Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner comes with many smart features. When the job is complete or DEEBOT 661 low on battery, with Auto Charging, it will return to its dock to prepare for the next cleaning. With Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, utilize voice commands such as “Alexa, ask DEEBOT to start cleaning”. DEEBOT 661 also comes with an easy to use remote control. ECOVACS DEEBOT 661 Convertible Vacuuming or Mopping Robot takes care of floor cleaning so you don’t have to. Interchangeable dustbin for vacuuming and water tank for mopping to tackle your floor cleaning needs. Three cleaning modes and scheduling accessible from the ECOVACS Home App ensures an effortless, thorough clean while you do things you really love. Its low sound level allows you to have conversations or watch TV while it cleans. Reveal more in Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner review.
Pros & Cons – Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner
The Deebot 661 is a solid purchase if you’re looking for a good mid-range robot vacuum. The ability to set it up on a regular schedule can help keep your house clean with minimal effort on your behalf. If you’d like to pick up a Deebot 661 for yourself, they retail at Amazon for $319.99.
Pros
- Schedule feature keeps your house clean with minimal effort
- Decent price for features offered
- Low profile makes cleaning under furniture easy
- Vaccums and mops
- App provides real-time data and detailed cleaning logs
- Includes three automatic cleaning modes and two suction settings
Cons
- Mopping yields middling results
- Robot will attempt to mop carpeted surfaces
- Often returns to areas it has cleaned and ignores areas it hasn’t
- Struggles to roll over raised surfaces, such as throw rugs
- Doesn’t support virtual boundaries
Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner comparison
| DEEBOT 661 | DEEBOT 711S | DEEBOT OZMO 950 | |
| Navigation Technology | Smart Motion + Random | Smart Navi 2.0 (Visual) | Smart Navi 3.0 (Laser) |
| Automatic Charging | Recharge | Recharge | Recharge & Resume |
| Run Time | Up to 110 Min | Up to 130 Min | Up to 200 Min |
| Levels of Suction | 2 (Normal, Max) | 2 (Normal, Max) | 3 (Normal, Max, Max Plus) |
| App Control & Scheduling | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Alexa & Google Assistant | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Obstacle Detection & Anti Drop | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Full Cleaning & Path Planning | – | ✔ | ✔ |
| Virtual Boundaries & Area Mode | – | – | ✔ |
| Mopping | ✔ | – | ✔ |
| Carpet Boost & Detection | – | – | ✔ |
| Multi-Floor Mapping | – | – | ✔ |
Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner review
The build & design
The Deebot 661 measures 13.1 inches across by 3.1 inches high, and it weighs about 7 pounds. It continues the design language of other Deebots with a black plastic body and glossy finish. An auto-clean button and Wi-Fi indicator light are on the top of the vacuum, a power switch and reset button are on the side.
The Deebot 661 is a round-front style robotic vacuum, rather than the kind that feature a square front. It’s got a lower profile than many other robotic vacuums, coming in at just a little taller than 3 inches, meaning that it should be able to fit under couches and beds. It weighs around six pounds and feels like it’s fairly sturdy.
On the underside of the 661 are a main roller brush, dual spin brushes, a swivel wheel, and a pair of driving treads. The dustbin is slotted in to the back and can be swapped out for a water tank to mop floors.
On the underside of the robot there are two sweeping arms that are used to feed debris into the beater bar where it is swept into the dustbin. The beater bar is rubber with synthetic bristles and pops out so you can remove hair and debris with the included cleaning tool.
The dustbin is also interchangeable and can be swapped with the included water tank, allowing it to double as a robotic mop. There is an included washable microfiber mopping cloth that attaches to the underside of the water tank by velcro.
The dustbin is located on the front of the robot and can be removed by pressing a tab. Emptying the robot is extremely easy and can be done in a couple of seconds. You’ll have to wash the included filter once every couple of weeks and give it 24 hours to fully dry to keep the robot running at peak performance.
It includes a remote control which can be used to control the robot if you choose to eschew using the app. The remote works fine, but I tend to lose remotes a lot more than I lose my phone, so I put it in my junk drawer and forgot about it.
