editor of the Australian edition of Digital Camera World, and writes for Tom’s Guide and T3.