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Cleaning performance
Let’s get down to business – how well does the Dyson 360 Eye actually clean your carpet?
Dyson advertises that its machine has “twice the suction of any other robot vacuum”, but in practice we found that this doesn’t quite translate to twice the cleaning ability.
The 360 Eye is a vacuum cleaner that works best when you’re using it regularly. When we had it set up to automatically do a clean once a day, our house looked pretty consistently clean. Its 40-minute battery life was more than enough to make it around the ground floor of our house where it was located, and it’s a great deal quieter than the Roomba 980.
Better still, the Dyson’s bin would take a couple of runs to fill, so we could afford to forget to empty it out occasionally and still get the benefits of it doing a clean.
That said, the robot was much less effective when the house needed a deep clean. One morning after having had lots of people in the house the night before we set the Dyson to work on a carpet that had seen dozens of shoes worn in from outside, only to find that it still needed vacuuming manually once the Dyson was done.
In other words, this is a robot that responds best to a ‘little and often’ approach to vacuuming.
The same could also be said of the machine’s closest competitor, the Roomba 980, although that machine is able, to a certain extent, to know when a bit of floor is especially dirty and go over it a second time.
The Dyson 360 Eye also lacks the side brushes of the Roomba 980, which allow the latter to clean the edges of your room slightly better, although neither machine is especially proficient in this area.
Another issue with the 360 Eye, as with all robot vacuum cleaners, is that it had a tendency to get stuck on various objects around our home. It was slightly better than the Roomba 980 in this regard, the side brushes on which meant that shoe laces were a constant hazard, but it would nevertheless get stuck on guitar stands on a regular basis.
You can avoid these issues by ‘Dyson-proofing’ your home before you leave, but given that the machine works best when it’s vacuuming daily, this can quickly become a hassle.
We liked
The Dyson 360 Eye is a nicely designed machine. It’s small and compact, runs quietly, and does a decent job of keeping your house clean, although you’ll need to make sure you run it fairly regularly.
The app is well designed and easy to use, and while the additional information it gives you might not be that useful, it’s interesting to look at.
Finally, the machine is designed in such a way that it’s very easy to maintain and clean. Its consumable parts can all be detached and cleaned, and as long as you're diligent about cleaning them this should keep them working for the longest-possible time before they need to be replaced.
We disliked
Although the machine is compact, it’s a little taller than the competition. Whether this is an issue for you, however, will depend entirely on the layout and furniture in your home.
You might need to use the machine a couple of times to get your home as clean as you’d like it to be. The Dyson 360 Eye is most effective if you take a ‘little and often’ approach to cleaning, rather than doing one big clean a week.
Final verdict
The Dyson 360 Eye is an amazingly engineered robot vacuum cleaner. It’s solidly built, runs quietly and efficiently, and is engineered in a way that makes it very easy to maintain.
It’s main competition is the iRobot Roomba 980. They’re both expensive machines, although at the time of writing the Dyson is a fraction cheaper, and for our money is the slightly better machine.
And if you’re prepared to spend the amount of money a robot vacuum cleaner costs, then you won’t be disappointed by the Dyson, and the company’s formidable build quality should keep it running for years to come.