Ease of use
If you want it to sweep, just make sure you have the dustbin installed. Then, hit the power button, and it will zip around your house, happily ducking under furniture and into hard-to-reach spaces, sucking up whatever it finds. Like all robotic vacuums, make sure you keep cords and clutter off the floor unless you want it to attempt to suck them up. If you want, you can use the app to initiate spot cleaning mode or edge cleaning, which is useful as many robot vacuums tend to miss the edges of rooms.
I’m not entirely sure if there’s an easier robot to use than the Deebot 661. Setting it up took just a few seconds and the app holds your hand through the entire process. It’s worth noting that you don’t need to use the iPhone app to use the robot, though.
If you want the robot to mop, fill the water tank with water, swap it with the dustbin, set it on the floor you want mopped, and hit the power button. It automatically detects that it should enter mopping mode and happily mops your floor for you.
When the robot has finished cleaning or the battery is low, it will return to its dock to recharge.
The app and features
To control the vacuum with the Ecovacs Home app, you must take the additional steps of scanning the QR code on the side of the 661, pressing the reset button to pair the 661 with your phone, and following the onscreen prompts to connect to your Wi-Fi network. There are often plenty of hiccups when pairing smart devices with their apps, but the Ecovacs process was typically seamless.
There’s also the ability to set up a regular cleaning schedule, which I think is the strongest argument for getting a robot vacuum in the first place. I found that this feature worked perfectly, so the Deebot 661 gets points there.
In the app, you can keep tabs on the health of your robot. Robotic vacuums need to have parts regularly replaced if you expect them to clean well. It’s worth noting that this is also a feature of upright vacuums, though those have a bit of a longer lifespan. Having the ability to quickly view the health of your vacuum’s parts, then purchase the replacements as needed is very useful. I was glad to see it included here.
It should be noted that the Deebot 661 does not have a mapping feature like other higher-end robots do. This means that there’s no way to red-zone specific areas to keep the robot out. This could be problematic for areas around desks or tables replete with cords.
Cleaning modes
The 661 has three cleaning modes, which can be activated from the remote control, or the app. Auto cleans the entire floor in a random pattern optimized for carpets. Spot mode cleans a small area of concentrated dirt in a spiral pattern. In Edge mode, the vacuum cleans along the walls for the full perimeter of the room. There’s also a Max setting, which doubles the vacuums suction power for tougher messes.
While the vacuum is cleaning, the app displays real-time data including the size of the area cleaned in square meters, the duration of the cleaning, the battery level, and the current cleaning status, along with a visual representation of the vacuum cleaning.
The app provides pop-up alerts when the 661 runs into trouble. These identify the issue—the vacuum is lifted off the floor, for example—and are accompanied by a gentle beep from the vacuum so you can locate it. You can tap “ignore” to close these notifications, or tap “view” to open a page that explains how to fix the issue. The app keeps a record of all these messages on a separate tab.
You can schedule automatic cleaning in the app. This allows you to choose a cleaning mode, select a start time, and apply it to particular days of the week. The app also tracks all cleaning jobs in a detailed log, along with the usage of the vacuum’s brushes and filters for easy replacement.
You can control the 661 hands free as well. It works with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant to support simple voice commands.
Vacuuming
The Deebot 661 features two cleaning powers, normal and maximum. The normal mode is sufficient for your average messes. The maximum mode is good if you’ve not cleaned in a while and want to be extra thorough, though I’d imagine it works well for homes with a lot of pet hair as well.
When it comes to vacuuming, the Deebot 661 is pretty good. It doesn’t seem to miss a lot, and I found that it had no trouble sweeping up hair, crumbs, and little bits of paper. Like the Roborock S4, it also pulls an unsettling amount of grit out of the 25 year old carpeting in my apartment. It isn’t as powerful as an upright vacuum, but it is significantly quieter, and if you run it a couple times a week, it keeps your house from getting dirty enough to run that upright vacuum regularly.
As far as volume goes, it wound up falling somewhere around 58 decibels when I was right next to it. Maximum mode barely made it over 60 decibels. Both modes are unobtrusive enough to allow the vacuum to run while you’re in the room or during the night while you sleep.
For comparison, my upright vacuum — a little green Hoover Air — hits 90 decibels with the beater bar turned on.
Mopping
When you mop the old fashioned way, your best tool is elbow grease, or more accurately, friction. Humans do this by exerting downward force on a mop, brush, cloth, etc. Robots don’t really have this capability. Ideally, a robot would be heavy enough to push down and loosen anything that is stuck to the floor, but the Deebot 661 is lightweight, even when fully filled with water.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m skeptical when it comes to the idea of a robot mopping for you. To mop a floor to an adequately clean state, pick at least two: friction, cleaner, and heat. The Deebot 661 doesn’t, though.
Chemical cleaners also help quite a bit. Surfactants prevent hydrogen bonding and the low surface tension cleaning solution unsticks dirt and grime from the floor. That’s all well and good, but the Deebot 661 can’t actually use chemical cleaners. The instruction book warns to avoid using cleaners as they will jam the reservoir.
Heat also helps by softening sticky and persistent dirt and allowing it to be swept away. However, there’s no heating element in the Deebot 661, and due to the plastic water reservoir, I’d be hesitant to fill it up with boiling water in the first place.
As far as I can tell, most vacuum-and-mopping robots work this way. Some of iRobot’s Braava line seems to be able to use specialized cleaners, but only on the higher-end models that feature a Swiffer-style spray function. This means that this isn’t a problem of the Deebot 661, but of robotic mopping in general.
That doesn’t mean that the mopping function is worthless, it just means you’re going to need to be a little clever. The Deebot 661 doesn’t suck any water back up into its cleaning reservoir, so you can soak the included cleaning pad in cleaning solution if you need to. I also found that spraying difficult stains with a cleaner of my choice — a solution of hot water, white vinegar, and rubbing alcohol — and letting it sit for a few minutes before running the Deebot 661 did wonders.
On top of that, because it’s a quick process to fill the robot and press the power button, you can run it more often. One of the biggest issues that the Deebot 661 solves is consistency. If you mop your kitchen or bathroom a couple times a week with the Deebot 661, chances are you’re not going to have any buildup of dirt and grime that is going to need a lot of effort to clean up. It’s a win-win.
In short, if you start with a clean kitchen, the Deebot 661 will help you keep it clean. As an added bonus, it doesn’t leave that nasty build-up that happens if you use an easy-mop like Swiffer.
There is, however, one major problem. The Deebot 661 doesn’t seem to have hard floor/carpets detection or the Braava’s “never go behind the line where it started” feature. This means that if you have carpet, the Deebot 661 will try to mop it. I solved this problem by setting a box in front of my kitchen doorway, which prevented the robot from crossing onto the carpet. However, I have a galley-style kitchen in a studio apartment, so anyone with a more open-concept layout may need to hold back from this purchase or come up with a more clever solution than mine.
Ecovacs Deebot 661 convertible vacuuming or mopping robotic vacuum cleaner performance review
The 661 generally did a good job vacuuming up common household debris like food crumbs, pet hair, and dust. Its modest height also allowed into such low-clearance spots as under cabinets and couches, places where many other robot vacuum’s I’ve tried can’t get to.
It had a tougher time negotiating different floor surfaces. It had no problem transitioning from carpeting to hardwood and back, but it struggled getting over a throw rug in my entryway, repeatedly setting off an alert that it was off the ground. It also tended to double back over areas it had already cleaned at the expense of areas it hadn’t, which didn’t make for the greatest efficiency.
The mopping function worked about as well as I expected, given that the 661 essentially wipes down the floor with a damp cloth and performs little agitation. It lifted surface dirt with relative ease, but deeper grime was left behind for me to go over with a mop.
Oddly, the 661 only comes with one cloth, so I had to wash and dry it after every cleaning. That wasn’t much of an issue, though, as I have little uncarpeted flooring. It will get tiresome if you have lots of hard flooring that needs regular mopping.